A REAL tour, lots of culture & history

The next morning we met up with Nathan’s friend Celeste, who’d I’d met before in London. We got up early to enjoy our two free pieces of toast and tea, and met with a walking tour guide. We were on time this, thank goodness. He was a lot of fun! We saw a lot of things that Nathan and I had seen the day before when we accidentally created our own little tour, but this time we got to hear all the stories and history behind the things we saw. We found out that every building in Munich except for about four monuments is only about 60 years old because it was bombed so badly during World War II. He told us the reasons why the buildings that remained were still there, which I will explain in the photo captions. He had so many great stories. Really glad we went.

After the tour we went to the English Gardens and saw really beautiful swans, and guys SURFING! Seriously. Coming from Santa Cruz, which is a huge surfing town, seeing this made me laugh. This guy was surfing in the river. How hardcore is that? Assumedly people do this all the time, despite the “no surfing” sign and the fact that it’s probably super dangerous with all the rocks/concrete lining the river.

We ate some German potato pancakes, which were greasy and disappointing, and then went on the Christmas Tram! They have a bus going around the city that starts and ends in the same place, and is decorated with Christmas stuff. It’s pretty silly, because it doesn’t really take you anywhere, but we got to take another look around the city at night while listening to German Christmas music. A nice end-of-the-trip thing to do before I had to leave to go back to London, and then to home! Only three days in Germany, but a great three days it was.