Day 7 of marked the halfway point for our trip to Germany, so what better way to celebrate that than going to the largest city in Bavaria, München! Technically, this was not my first time on this trip in München as that’s the city we flew into, but I was so tired I don’t even count it! To get to München from Augsburg, we had to take the train there. It was about an hour ride, and we got there at around 10:40 AM.
After reaching München, we went to Marienplatz, the central square. Marienplatz is also where the town’s city hall is located. There, we met our tour guide who gave a short introduction before instructing us to watch the glockenspiel going off at city hall. In addition to the music ringing from the building, there was what I’d describe as a life size music box on the building, depicting two spinning scenes from Bayern history. The first scene was a joust between a knight from Bayern and a knight from Lorraine in honor of the wedding of a München noble.
The second scene depicts men from the barrelmakers guild, which still exists, dancing in the town square to celebrate the end of the black plague and to let people know they can come out again. Apparently they did the same thing after the pandemic! This was really cool, and a nice start to our day.
After that, we continued on our tour around the city. One really cool thing we saw were the river surfers, who surf on a continuous wave on a city canal. It would be so awesome to learn how to do a thing like that!
After the rest of our tour, we went to lunch at the original Hofbräuhaus. Considering how well-known the Pittsburgh one is, it was really cool to see the original. They also had an oom-pah band playing, so the atmosphere was very nice.
After lunch, a member of my group and I decided to climb the Alter Peter, which is a church’s tower. The tower had fifteen flights of stairs to reach the top, which our tour guide said equaled out to 306 steps. That was a rough walk, but the view was so worth it. We could see the whole city!
After that, we only had about an hour before dinner so we window shopped for a bit. For dinner, we went to a burger place with some pretty good burgers. After that, we took the train back to Augsburg and my aching legs could not thank me enough!