Munchen

We arrived in Munich by train from Venice in about 7 hours. While the train was pretty old and not that fast the journey was quite enjoyable as we travelled through beautiful landscapes from the north of Italy and across all of Austria. Munich was cold and rainy when we arrived but lucky for us the hostel was very close to the station. The hostel had great facilities including a bar and an indoor garden with hammocks and couches. They also had free tours of the city which lasted about 3.5 hours and covered all the main sights of the city. We got to know about what it means to be Bavarian and how separate from the rest of Germany it is as well as its significance in WWII.

Munich was very cosmopolitan with great markets, beer gardens and restaurants. We found a good Viet & Thai restaurant nearby which we found ourselves going back to often. They were also lots of good Japanese places all over the city. While we were in Munich the first Ashes test started in England so we spent an entire day in our hostel watching the match in the big screen tv in the bar with some Aussies. So we had a very relaxing time of it.

A visit to the Deutsch Museum is a must in Munich, especially for us engineers with great scientific and technological displays to keep you amused for hours on end. I particularly liked the massive room dedicated to bridges where we got to see models of almost every type of bridge ever built and how they worked. The place was so huge we were too tired to see it all.

A short train ride from the centre of Munich is a fantastic garden called the Englisher Garden. It covered an immense area and consisted of lush green fields in amongst tall majestic trees as well as two beer gardens and a great big lake as its centre piece. We hired bicycles and rode around the lake and throughout the park. By coincidence while riding around we stumbled upon a cricket match played between two regional teams in the area at the MCC (Munich cricket club). We stopped by and watched the match for a while and got to know a very nice German girl who was there supporting her fiancé. The local team had a Sri Lankan spinner (he got a couple of wickets while we watched) as well as an Indian fast bower. It was great fun to watch and Pramo was itching to play with them. We had to leave to return our bikes otherwise we would have been there right till the end.

After returning our bikes we had lunch at the beer garden by the lake - curry wurst & beer. Overall it was a very relaxing and enjoyable day at the Englisher garden.