So for our 2018 vacation, mythical gf future wifey and I went to Europe. Specifically Munich, Germany, Budapest, Hungary, and Vienna, Austria. These are all places that I’d never been to before, but such could very easily be said about anywhere on the planet, because in the grand spectrum of things, the world is pretty large.
Needless to say, the trip was pretty much excellent. All three places were great in their own ways, and I look back fondly to the exploration, food and drinking of each of them.
Munich, completely redeems the entire country of Germany for me. When I was younger, I’d often said that Germany was a country that I’d most want to visit in my life, because it seemed like the one country where it was a pretty drastic change to everyday life without having to go into the bush. In 2016, I went to Germany for the first time, but it was to Berlin, which turned out to be a city that embodied hostility, owned their unfriendliness and was just basically an unpleasant place that really made me question my choice of places I wanted to go. I was as relieved to leave Berlin as much as they probably bid good riddance, and I really debated on whether or not I wanted to ever go to Germany again.
Thankfully, future wifey convinced me that Munich would be different, and our 2018 European vacation would both start and end in Munich, which turned out to be a pretty good thing in the end. From the very start, arriving in Munich was arriving in a traditionally beautiful city that had classic European architecture all around, and the historic building and landmarks were stuff like cathedrals and monuments, and not just dingy vandalized wall fragments.
The people of Munich were also way friendlier, spoke more English, which is another thing that I don’t take for granted when traveling abroad, because I’m always impressed and grateful as hell whenever I go to other countries, and there are always people who can speak English as opposed to how it’s like in America where so few people speak anything otherwise.
And the trains in Munich, they actually worked, unlike Berlin, where they were always broken, closed for maintenance, and made absolutely no sense to where they actually went. Much of our time in Munich was spent walking around from tourist destinations to bier hauses, and in a country where beer is pretty much the same cost as water, needless to say, we did a good bit of bier drinking. Hofbrauhaus was a fun tourist destination, but Paulaner was definitely of superior quality in food and beer, but if any one place is worth remembering, it’s the literal cave like cellar of Augustiner, which turned out to be a really cool place in the end.
