Back to Bavaria

Back in March 2011 when I was accepted to my program, a friend of mine ghostwrote the first post for this blog.  We decided she should visit for my July travel period... and she did!  This trip was a long time in the making.  For example, we did not know that she would make a German friend in her grad program way back when she said she was going to come to visit Germany.  This German friend is most  likely not going to be in the US come next year, so we took this opportunity to visit her.  I had already been to Munich with my dad and also for Oktoberfest, but I thought it was worth a second visit.  Besides, this time we had the help of a real Bavarian.  We also got some free Germany soccer fan item that someone left in our hostel

My friend's German friend drove us to go hiking in the Alps (technically they were the Pre-Alps... but whatever).  The clouds really blocked our view a lot of the time 

but occasionally they did clear up

The lake was also very pretty

Afterwards we went to a beer garden that had caged deer.  The deer were awesome.

The next day we went on a walking tour of the city.  I honestly remember 0 of what I learned, because I took a little too long to blog about it.  We did hear a nice story about people building a church and tricking the devil to help.  Apparently he wanted it built without windows and they made it so that it had windows that could only be seen from within the church.  He apparently got so pissed off that he left a footprint

This is the inside of the church

I also learned that there was apparently a major crisis going on in Munich.  According to this, Augustiner is running out of beer!

After Munich, we traveled on to Barcelona, which was the beginning of our transportation follies.  However, I will save these thrilling stories for the next post :)