Thursday in Munich we got to meet up with Gretchen for lunch. We ate at this little Italian place up by the university. It was pretty good food for not a ton of money. Unfortunately for us, Gretchen had to work, so we didn’t get much time for lunch. We planned on meeting later though. She left to go to work and we headed out for our adventure of the day.
Joni wanted to visit this huge park they have in Munich. And when I say huge, I mean huge. The dang thing runs along the river and is about four miles long. It’s big.
And we didn’t even start out in it. We found a little side park next to the caramel river to walk in first.
That’s not its real name. We just call it the caramel river because it’s got this funky brown color to it. It’s a little disgusting actually. Especially when it froths.
The little park we were in was quite nice though.
And by little, I mean a measly half mile long. They’re very into large parks and lots of green areas in cities in Europe. It’s so strange to be in Munich, then suddenly you’re in the forest.
We walked along the river for quite a ways. It was just nice to be in nature. I guess there’s not too much to tell on that front yet. It was trees, grass, and dogs running around. Pretty standard park fare all in all. The river did offer some interesting views though, like this emergency ladder of questionable effectiveness.
A ways down the path, we came across this weird little side path. It looked like it went down next to the river, perhaps to a sitting area.
We decided to investigate, but we found to seating area. It’s just a landing with a graffitied wall down there. The wall, however, did include a wide assortment of teeny tiny snails. Joni was entertained.
Each of those little pokey things is a snail. They had really long, spiraly shells.
Before we knew it, we were at a big road that ran through the park. The road actually split into two and curved around this large fountain and column.
We also got just a little lost at this point, but a handily placed park map put us back on course. This whole time we thought we were in the big park, but we were in a different park entirely! Oy. Working without a map is confusing sometimes!
We got back down by the river and followed the path toward the big park we were actually after. Along the way we found a bunch of slugs chilling out on the path. Some of them were pretty big.
That guy was pretty cute… and big, so we stopped and ogled him for a bit. He seemed kind of curious about us too.
We continued on, making sure to avoid stepping on any slugs. We eventually found the road we wanted to take to the big park and made our way over there. We just happened to enter the park next to the Chinese tower they have, so we took a picture of that, then sat down for a little rest.
We continued our journey with an attempt at finding the lake in the park. We were sort of turned around, so we ended up taking the long way. It worked out really well though because we got the opportunity to see snails. We found tiny black snails with really elaborate shells. They were everywhere. We also ran across the biggest snail we’ve seen thus far.
He was cute, so we looked at him a bit. Say, did you know that the world’s largest snail is the Giant African Land Snail and it can grow up to 12 inches long? And live for 10 years? And is such a prolific eater that it’s banned in a bunch of countries because it royal screws up an ecosystem it’s introduced to? Really!
We did eventually find the lake. We saw some cute baby ducklings and many, many very angry geese like birds. We’re not entirely sure what they are. We were getting tired by this time, so we headed back through a different part of the park in an effort to get back to the hostel.
We had to consult a map to find our way back. We’d been looking at these maps scattered around the park and we thought that the lake was the end of the park, since it was at the end of the map. Well, turns out that they have to split the map into two versions: north and south. We had been looking at the south map. The north map is just as big. So in the three hours we were walking around, we got almost half way into the park. Seriously, huge.
We managed to find our way out of the park.
We stopped off at a grocery store on the way back to the hostel and got some food to munch on. Once back at the hostel, we collapsed from 800 miles of walking, then had supper. The plan was to meet Gretchen and Ben (the Boyfriend) later in the evening for a drink. Gretchen worked until 10, so we had some time to relax and recuperate. At a little after 10 we headed out and made our way to the meeting point. We found Gretchen and Ben and went to a bar. We spent the evening just goofing around.
The bar has this thing where they give you a glow ring with your drink, so that was fun. Low light photos + glowing thing = fun.
Oh, we can have more fun than that!
Lame. MORE FUN!
Better. Maybe include people. Pictures are better with people in them.
Much better! Now do something silly with the glow ring!
Perfect! That’s a fun low light glow ring photo! Good job.
Too far.
We kind of lost track of time. We ended up missing the last subway of the night. It was about 1:30 at this point. There was a bus coming a little later, so we decided to catch that. Before the bus, a McDonald’s run was in order, so we popped across the street and got a couple of burgers. We headed to the bus stop. Gretchen and Ben crossed the street to show us where the stop was, but as we were doing that, their bus appeared on the opposite side of the street! We told them to just grab it and we could figure it out.
Well, we couldn’t figure it out. The listing of stops for the bus didn’t match up with the map, so we got confused. 🙁 We decided to just walk it. It was only about 3 miles. We wandered back toward the hostel and arrived an hour later. By this time it was nearly 3 in the morning, so we just curled up and went to bed.
It’s Friday morning now. We’re going to meet Gretchen and Ben this afternoon for more fun times, but we’ll have to call it a night early because we catch a train to catch our plane at 7:30. No 3AM walk for us!
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