Saturday morning we took it easy after our Hofbrauhaus escapades. We ate brekky in the bar (4 euro for a full spread buffet with cold meats, cheeses, fruits, yogurt, breads etc. etc. Not too shabby!) then spent some time chillaxing in the atrium. We joined a bunch of other hostellers at the entrance to the hostel at 11:00AM for the famed free walking tour with Ozzie: "The only black man in Munich wearing lederhosen". Yep, he's easy to spot! He's not a native Bavarian (I deduced this from the pronounced American accent), but he's lived in Munich for about 8 years, & has been leading tours through the city every single day for 6, so he's knows the place inside out, back to front. Basically the way a free hostel guide makes his or her money is from tips; so where a paid tour is paid upfront, a free tour is paid for essentially on how good a job you think the guide did. So they have pretty good incentive to do a good job. And I'm quite sure that Ozzie would be making a pretty nice living for himself if everybody tipped him what he's worth!

It was a fantastic way to get acquainted with the city on our first morning there, or as Ozzie puts it, to "get us local". Although it was rather cold & drizzling with rain, he managed to keep us dry & under shelter for most of the time, & he kept quite a pace too, with his walking AND his talking! Fortunately I'm a fast walker too, & an expert as dodging through crowds (all those Christmases running for a toilet break through the shopping centre while working for Body Shop have trained me well :P) so I kept up just fine. And like I said before, he's not hard to spot! And not only because he's a black guy in lederhosens, but also because, even then, he's very different to your typical Munich inhabitant. Despite his extensive knowledge of beer he's completely lacking the common beer gut; rather he's tall, & lanky with the calves of an Olympic track runner. Guess it must be all that power walking!

So in three hours we whirled around the Marienplatz, saw the Glockenspiel & watched the clock strike 12 & do it's little dance, & went to about a million other places! We stopped for lunch at a shop near the Viktualienmakt, where we all huddled under cover & munched on Bratwurst with mustard inside soft, white bread. And in those 3 hours I learnt more than I did in pretty much all my high school history classes!

For example…did you know…

oThere are 4 ozzies in Germany: Australian expats & travelers, Austrians, East (Ost) Berliners (although this is an offensive term), & of course, the black guy wearing lederhosen!

oLederhosen means leather pants

oMost of Munich has been rebuilt in the last 60 years, because most of it was destroyed in WW2. So despite the fact that a lot of it looks quite old, it was actually either rebuilt of remodeled to look that way, based on pictures of the building carefully taken before the war began.

oBefore WW2 began, Munich was stripped of all it's wealth, which was hidden in the mountains in preparation for the inevitable devastation they predicted. They figured they'd be better off removing it themselves & hiding it before it got destroyed, then they just replaced & rebuilt it all after the war was over.

oThe typical German stereotype i.e., beer drinking, lederhosens, pretzels etc. is actually a Bavarian stereotype! When Germany was formed following the Franco-Prussian war, a whole lots of very different places were united as one country, as Bavaria has remained the most separatist German state ever since. As Ozzie put it, they are the Western Australia of Germany :P

oThere are huge difference between Munich & Berlin: Munich is old fashioned, conservative, Catholic, traditional, wealthy & situated in the mountains, Berlin is liberal, modern (the NYC of Germany), Protestant, broke, & situated "on a swamp" :P Of course, Ozzie says this doesn't make either one better than the other, but I think you can guess where his bias is!

oOnly 4 important building actually survived WW2…the towers of the central Catholic church, the Glockenspiel tower, the Hoffbrauhas, &…somewhere else I forget! This was not luck or sentimentality, but targeted bombing, which allowed the Americans flying over head to navigate their way over Munich where all buildings are limited by law to being 6 stories high.

oMunich is a candidate to host the 2018 winter Olympics; if they do they will be the first city to the host the summer & winter Olympics, as well as the world cup.

oThere is a point in St Michael's church where you can stand & not see any windows…this was a deal that the architect made with the devil, when we he told him he would pay for the church to be built as long as it had no windows. The architect put windows in anyway, but from the place where the deal was made they weren't visible.

oThe German Americans of Cincenati funded the rebuilding of the main Catholica church after the war.

oMunich (English) = Munchen (German) = Monaco (Italian)…all these names come from monk, because monks originally founded the city, hence the monk is one of two important figures, which represent the city.

oEdinburgh & Verona are both sister cities of Munich

oIn 1516 a beer law was issued which stated that all beer should only contain water, barley (not wheat, because at the time they were facing a bread shortage), hops, & yeast. This purity law maintained the quality of Bavarian beer for years, & though it was recently overruled by German law, many Bavarian brewers still adhere to it out of pride.

In the afternoon, exhausted after all that walking & listening & learning, we decided to take a nap before heading out for the night. We stopped by the hostel bar again at happy hour for a couple of cheap cocktails & chatted to a couple of lovely Aussie girls from Melbourne, Sal & Rachael. They mentioned they sang in a band…& only later did it come out that they just so happened to be back up singers for Clare Bowditch! So there we were, munching away on cheap pizza & corn chips (dinner for two for 6 euro - score!), sipping cheap cocktails, & meeting lovely people - just one of the many reasons I love traveling :)