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Today we were really spoilt. We decided to be lazy and have a nice lie in for a start - we didn't even get out of bed until about 12! And then at 1 we met up with a friend we made who was staying in our hostel in L.A.! It was so nice of him since the train ride is two hours long and he came especially to see us! :)
Heni (I'm sorry if I spelt it wrong), met us at the main station of Munich with a friend of his called Steph. I hadn't had any breakfast so I was staaaaaaaarving and so we headed to Marieplatz to a restaurant called Vapiano to get some lunch. This restaurant is Italian and I saw it in Poland but never actually ate there before. It has a very unusual set up… When you arrive you are given a card, which you give when you order food later on and then at the end you pay by handing the card over and it presents the final bill. It's actually a really good system because I've found that one of the most annoying things about Europe is how difficult it is to split the bill at restaurants!
However one of the annoying parts of the restaurant is that you queue up in different lines depending on what you want, i.e. pasta, pizza and salad all have their own lines. Because I felt like I was on the brink of starvation I waited in the pizza line, however the others wanted pasta. The issue was that by the time I had ordered my pizza, waited for it to be cooked, and sat down at a table with it - they were only halfway through the queue. I think a lot of the cooking is slowed down by the fact that they cook the food in front of you - which whilst is impressive, can hold a lot of people up.
So I ate half of my pizza by my lonesome self. But it was really delicious - for just 6.50 euro I got a huge monster of a pizza covered in mozzarella, basil pesto, spinach and tomato. It was actually quite tragic because when I was sitting by myself there was a couple at the end of the table who looked really elegant together - and were picking at their salad. Meanwhile I'm sat next to them with an entire pizza and bottle of full sugar coke. I'm definitely going to have to start controlling my eating otherwise I will get obese D: but I try to justify it by the fact that we are walking a lot and soon I will be in hot countries - and I can barely stomach any food when I'm in a hot place - and therefore should shred those unwanted pounds I've gained from being in Europe.
Eventually the others joined, and by this point another friend of the others had joined. Everyone ate their pasta and then we left! When you leave there is a bowl of Haribo gummy bears that you can help yourself to :)
We went for a nice walk around the city and saw lots of old buildings, and then eventually we ended up at a university which one of the girls studies at. It was very pretty and smart looking! However what was even better is that we went up to the roof of one of the buildings where there is an informal rooftop bar! It was sooo amazingly nice. Everything was chilled and there were lots of students drinking a variety of drinks. We all had beers that were made by the university brewery - which I also found very interesting! It was good beer too. Also from the rooftop we had an amazing view of the Swiss Alps in the background which were all covered in snow. We spent quite a while up here and just chatted about lots of things - especially about New Zealand since we're sooo excited to come home eeeeeeeee! And also about what Matt and I had been up to since we last saw Heni when we were in L.A. It was a nice catch up - I've said this before but I'll repeat it again, the best thing ever about travelling is not the places but the people. It makes the hugest difference ever and it's so nice. Today we didn't really do any sightseeing, but the magical experience of drinking at a local university rooftop bar, drinking university brewed beer with random friends we've made from travelling totally destroys any experience of seeing a fancy landmark in a famous city. I will now always smile when I think of drinking lemony beer, listening to German accents and having a view of the beautiful Swiss Alps.
After this we went for another walk. I don't really know where too, it was just nice walking. The others had to catch a train back home around 6 so we hung around until they left and then went home to chill for a bit. We spent about an hour lazing around and then headed back out since we were running low on cash and needed to find a currency changing place as I still have heaps of the Polish currency on me - and I don't know if I'll be able to change it in Dubai! However it was pretty unsuccessful - the only one we found was going to take like 17 euros commission which was so ridiculously we couldn't even laugh it off. However since we've been back in the hostel the receptionists have told us of others.
We did however get a different insight in to what Munich is. We took a few random routes since we were looking everywhere for a currency exchange place, and I'm pretty sure we found ourselves in the red light district of Munich. It was really tacky and not a pleasant place to be around. Every other building was a 'table dancing bar', or 'strip bar', and other more interesting names. We also quickly realised it was a Saturday night since there were sooo many drunk people everywhere - even openly peeing against walls on the main street. That was pretty unpleasant because so far I had only seen nice things in Munich! But I guess this stuff does happen in every city. It was the same with how many homeless people suddenly emerged - a lot of them seemed to be immigrants which was interesting for me - because actually I have seen a lot of obviously immigrant people in Munich - even McDonalds is written in a number of different languages including Arab! But it's such a random place for foreigners to want to move to in my eyes! Of course it's a very rich city that seems to be doing well for itself, but it still came as a surprise!
I also saw something quite impressive. There was a church on the main street which was lit up in all sorts of bubbles and colours, with some nice modern instrumental music playing. Outside there were some people walking around with glasses filled with candles. Of course this caught our attention so we looked in to the entrance, and inside it was sooo incredibly beautiful. There were hundreds of paper birds hanging off the ceiling, lots of different lights being shone around the room and so on. I was really impressed because it was like they were modernising the church and trying to catch more people's interests - which was definitely successful as there were so many people in there!
So basically we had a very nice and interesting day. Thank you so much to our German friends for coming all this way to see us and make special memories of Munich for us :) Remember if you ever head to New Zealand you've always got a place to stay and people to show you around!
P.s. the photo attached is of me, Matt and Heni up in the rooftop bar. In the background you can just about see the mountains :) (iPhones cameras are good but not necessarily the best!)
P.p.s tonight is our last night in Europe :O So weird. :( We'll be back though, don't youuuu worry!
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