Day 8 - And Then There Were Five

Friday was going to be a very busy day for us, so I was not pleased to hear my alarm screaming at me at 9:00am. In fact, I was so annoyed that I think I turned it off and went back to sleep without even realizing that I’d turned it out. A night of beers and rum & coke had taken it’s toll on me and when I got Alex’s phone call saying that it was almost 10:00 (when we were supposed to meet him) and could we wait until 10:30, I just about passed a kidney stone. My head throbbed, my eyes would hardly open, I had no appetite, etc. I told Stefan to take his shower first while I did all that I could not to move, even though I knew we’d be late for our free breakfast, which ended at 10:00.

To add misery to the pain, it was raining and cold outside – the first day that we’d had (or would have) with such terrible weather. Donning my rain gear, we rushed downstairs to get some free food before the kitchen closed. I hardly felt like eating anything, but I forced some bread and cheese down my throat because I knew it would help soak up last night’s suds.

Alex and Verena then met up with us and we headed out for our tour of Bamberg. We walked around the beautiful town again in the daylight getting wet and with me feeling like I wanted to jump off a bridge into the raging waters below. We headed through town and then up a hill to the magnificent four-point cathedral that was on top of the hill. Alex and Verena told us about the significance of this small town in history. At one point, it was the capitol of the Roman Catholic Empire in Europe and was also the single most important city outside of Rome for the Catholics. One of the popes was entombed in the cathedral and there were quite a few other famous religious relics inside, such as a famous statue of a teenage man on a horse. Nobody really knows anything about it, but it’s apparently stirred up a number of debates in Germany on what it signifies and who it is. There were a number of tour groups in the cathedral discussing the sculpture, which I found interesting.

After the cathedral, we headed over to a beautiful rose garden that overlooked the city. I was slowly (very slowly) emerging from my daze and livened up a bit by the time we started heading up to the monastery on the next hill over, the highest point in the city. The rain was slowing down a bit at this point as well and we decided to have something to drink inside the monastery café since it was warming up outside.

We continued the tour by heading down the hill and down to the river again to an area called Little Venice, which has several old fishing houses situated below the river line alongside the river. They had small fences that kept the water out of the house and we were amazed that these places hadn’t been flooded out a million times. I hope they have flood insurance in Germany!

It was then lunchtime, so we headed to the school cafeteria to have a super cheap lunch. Because students get a special fare at the school, we were instructed to tell the cashier that we were exchange students from England, Italy, and Portugal and that was why we didn’t have our student ID cards. It made sense to me, but it didn’t sink into Daniel apparently since he asked me later that day why they had to pretend to be Portuguese :o) . Luckily, the cashier just assumed that we were students and rang our $2 meals up like he did for the other students. I found it amusing that you could buy beer in the school cafeteria, but such is life in Germany!

After our tour was over, we slowly made our way back to the hotel, stopping at some stores on the way to buy some soccer gear and Stefan’s trinkets. The great thing about being at the World Cup is that by the semi-finals, most teams have been eliminated and soccer gear with their logo is instantly slashed 50% just to get rid of the inventory. So I scored on some nice items like a flashy red Czech Republic jersey and a sweet full England kit for my niece Ellie, including the jersey, logo’d shorts, and knee high socks (shin guards not included). I hadn’t seen such an awesome set anywhere in Germany, so I had to pick those up.

Nobody was feeling particular great from the greasy cafeteria meatballs, but we did have a major trip to make that afternoon to pick up the newest member of our traveling Footie Pack – Roland. Poor Roland lived a couple countries over in Slovakia and had not been able to join us earlier on the trip because of problems at the hotel he runs, despite his inclusion in all of our previous trips together. He was another vital element to a good trip, however, and I was anxious to pick him up. We had talked and planned back and forth for the past couple weeks, toiling with different stratagems on how he could meet up with us. Initially I had thought that he would drive out and meet us, hence the rental of the Golf wagon. It turned out to be a bonus because when he told me that he wasn’t driving, I went and upgraded our car to something bigger, which turned out to be crucial and convenient. In the end, we figured out that he could take a bus from nearby Vienna to Munich for like $50 since all of the cheap Euro flights were sold out or wouldn’t fly anyway near Bamberg. The day before I left, he’d finalized his tickets, but we couldn’t figure out where the Euroline bus actually dropped him off, which was a bit of a problem since Munich is not a small city. After spending a significant amount of time before I left googling “P&R Anlage Fröttmaning”, which is where the website said the drop off point was, I finally discovered the answer: Park and Ride! Munich was a toasty 2.5 hour drive from Bamberg, but I owed Vas that from the previous year’s trip to Eastern Europe, where he picked me up from Vienna and drove me everywhere.

So we decided that Stefan would stay in Bamberg with Alex and figure out where we could stay in Berlin the next night and also go with him to Hendrick’s birthday party/barbeque later in the evening. Daniel and Kelly wanted to go with me down to Munich, which was great because at this point I was hitting the post-hangover dazed and confused and tired stage and didn’t really feel like I was up for driving an expensive car at the speed-of-sound on the Autobahn for five+ hours. So I made the bold decision and let Daniel pry the keys out of my death-grip and have a trial run with the car. Up to this point, the most I’d let anyone else drive was to let him make the five minute drive into the town of Kahl to pick up supplies for the cabin. And since I knew that the last couple days of the trip would be a major endurance run to Berlin and back to Frankfurt (ten+ hours of driving), I figured I’d relax and let Daniel take over for a bit.

I ended up not sleeping the whole trip down to Munich (maybe I was nervous about Daniel driving after our experiences in Brazil ;o), but it was nice not to have to think for a few hours and relax a bit. On the way down, we stopped at the FanFest area in Nuremburg and thought we’d find the stadium as well, but it was nowhere to be found with out eyes. We did come across a coliseum that was used in the infamous Hitler Nuremburg rallies in the beginning of the dark Nazi era of German history. I would have liked to of checked out the coliseum and the other historical sites near the FanFest, but we were running late and had to find the stadium. And that’s when we perfected the Navi system in the car when we looked up sports stadiums and found it right there on our menu! This would’ve been nice to have in Frankfurt, that’s for sure. Sure enough, it led us right to the doors of the stadium, where we stopped for a few minutes and took pictures.

Back on the road, I was starting to feel better and was talking to Daniel about the previous night of liquid gluttony and over-indulgence. He starting telling me how I was really lit up and could hardly walk when we went out to find pizza. I had no idea what he was talking about. Pizza? We didn’t go out for pizza, did we? He was trying to describe all the things that led up to that I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. I was totally laughing because I’ve never really blacked out from booze before in my life (except for some pieces in SLO last time I was there). Then he said something about us smelling the fresh bread at 3:00am while we were playing poker and the hamster in my brain finally kicked in gear and it started coming back to me. Apparently we had gone out to get pizza at this sketchy place around the corner. Daniel had gotten his piece and it had a nice long, black hair snaking around the greasy cheese on his slice. He tried to tell the guy that there was a hair and the guy just kept telling him that it was fine. They went back and forth a few times and then I blurted out the German word for hair and pointed and the guy finally figured it out and gave him a new one. It was pretty funny though that I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about and Kelly was laughing her ass off (while eating her golden puffs) in the back seat when Daniel explained what we were talking about.

As my extensive googling indicated, the Park and Ride facility that Roland was arriving at was directly next to the amazing new Munich soccer stadium, the Allianz Arena. We oooohed and ahhhhed over the stadium as we flew by and noticed that the traffic heading out of Munich (going the opposite direction) on Friday at rush hour was horrific. We kept that in mind as we pulled into the Park and Ride to find that the place was chalk full of probably 20 tour buses and hundreds of people all over the place. We were pretty sure that we wouldn’t be able to find Roland after all of the trips that we’d taken and all the time that we’d waited for him to show up, but this time wasn’t too bad. His bus was a few minutes late but after searching up and down through the tourists for him, we ran into each other and were stoked to have the final piece of our puzzle in our hands.

The first order of business was to check out the Allianz Arena stadium, which we could walk to. Unfortunately, we could only get to a stone’s throw distance as they had it all fenced off because they were making the necessary adjustments inside to get it ready for the start of the soccer season, which was just a few weeks away.

With the traffic going the other way in mind, we decided that we should just go into Munich for dinner and then head back to Bamberg for the party. We had no idea where to go in Munich, so we just punched in “Old Town” into the Navi and did whatever it told us to do. We came across a business / university area on a main road outside of old town and decided to explore the area for some local, suitable, and traditional Bavarian cooking. We got a nice parking spot and headed down a street that looked like it might have something. We found a nice little restaurant that had some blue color workers drinking beer and eating at, which was an instant thumbs up sign for me. Kelly still wasn’t feeling well and wanted something lighter on her stomach so Daniel took her down the street where they eventually found an Italian place to eat at. It can definitely take a while to adjust to completely different foods in new countries like this. Roland and I hung out at the Bavarian place and ate a nice, humongous German meal with sausages, potato salad, and beer – well, for Roland anyway. I just drank a monster Coke/Fanta mix (I think they call it a Spezi), which was my favorite Euro liquid sugar drink.
With out bellies full, we had a party to catch back in Bamberg, so the four of us met up again and Daniel drove back again. On the way out of town, we noticed an amusing demonstration of German engineering and planning on the sidewalk next to the street in front of the university. Being a school, there were of course a ton of bike riders and the bike riders themselves had little streetlights. It was kinda funny….

The ride home was quick for me because I passed out shortly after we got out of Munich and woke up when we were back in Bamberg. When we got back to the hotel, I had no key for my room so I hung out with Roland while Daniel and Kelly cleaned up for the party and Roland took his shower. I got ahold of Alex on the room phone and he tried to explain how to get to where he was but I was definitely not up for the challenge, so we decided we would take a taxi (since the taxis were all right outside of our hotel) down to the party and then call him and he’d meet us outside. Except that Roland, the only one with a Euro phone, had a phone with no battery left.

So we hit the taxi stand and jumped into an elusive full-size van taxi and headed to the party. We got to the party and there were thousands of people in the courtyard, which was several acres in size. Luckily they let us buy tickets without a student pass (maybe you didn’t need one, I have no idea). Well, we figured we might as well start walking around and see if we can actually find them at some point in the evening. And we did! We headed off to the right and within a minute we ran right into the group. Alex and Stefan were already enjoying their moment after Hendrick’s raging birthday party (during which apparently Stefan almost got stabbed by a guy). Beer and socializing were not a high priority on my list for the evening unfortunately, after the previous night. It was unfortunate because all of my German and international buddies were there, the beer was being served in giant one liter masses (pronounced “moss”) and it was dirt cheap as well. After some arm wrenching, Alex persuaded me to get one with Daniel and Roland and we all got the night started proper. We learned the proper German mass toast, which is when you really smack the mugs together. The things weigh like ten pounds each, so there’s no way you’re going to break them. There were some live bands that we checked out at the end of the night and of course we found the live Spanish band right as they were performing their last song, which was disappointed for our residence Latin dancer Kelly, who hung in there with us even though she wasn’t feeling well still.

Before we headed home, we had to eat some snacks. Stefan knew where the sausage stand was and kept taking someone there and then coming back with another new sausage and bread roll. He did it at least three times before we all eventually went over there. Then we got some awesome cheap crepes, which always hit the spot.

It was finally time to head back to the hotel and get the poker game going, so we all piled into a taxi and got a ride back. We played poker into the wee hours of the morning with Roland taking us to town. Daniel was the only one with rum and cokes by his side the whole time.