Stephanie - CS #10

After a shower and some breakfast everybody was feeling pretty good. We only really had time for food and packing before catching our train. We parted ways with Renzo (who for the record said that we were his two favorite American girls: WIN!) and off to Munich we went.

Well...not so easily. Getting to Zurich was simple and quick, and there we changed trains. Now, after our first mishap with Eurails, we are very careful to do everything correctly. Still, every time we hand it to the ticket checker we're thinking, "Oh gosh, please please work!" We had gotten pretty comfortable with our competency at using Eurail tickets and haven't had any issues since the first one. But when the ticket checker came on this train, she looked at my ticket a little longer than usual and asks, "where's your final destination?" "Munich," I said, thinking, 'I wrote that on my papers, I filled out everything correctly, right?!" Then she says, "I need to see your ticket for Austria." What? We were super confused. Finally we figured out that our train was passing through Austria (unbeknownst to us...nobody told us, and why would they have?). Our Eurail pass only covers Benelux, Germany, and Switzerland. So we thought we would be totally fine, but no, we had to pay extra because we were accidentally and un-purposefully going to Austria. Fantastic. So we just smiled and asked how much. It was only 5.40 Euros, so nothing too damaging, but Laura and some Swiss Francs left so we tried to use those. It came out to 16 something francs, but Laura only had 16. Finally, the woman, who seemed a bit exasperated from dealing with us (we must have looked pretty stupid), said she would just take the 16 CHF and that would be fine. Phew...

Then this nice physicist who is sitting next to us made a funny face after the woman walked away. "Don't feel too badly," he said, "she gave you a terrible exchange rate!" Great! So that was a fun little experience :)

Stephanie, our most current CS host, was right where she said she would be at the train station. We dropped our bags off at her place before going to a restaurant for dinner. She lives in the University neighborhood of Munich so it has a pretty fun, young vibe. She is also really close to the city center and though we didn't have time to explore today she apparently lives within walking distance of a ton of cool things! Stephanie works in online sales and just graduated from University a few months ago and has only been living in Munich for a month (though she was previously familiar with the city). It is really fun to be with a girl our age who did the University thing and is now doing the job thing...that pattern is pretty easy to relate to.

The restaurant we went to had a Sunday bacon cheeseburger special so of course we got that. We have heard that Munich is one of the most expensive cities in Europe, but compared to Switzerland it is like a breath of fresh air! Being in Munich's U District and getting Sunday specials though I'm sure helps...

At the end of dinner, one of Stephanie's friends named Bettina joined up with us. She was very quirky and tons of fun. It was really great to have kind of a girls' night out! After dinner we went to one of their favorite bars and got a beer. It was very loud for a Sunday night because there was a DJ blasting music that drunk people were singing along to quite loudly. Mostly they were singing about carbonerra pasta and coca cola...very strange. After that, Bettina went home but offered to hang out with us / show us around on Tuesday. Oh, by the way, we are staying here an extra day since we got here a day 'late' and then we'll figure out our Austria itinerary later...I love this flexibility...

We went back to Stephanie's adorable apartment and she helped us figure out some things to do tomorrow. Then, since all three of us apparently had extremely long nights last night we all kind of crashed early. I'm excited to get a good night's sleep and explore the city tomorrow.


Quotes:
"I woke up and my first thought was, 'what country am I in?'" - Laura, after a long night...

Accomplishments:
Accidentally went to Austria.

Travel Tip:
Always know the tipping customs.


I SWEAR I AM GOING TO START EATING BETTER...as soon as I eat a pretzel and get through Spring Fest!! My chub is really starting to gross me out. Yuck. Still have 10 weeks to work it off...