Day Five- Mishaps in Munich

Hi again, so I’m writing this over a year after I actually went interrailing and I don’t expect anyone to read this. Especially due to my history of leaving this blog unattended for months at a time. But I’m mainly writing this for me, one because I have a fair amount of spare time at the moment between trying to convince someone to employ me and two because the little notebook I have with all my notes from the interrailing trip is falling apart. If I don’t write them up in some form I will definitely lose them so I may as well carry on what I started and put them online. Even if I am the only one who reads them!

So because I haven’t updated this blog for so long here is a short recap of what happened on day four-

We got very stuck because we were unorganised and failed to book our hostels in advance. Advice- book your hostels in advance. Don’t be “unorganised bastards” as the Australians we met called us.

The night we spent in our final resort hostel was not a particularly fun one, with parades of people coming in and out of the room all night. At one point a guy with a pony tail (memorable feature) tried to climb into someone else’s bed simply exclaiming “oh” when he saw the stranger sleeping in his chosen spot. We were then woken up at stupid o clock by a girl who spent a good two hours putting on her makeup. But overall I’m sure we had a better nights sleep in the hostel than we would have done had we had to head to the train station for the night.

When we had collected our things together we headed back to the Pension from the day before, questioning why we hadn’t just stayed there when we first found it! The woman in charge seemed to be very happy to see us again and despite the terrible language barrier tried her best to ask us for any news on the royal baby.

No room is complete without a fake flowers

Standard bed but comfy!

The room in the Pension was nice with very comfortable beds. And left over German Prince and Princess Coke bottles which were a personal highlight for Dan and myself. We did spend most of the day in this room, spending most of our time in Munich booking hostels and campsites for the rest of our trip. Thank god for wifi and iPhones, although I was yet to enter the age of an apple phone and had to use my iPod, good old apple. (I am not sponsored by apple, although if you happen to read this apple feel free to send me a new iPhone…)

The best names for coke bottles

That evening we headed to the nearest beer garden where we enjoyed a stein and some of the weirdest food I have ever eaten. I decided that I wanted to go for something typically German so chose what I thought was pork, a dumpling and cabbage. This dumpling turned out to be a potato dumpling, with croutons in the middle. I have never been more shocked to find a secret filling in my food, whose bright idea was it to put croutons inside a potato dumpling? I assume it was the same person who decided to bypass the normal dumpling recipe with potatoes.

My German meal

And the unwanted surprise in the dumpling

It was quite an odd beer garden, I wouldn't say i'm an expert, but I definitely didn’t expect people who I assume were beer garden supervisors to walk around shushing anyone who were acting a little too loudly. We left the beer garden and had an earlyish night, we had to head to Milan the next day and although we had a hostel booked now it was best to play it safe!

Pretzel bigger than his head

Cheers Munich!

Tune in next time (If there is a next time it may be in about a year) to see what we got up to in Milan!

Day 4 Nuremberg and Munich Click Here

For info on the Beer Garden we went to Click Here

Follow me on Twitter Here

Credit for the better photos goes to @dan_magid

@KarlTaylor7 was there too

Day Two Prague, The One With the Ice Bar, the Unnecessary Reservations and a Sausage in a Box

Our first morning in Krakow began as the first night ended, with loud Germans. Throw in what appeared to be a dying bird and you don’t exactly get a pleasant wake up call. But we were up and ready to head off to Prague, one of the good things about our Krakow hostel was that they left out breakfast, typically the Germans had eaten the majority of it, but there was enough food for a good meal.

When we arrived at the train station we realised a flaw in our plan, we had to reserve to get onto the trains we needed. Now we did know that we would need to make reservations on the long distance trains but we didn’t think that we would have to reserve seats to get onto the smaller trains. So we joined the long queue of confused looking Brits waving around their Interrail passes and made reservations for our first two journeys. We then went to buy some snacks for the train however left this a little late and ended up running through a shopping centre with our massive backpacks on, luckily we made it with seconds to spare (this may be an exaggeration.)

Updating the twittering world!

I'm pretty sure that the first train was the Hogwarts Express and we managed to secure a cabin for ourselves, something that rarely happened on later journeys. This was one of the nicest train journeys we had, barely any stops and the time flew by, although when we did stop i'm certain it was because of Dementors. The genuine Hogwarts Express experience.

On the way to Hogwarts

Our next train ride of the day was an entertaining one, I hadn’t laughed so much for a long time. It started off innocently when the man that runs the food trolley came into our cabin and asked if we had seen his crocs. Sure enough the missing crocs were underneath my chair, a little later I went to buy some food as I hadn’t bought anything at the last station. When I got to the restaurant carriage the man working there told me that they didn’t have any sandwiches available but he could make me a “frankfurter with bread” which I assumed was going to be a hotdog. But when you assume you make an ass out of you and me, and I tend to do that a lot. What I was handed was two hotdogs in a box with five pieces of bread. Not even an equal amount of bread to make a sandwich with. After this entertained Karl and Dan for a while and I had constructed several mini sandwiches the trolley man came with complimentary snacks, juice/water and a biscuit. However not the nice biscuits, they were for first class only. This was also our first encounter with unwanted sparkling water, something that would haunt the rest of the trip.

My unexpected meal

Free Juice (Although I asked for Orange)

The downside to the journey between Krakow and Prague was the fact that our reservations were not checked on the first two trains leading to a very irritated Dan. Because of this we decided to get on our third train without making a reservation but as we got on we saw the signs on the doors stating that we would need  a reservation, thankfully they did look at them on this train and it wasn't a complete waste of money. If you are Interrailing read the small print carefully, i'm sure most people know and we were just optimistic but if its not a regional train make sure you reserve! 

The hostel in Prague started off our long chain of having 0% luck in finding the hostel. It wasn’t that the instructions were bad, we did actually manage to find the street it was on at one point but we didn’t realise we were on the right street and walked right past the hostel. About 30 minutes later, after several stops to relieve our backs and a trip into a bar where 3 overly helpful men raced to show me where to go on Google maps, we found it. The hostel we stayed in was Hostel Arnosta, it was a big place with helpful staff, there were plenty of showers and although there were only two toilets there was never a queue to use them. The only minor issue was that the wifi didn’t work in the rooms and only seemed to work if you sat on the stairs near the reception so there was a constant group of people sitting around there and making use of the wifi.

A similar room to the one we stayed in.

That night we decided to try out Pragues famous night club Karlovy Lazne. It’s the biggest music club in Central Europe and with five floors really had something for everyone, at 180czk its about £6 to get in and it was worth every penny since there really was something for everyone there. When we went in we went to an ice bar, you pay 140czk (About £5) to get in and it gets you  a cocktail (which comes in an ice glass.) The walls, bar, tables and sculptures were all made of ice and it was kept at -7 degrees so was pretty freezing but we were given big coats and gloves so it was unlikely that we would get hypothermia. I would happily have spent more time in there but i'm not sure how my body would have coped with the cold.

An Ice cold drink.

Looking cool.

Ice Queen

We spent a long time in the club going to all the different floors and finding out what the music was like on each. There was Radio Hits (which was basically a selection of odd foreign songs,) dance, oldies (cheese,) R&B and chillout. It was a really good night and definitely worth going to if you are ever in Prague. After we had tried out all of the floors we headed home and although Karl steered us off in the wrong direction when he didn’t think I had taken us the right way we all got home safe and sound after having an amazing night. 

Practicing my Rocky

For more information on Hostel Arnosta Click Here

For more information on Karlovy Lazne Click Here

For more information on the Ice Bar Click Here

Follow me on Twitter here

Credit for most of the photos goes to @dan_magid who had a much better camera than me and is pretty good at this photo business.