Day 26- Munchen on some bier

We left sunny Venice on Friday morning after spending a second night in our luxury accommodations. I am now officially spoiled. We took the boat to the train station and spent some time waiting for our 1:30 p.m. train to Munich (Munchen), which arrived about 7.5 hours later. We took the tube to our friend Florian's house (Florian from the Patras to Ancona ferry ride). He met us at the train station and we got back to his house and chatted over tons of Kinder chocolate until midnight.
At 5:30 in the morning, we woke up and showered and headed out into the still-dark morning around 6 a.m. We caught the tube into downtown and by 7, we were queuing up at the tent in Oktoberfest. This may sound crazy to you, but this is how the Germans do it. We waited for 2 hours for the very best tent, the Haacker Pschorr, and it paid off. We got a great table near the center and stayed there till the festival closed around 10 p.m. I didnt know I had it in me.
We ate white sausages (weisswurst) and "water with gas" for breakfast and began the beer drinking around 11 a.m. We split a couple litres, then I decided I wanted my own huge 1L beer stein. I had a total of 2.6L throughout the course of the day, which I would consider a respectable number (since I didn't end up under the table like some people literally did). For lunch we had a grilled cornish hen—amazing—for about 10 bucks and also munched on a pretzel the size of my rib cage. When the tent was about to close, we walked around the carnival-like atmosphere outside the tent and ate chocolate-covered bananas and candy-roasted cashews. It was raining, and by the end of the night, we were soaked. We headed back by the tube, reviewed the hilarious pictures and videos that Florian took (he will burn a copy for us), and hit the sack.
We slept in this morning, which felt so good since we haven't done that properly in weeks. Luckily, we were able to do our laundry at Florian's because everything from last night was soaked and filthy-I even got to wash my shoes. Hannah and I decided to trade some clothes for today since at this point, the same 4 t-shirts in a month have become quite boring.
The three of us headed out and were going to see a modern art museum with everything from Picasso to Johns and two neighboring museums which have work from Van Gogh to Manet (new museum), and Rembrandt to daVinci (old museum). By the time we found it, it was near closing. Since tomorrow (Monday) is a national holiday celebrating the reunification of East and West Germany, everything will be closed. We plan to go back early Tuesday morning (when we were supposed to leave). Instead, we walked around and saw some famous sites (the Hofgarten and Residenz, and the place where Hitler's party declared their candidacy) then found a little coffee shop and I had hot chocolate, which was like actual chocolate, just melted and with a tiny bit of milk mixed in. Thats the way it ought to be! It rained all day, so soon after we had our hot drinks to warm us up, we went to another one of Florian's spots; a little Italian place with a real pizza hearth and great food, though I must admit that it was sad that I was eating Italian pizza in Germany, and it was better than the pizza we found in Italy. C'est la vie.
I'm not sure what tomorrow holds, but we will be leaving Munich at 3:30pm on Wednesday for a 4.5 hr train ride to Vienna, Austria.