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Wombat’s Hostel, Munich, Germany

As far as hostels go, Wombat’s is the easiest to find from the Munich Central station (main station) - it’s about a ten-minute walk from exiting your train. More specifically - and I’m taking directions off their website - you exit the station towards Bayerstraße, cross the road and go left, then turn on the first street on the right. Wombat’s is the second house on the left. Easy peas. Voted as the ‘Cleanest Hostel Worldwide’ in 2004, the ‘Best Hostel Chain Worldwide’ in 2006 and 2007 (reviewed by those who booked through Hostelworld.com) and the number six hostel Worldwide in 2005 should be enough to convince one it’s a great place to stay. But just in case it you want more . . .

Wombat’s is a perfect hostel to stay in. It’s ideal location and friendly staff made it hard to leave, although it could have been the awesomeness of the city it’s located in. For whatever reason, Wombat’s is a perfect example of what I’m going to term as a true “backpacker’s hostel.” The inexpensive rooms, provided security lockers, WiFi in the lobby, 24-hour reception, a fun bar (womBar) with happy hour specials and a complimentary welcome drink, and the always sought after washer and dryers. Okay, it doesn’t include breakfast, but at an average of 22 euros a night, I thought it okay to spend a couple extra euros eating a strudel at a nearby bakery or a cheap bratwurst at one of the thousands of bratwurst-selling kiosks.

Another great thing? The walking tour starts every morning at Wombat’s hostel. You simply show up in the lobby by the couch at 10:15am and you’re set to go learn about the history of Munich, eat some good food, and walk by dozens of important Munich sites essential to any great tour!

Address:
Senefelderstrasse 1, D-80336 Munich

+49 89 59989180
www.wombats-hostels.com

womBar at Wombat’s hostel, Munich, Germany

The womBar is easy to find from any room you stay at in at Wombat’s City Hostel. The friendly bartenders make it hard to leave the fun atmosphere, but since you’re allowed to have drinks in the lobby as well, a lot of people congregate to the comfortable bean bag chairs and couches it has provided for many different scenarios.

Whether you’re playing poker (we didn’t get do that!) or catching up with people you recognize from the last hostel you crashed at, womBar is a cool bar to chill in either way. When I was there, our tour guide Ozzie was also our bartender a few hours later!

If anything, go down, check it out, and at least grab your complimentary drink (that includes a soda for you non-alcoholic drinkers). It’s a good place to start for you night owls, and on your way out the front door, grab one of the free city maps - you’ll be needing it for the giant maze of crazy Munich streets!

Englischer Garden, Munich, Germany

Perhaps I was jinxed as it had rained in every city I’d been to since my arrival in Europe. Five days worth of downpour in London, a couple days of regular ole rain in Paris, and one harsh day of slanted rain in Interlaken. Why wouldn’t there be a light drizzle in Munich to cap things off? I can’t be critical. It was, after all, the beginning of September and if I’d read a site like ours, I’d have known August and September are rainy months in Germany!!

A light rain poured and Paul (my current travel buddy) and I took cover under a large tree. Always the gentleman, Paul laid down his jacket for him and I to sit on, preventing our last pair of clean jeans from getting drenched. It was nice after all the eating, drinking, and walking, for Paul and I to meander through the park and catch up on all we’d seen and done prior to meeting in Interlaken.

As much as I enjoyed Luxembourg Garden in Paris and St. James, Hyde, and Green Parks in London, I loved the Englischer Garden just as much, maybe a smidge more. Maybe because it was such a simple park - i.e. minimal trees, sparse benches, etc. - I spent more time there.

It’s a remarkable open space that made it easy to see tourists and locals alike enjoying the garden’s curvy pathways and extraordinary landscape. From most spots in the garden, it was also easy to see downtown Munich’s unique buildings against the skyline.

For me, it was all leading up to Spain where I was to meet Ali and experience the time of our lives together. For Paul, it was the end of traveling with his sister and a start of something completely new. He was off to Amsterdam alone and I was headed to northern Spain, but for both of us, in the middle of the Englischer Garden, it was sanctuary within Munich, Germany.

Munich, Germany

I’m listening to the new Coldplay album while I write my blog about Munich, Germany. It’s funny - I always relate music to moods, moods to writing, and come full circle: writing to music. There’s a song called Lost that’s chorus states, “I just got lost, every river that I tried to cross . . . and I’m just waiting til the shine wears off.” It was in the third largest city in Germany where I truly did get “lost”, however, in the most desirable way.

This isn’t the ‘lost’ one refers to while hunting for Exit 20 off a crazy California highway and there’s Exit 20A-F to confuse you. Quite the contrary. ‘Lost’ is what I was in Munich, the city where I finally dropped my guard and began to fully appreciate where I was. Munich, or Munchen, is the first city of many I hadn’t planned on seeing, but was glad I did.

beer-germany.jpgWhen Sarah and Paul, the brother and sister from Florida whom I’d met in Interlaken, Switzerland, invited me to go with them to Munich, Germany, it only took me two seconds to decide so I bought a ticket (my first time with Euros) and said goodbye to Interlaken.

I saw a lot of great things in Munich, much more than just a reflection of a pasty white wannabe rogue traveler too (uh, that’s me). There was the Marienplatz, the Englischer Garden, the Biergarten at the Chinese Pagoda, the Hofbrauhaus (my favorite place for beer and food), the Viktualienmarkt (a daily food market), and I also got to know the lobby of Wombat’s hostel intimately. But of course, the most important thing to try and do in Germany, is eat!!

I’d like to say plainly how much food my Swiss/Munich traveling buddy Paul and I consumed in a mere three days, but I havecheese.jpg to elaborate. No exaggerations, the morning his sister Sarah left (boo raspberries), Paul and I made a silly pact to be eating something all day. We called it Munchin’ in Munchen. Blackberries, gummy bears, cheese and crackers, cheese and bread, cheese by itself, steins of German beer, and of course bratwursts. Oh and cheese. By the way, cheese makes my face get fat. But while I was traveling in foreign countries, fat was the furthest thing from my mind (…unfortunatelyit was the closest friend of my inner thighs). Don’t skip out on the food though because it’s like I said, you have to be yourself while traveling and experience what you want to, and myself said to stuff my fat face with German goodies.

As we munched on our morning pastries, Paul convinced me to take the free walking tour (the tour leaves from Wombat’s every morning at 10:15am and lasts about three hours) and although we were late and had to catch up, we were happy we did because it was the best tour I’d ever taken!

tower.JPGOur tour guide Ozzie, informed us that the square we were furiously snapping photos of was the Marienplatz, which is named after the column of the Virgin Mary and is now known for its famed neo-Gothic town hall. He also told us to look up at the mechanical clock, the Glockenspiel that chimes at various times of the day and puts on a little “show”.

Then he proceeded to take us around everywhere a great guide can take you while in Munich (short of participating in Oktoberfest Paul and I missed by two weeks!). Three hundred years of Munich history in just over three hours, and Ozzie was patient, passionate, and displayed every great German cultural accord.

He took us to Frauenkirche (the giant ice cream cone looking buildings) and told us how the structure of Frauenkirche is the tallest structure (109 meters or 358 feet) in Munich and will remain so due to German building limitations. Once inside, he showed us the famous Devil’s Footprint that is imprinted in front of the cathedral as well as the tale of the “windowless church”.

As we kept walking and, in my and Paul’s case, eating, I began to feel a sense of what Munich truly was about. I also began to feel quite full, but my urge to try everything German overwhelmed my body’s urge to implode. This included my brain too as Ozzie continued to stuff it with so much information, I almost believed I was in the war circa 1939. The truth is, you’ll really care about the bullet holes left behind in the cement walls, the red-painted cobblestones representing history’s mistakes, and the buildings having been rebuilt brick by brick because war planes destroyed them over six decades ago. You care that you’re walking through the same streets as Hitler and his Nazi soldiers. You remember that, trust me.

The tour continued through some side alleys and stopped outside the National Theater, the old opera house located on the edgehofbrauhaus.jpg of Old Town Munich and nearby the highly visited Residenz museum. It was there Ozzie told us of the square’s great moment in history, then informed us that our next stop would be a fun break from the heavy history some of Munich represented. We were off to the Hofbrauhaus, a highly populated local biergarten and the most famous beer hall in the world!

When the tour ended, I was upset. Not because it was over, but I wanted to know more! That’s the great part of going somewhere like Munich - it’s packed with all the fun things you love to do while traveling, but also stored within this marvelous city are the stories it keeps, waiting for people who want to hear about them.

Don’t go on the walking tour just because it’s free, but for the memorable and respectable German knowledge. Keep in mind the walking tour sticks only to sites that don’t cost any money and for the most part, it’s an outside tour. Also, make sure to tip your guide! They don’t get paid for giving tours and they try to fit in a roundabout way of telling you, so the gesture of a tip is a much appreciated one.

There are just too many sites to see and the free walking tour is a surefire way to see a lot of the meaningful ones while getting some powerful historical information, not to mention great exercise!

Devil’s Footprint, Munich, Germany

The Devil’s Footprint can be seen at the front of the Frauenkirche church. The story indicates it’s where the devil stomped his foot after he had been tricked by the builder. Legend goes, the devil could enter the cathedral only if it was entirely windowless. And, from the spot of the Devil’s Footprint, you can’t see any windows! Allegedly the clever builders made it appear, from that spot only, that the church it was suitable to the devil, and in anger and disgust, the devil tramped his foot there because he couldn’t go any further into the sacred grounds. Our tour guide volunteered each of us to step in the footprint and see what it was the devil saw . . .

The devil might not have been able to go into the church, but I could… and I took photos of his footprint and more of Frauenkirche’s beautiful interior infrastructure!

Marienplatz/Glockenspiel (Tower), Munich, Germany

Ever go to a movie someone talked about endlessly saying how great it was, but then you see it and for you, it lacked just about everything a movie is supposed to contain? Yeah, that’s the Glockenspiel, the tower in the center of the Marienplatz Square.

Our tour guide, Ozzie, played a trick on us. He said to get ready for a ‘great show’ only to witness the lamest clock chime ever created! But, like everything in Europe, there’s a story and the clock tower tells two of them – one about the marriage of a duke to his bride and the other . . . well, I’ll leave some things for you to find out!

My advice: take pictures of the buildings around you because beautiful architecture seemed to be characteristic of every Munich building, which makes sense since it was yet another German city that had to be rebuilt following World War II. Ozzie explained how the Marienplatz was erected in gratefulness for deliverance from the plague and it included the Glockenspiel tower to relay the stories of Munich history. Pay attention to the tour guide if you can. I was busy taking so many photos I missed a lot of historical information and it wasn’t until later, I truly appreciated the stuff I did remember.

Viktualienmarkt (daily food market), Munich, Germany

As the most popular market in Munich, it was no surprise to me it was the busiest. At the late riser time of 10:45am, Germans, Swiss, Americans, Aussies, and everyone in between were enjoying the day, drinking steins of beer and trying to digest the several bratwursts they had already eaten. So, why wouldn’t my traveling buddy Paul and I participate in a lot of the same?

We’d already started earlier that morning by eating giant German pastries from the local bakery and devoured a box of blackberries fresh off a local farm. Oh, and Paul’s addiction to gummy bears could and would not go ignored.

Our tour guide set us off to our own devices for about an hour and told us to reconvene in the market’s center where hundreds of cheeses, armed with cholesterol and fatty goodness surround you like the military on a raid. Ozzie (our guide) said Viktualienmarkt is the best market to get fresh food and a variety of delicatessen. Paul tried some sort of seafood pita thing while I busied myself with Weizenbier (wheat) and a giant pretzel. With extra mustard. And salt. And then we both had ice cream. And then I ate an antacid.

According to Ozzie and his boundless knowledge of German culture, we were all on track to becoming “healthy” Germans who usually burned off the calories by walking everywhere (typical of Europeans). With that, Ozzie wasted no time after our hour-long break to get us moving again. Paul and I swung our full bellies aside and plundered on!

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