Thursday, August 8, 2013

This is It

I made it! It was a long day of travelling on Wednesday, but I finally made it home!

So I think I left off with last Thursday. So last Thursday I took the train, metro, and bus from Gaillac to Toulouse. It wasn’t too bad getting to our new residence but having to carry all of my stuff with me made it a little rough. But anyways, I got to see everybody from the program again and we spent the afternoon walking and shopping around Toulouse. On Friday we had our presentations, so we had to sit through about 7 hours of students speaking about their experiences.

On Saturday we finally left for Germany! We had a layover in Paris so we didn’t get to Munich until around 6:30pm and by the time we got to the hotel we were so tired. We lugged all of our baggage through the city, which we thought was a good idea, but then it ended up being 98° so that wasn’t so great. So once we got to the hotel we decided to have dinner, we walked down the street and found a Thai restaurant. So my first meal in Germany was Thai food haha, it was really good, but super spicy.

My first German dinner!

On Sunday we did some quick sightseeing in the city. We visited about 3 churches including the famous one with the 2 onion domes. Since it was Sunday, mass was being said in every church we visited so we didn’t get to walk around inside the churches but they at least let us walk in and see it from the back. We also got to see Rathaus, which is Munich’s town hall I believe. It was a very pretty building. After we did that we stumbled upon a beer garden so we decided to stop and have lunch. We both got a beer and a huge pretzel!!! Then we headed to the Residenz which is the palace in Munich that was home to many Bavarian kings. It was huge and there were so many rooms!

Frauenkirche!

Marienplatz! (Rathaus is on the left)

My giant pretzel!

The Residenz



The King's bedroom

Monday was our day trip to 3 sights outside of Munich. We visited Linderhof Palace, Oberammergau, and Neuschwanstein Castle. The Palace was amazing! It was small, but there was so much pretty detail in every room. I loved it! Then we headed to Oberammergau which is a cute Bavarian town. They only gave us 30 minutes there so I didn’t get to see much unfortunately. Then our last stop was to the castle and this was amazing too! King Ludwig II started building it but was unable to finish before he died, and about 6 weeks after his death it was opened as a museum. So it’s been a museum for a long time now. It was beautiful!!! I can definitely see why Walt Disney used it as a model for Sleeping Beauty’s castle in Disneyland. Once we got back to Munich we decided to go to a pub for dinner. I had my first real German wienerschnitzel. It was so yummy! And for dessert I had Bavarian cream, which was pretty good too.

Linderhof Palace

I want to live here!

Neuschwanstein!





Tuesday was our last day in Munich. We decided to go visit Dachau the concentration camp. It was definitely interesting to see even though it was a bit creepy. We got to see the camp and there was also a museum set up in the main building. After visiting the camp we decided to go to another beer garden. This one was the Augustiner beer garden which was much nicer and bigger than the one we went to on Sunday. I got sauerkraut and some sausages. It was delicious! After we ate we decided to go the Olympic Park. Unfortunately there wasn’t much to do there except look at the buildings. We could’ve gone roof climbing but that would’ve cost us a small fortune so we just walked around and looked at all of the cool buildings. After that we took the subway back into the center of Munich and found the Hofbrauhaus pub. This is probably the most famous pub in Munich and I could see why. The building was gorgeous and the atmosphere was so much fun. They had a brass band playing while we ate which was very cool.

Dachau





Augustiner beer garden!

Olympia park!

Olympic stadium



Hofbrauhaus! 

Pig knuckle for dinner!

On Wednesday, we got up early to pack and then we headed to the airport. I was very sad to be leaving even though I was excited to see my family again. It was about an 9 hour flight and my dad picked me up at the airport.

These past two months have been amazing! I have learned so much not only about wine making, but about different cultures and how to communicate. Some days were more challenging than others but I enjoyed every bit of it. I was able to visit so many different places and see so many different things and I can’t believe it’s all over now. I really enjoyed these past two months and I hope I will be able to do some more traveling like this in the future.

Thank you to everybody who has read my blog. I hope you enjoyed it! I know my writing isn’t the most exciting but I hope the pictures made up for it! Thanks again and I hope all is well with everyone.