Two Week Road Trip Around Europe - Munich

So we leave the strasbourg/kehl border behind and head off to find somewhere to sleep, eventually we come to a service station that looks like we might not get arse raped and get ready to kip for the night. Before dropping off though I headed to the toiler.

This toilet put to shame any English facility I had ever been in, the air was fresh, the walls sparkling and the urinals lit up when you started to piss. But the most amazing thing happened when I went for a dump. After flushing the toilet something happened that I have never seen before, its simplicity and yet extravagance hypnotized me.

Let me set the scene, you are very tired, ready for bed and you go to flush. A quite electric sound humms from the water tank behind the toilet and a small part detaches itself. A small arm with a disenfectant covered spounge decends onto the part of the toilet seat closest to it. After a couple of seconds the ENTIRE TOILET SEAT rotates, ensuring every partof the seat is clean and acceptable for the next user.

Jesus I have never been so impressed with anything in my life.

The next morning we woke up, anus intact and began the trip to Munich. The trip was fairly uneventful, progress was unfortunately pretty slow due to a torrential downpour limiting our vision considerably.

Eventually we arrived in one of the more famous of German cities, Munich or Munchen in the native tongue.

Munich is a fantastic city, while we did not see it at its best due to unseasonally poor weather I fell in love with the city. From the cheap beer to the friendly people I found it hard to fault this city or the people in it. The architecture of many buildings was stunning, with their historic buildings given copious space unlike many similar places in the UK. We took a short walk through the English Gardens, A huge tract of land filled with english style foilage. Unlike many English gardens however the one in the centre of Munich comes with four huge beer gardens, a nudist area and even parts of the river where surfers can ride the current.

Our guide told us how in warmer weather the areas we passed would be thronged with people playing in the river, drinking in the spacious tree covered beer gardens and of course walking around naked. Fortunately due to the weather we avoided copious amounts of bodily hair, but rather disappointingly missed out on some of the worlds most renowned drinking areas.

We did however visit the Hofbrauhaus, this is renowned to visitors of this city, not only for its hefty steins of beef, large portions of filling food and authentic bovarian music but also for its locals, who drink here regularly and later on in teh night have a tendancy to dance on the tables and get truely wasted. The hofbrauhaus is the only place I have ever been in my life where they have a dedicated funnel type piece of apparatus specifically for people to be sick into. INterestingly they only have this in the mens... obviously the designers never went fora night out in Leeds.

The Hofbrauhaus is wher Hitler first started his campaign, though intially he was boo'd off and had glasses chucked at him this was later turned into one of his main establishments, if you look at the roof from the inside you can clearly see where the swastika were painted on the ceiling and later painted over with flags, though unfortunately still in the shape of the fallen symbol.

At our hostel (Its called the wombat hostel, would highly recommend it!) We met some fantastic people, Patrick the card genius, Eric scarily intense, think 7 minute abs off theres something about mary, Emi & Briannan (Not sure how she spelt it offhand, bloody aussies)and several other random people we played cards with. No other place was there the same kind of atmosphere as here.

At the hostel next door I vaguely remember meeting several other people, all of them seemed pretty cool, at this point however it was knocking on for 4 in the morning and I was pretty hammered.

I am hoping to go back to Munich next year, I couldn't fault it.