Happy New Years Eve

December 31, 2010 - 6:50 pm (11:50 am CT)
Munich
Wow it is crazy that we celebrate New Years Day at midnight, go to bed, wake up for our morning train and people in Minnesota will just be celebrating the New Year. Alas...Today we finally got to see the sights of Munich. It is very easy to see the main sights in a day as they are so close to each other. We started by walk down from Karlstor Gate to the Marienplatz (Mary's Square), stopping at St. Michael Church along the way. All the churches in the center of Munich were destroyed during WWII and rebuilt. All the churches have photos of what they looked like after the WWII. AMAZING! Next we walked to Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady). This is the Cathedral for the Archdiocese of Munich. Pope Benny XVI was the Archbishop here in 1977-1982. For being the cathedral it is rather plain compared to the other fabulous churches in town. We finally got to Marienplatz just in time for the daily "jousting" of the glockenspiel on the New Town Hall. After that we hiked up the 306 steps of St. Peter's Church to get the best view of the city. It was your typical hike up....2 way traffic on a single lane stairwell. The view was great! We check out a couple more churches and had some lunch and then hoped on the train for Dachau. Dachau Concentration camp is surprisingly only 10 miles away from Munich. Crazy to think of what was happening so close to this great city. It is a very somber experience. It hasn't changed since the last time I was here 10 years ago. After that we hopped on some trains and head tours the Olympic Park. Munich hosted the 1972 Summer Olympics. We saw the swimming pool arena and the olympic tower which only cost €4.5 to go up a whopping 186 meters (~600 feet). It was dark by the time we go up there so there wasn't too much to see. We could see the stadium but it was dark....you would think it would be some what lit up...but NO! They were preparing a skiing hill for some ski championship thingy happen in January 2nd. Right now we are watching some "Die Simpsons" in German (Eric is so happy...the Simpsons) Yesterday it was Family Guy in German. Next is Two and a Half Men. We are going to head down to the Marienplatz later for fireworks. This place LOVES fireworks. Every where we go we see people carrying huge bags of fireworks (most of which I think are banned in the US) and you can hear them going off all over the place. But Simpsons are done now, time for dinner. Ciao! Glückliches neues Jahr!