Munchin' in München

Well, the day was clear and flying was quite peaceful today/yesterday/whatever the heck you call it when you lose a few hours of your life to time-zones. One day I'll get those hours back, you see, one day...oh, wait...
We actually did enjoy a peaceful flight, the most turbulence we suffered was landing in Atlanta. The wind didn't want to let us go down. Other than that, the flight over the Atlantic was one of the best long distance flights I've been on. Which reminds me of my flight to Brazil...I though flying was the WORST form of transportation after that flight.
Anyway, we arrived in Munich at about 7.30 Tuesday morning. Since we didn't have to wait for any bags, we took off to the service center where they held our bags for the day. I should've left my backpack there as well, because, well, it was annoying, and you'll see why.
We boarded the S8 train—plug for a national rail system NOW!—and went into the actual city. Eastern Europe is such a different experience than the western side of the continent, and so when we exited the train and walked up to Marienplatz, imagine my awesome when I turned around and saw the Rathaus. It was an amazing piece of architecture. We stayed a while in Marienplatz waiting for the marionettes in the tower of the Rathaus to dance to the hourly toll, but 9 o'clock came and went and no dancing. They didn't dance later, so I assume they were out of order...bummer.
I flipped out the GPS and asked Mr. Garmin what some points of interest were around there. It directed us to few churches, which was cool, but still we could only get into one. So we decided to hop on the train again and go to Olympiastadion, the Olympic stadium and park of the '74 summer games.
That was pretty cool, but even though the train took us to it, the actual grounds were humongous, and we walked a good long time looking at the crazy architecture of those games. We tried to get into the stadium...by going through the vehicle entry point (what is that called anyway? the big tunnel?) We got to the field, but were quickly informed that only workers today, no visitors. Made sense, since they were cleaning up from Celine Dion's concert last Saturday.
It began to rain lightly, which felt very good. We decided to make our way back so we could eat. Before boarding the train again, we saw the BMW Welt and Museum. Don't ask me what welt means...it had that word in German and English, so I imagine it's a class thing. Haha, whatev. It was cool anyway. I've officially decided that if someone...anyone...wants to gift me a new BMW, I will not be picky as to the model. Although the 160's looked like me. Hint hint. (Who says I'm hard to shop for???)
The museum actually cost money, so we just peaked. We were extremely hungry anyway, so we decided to go back to Mariensplatz to eat. Who knows why we chose that...huge tourist place + european cafe = many euros for notta lotta. Oh well, it did taste good. Plus, maybe if America could get used to European portions...yeah, right.
We now had a decision to make. We had eaten, we were all sorta tired, but our plane doesn't leave until 9.30 that night. It was not even 1. Out comes GPS again. We knew there was a pace called Englischt Garten, you know, those English Gardens. On the map it was HUGE, so we thought we'd take a look. Thanks to Mr. Garmin, we found out that one of the many trains actually took us quite close. So we decided to do that.
We saw the Chinese Tower (Chinesischer Turm), which was neat and pretty out of place...or at least I thought so until Mr. Garmin told us that is was the area's largest beer fountain. Ah yes, German ale. We took a break. by now our legs were dead, and I don't think our minds were much fond of us either. We headed back, but we had just walked to the center of a forest in the middle of the city that was over 10 city blocks, and we had to follow the path. So we did, and it led us to Hof Garten, which was a much, much smaller garden that actually resembled a garden. After resting and listening to live violin concertos, we head back to the Underground. Taking the subway back to Mareinplatz, we decided that we would just head to the airport, and catch a few winks before our flight, which is what everyone else is doing now...
Check this post again for pictures in about 9 hours...