Germany Trip, Day 1

We made it to Germany and it was a lot easier than we thought it would be. The girls were awesome on the plane and slept all of the hours they were supposed to. Olivia flirted with an old German guy for a while and had everybody laughing. The kids congretated around me for the most part, so Mary got a lot of time to herself. When we got to downtown Munich on the subway, two tourists from Switzerland saw us and our large number of large bags and told us they were getting off with us to help us to our hotel. They helped us with our bags and walked us to our hotel which took a few wrong turns to find. It turns out that it wasn’t even their stop, but they had some time to spare before their train back to Zurich. It was a nice welcome to Europe. Abby added to the nice welcome by throwing up twice at the outdoor Christmas market (Kristkindelmarkt) within a few hours of arriving. Besides the vomit, we had a good time walking around the market, drinking hot punch, and eating roasted nuts and chocolate-covered fruit on a stick. The buildings at the town square (Marienplatz) impressed Abby. She thought every tall building was a castle. Her comment was: “I saw two really big castles. One was the biggest ever and the other one was a little bit big.” I ate the longest hotdog I’ve ever seen for lunch before going back to our room to try to nap through the jet lag. Mary, Livi, and I slept but Abby was wired and hyper and she played and talked the whole time, and finally forced us to get up and go out for the evening. For dinner we headed out to Hofbrauhaus, the most loud and famous of Munich’s many beer halls. We ordered a nice variety of bratwurst, meatloaf, German potato salad, and pretzels and ate while listening to an live oompah band in the background. While we were eating, a Japanese tourist came up to us and started taking pictures of Olivia – we’re guessing because fair-skinned, redheaded, blue eyed girls aren’t too common in Japan. After that we called it a night, and headed back to our hotel (the Blauer Bock) to get the tired grumpy girls to bed.