Having spent the best part of three days in Berlin we headed over to the main station and hopped on a high speed ICE train to Munich. It's over 300 miles to Munich and the train covers it in around five hours, the stunning thing about it is not so much the speed but the cost, a second class ticket is around £30 (one way) which is far cheaper than say the equivalent London to Edinburgh (a similar distance) journey which weighs in at around £100! Anyway, the train was on time and we sped down the length of Germany at impressive speeds, there was a speedometer inside the carriage and I noticed a maximum of 300 km/h which is around 185 mph, we won't see trains in the UK that fast until we have HS2 (so when most of us are dead then!)
You can tell that you are getting closer to Munich as the train passes field after field of hops, I snapped the picture above at around 30 minutes out. Munich is of course the capital city of the province of Bavaria and is world famous for it's beer production, hence the annual Oktoberfest festival there, I guess these hops would be destined for the various types of lager brewed at vast scale in the region so will probably be of the Nobel varieties such as Saaz, Tettnanger and Hallertau, unfortunately you can't open the train windows to have a sniff!
We arrived at the main station in Munich at around 5pm and immediately noticed that a) it was extremely crowded and b) a large percentage of the crowds were wearing traditional Bavarian dress, i.e. the men sported the famous lederhosen, white or cheque shirts, jackets and felt hats (with feathers in them) and the Women were in patterned skirts and waistcoats, it looked surprisingly cool! All these people were on their way to Oktoberfest but fortunately we headed in the opposite direction to our hotel for three nights located in a quiet residential area to the East of the city.
Since it was our first night in town we decided to not venture too far and headed a couple of hundred yards up the road from our hotel to the "Camba" brewery tap room where they had 40 beers on tap and a bowl of chilli on the menu! To my great surprise I noticed that #22 on the beer menu was a beer (Broken Dream) from the Siren brewery in Finchampstead, UK my local!!! (of course I had to have one to keep the British end up!) After a couple of beers and some hot food we wandered back to our residence and slept soundly until the next morning when new adventures awaited, more in part 4..
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