Munich and Oktoberfest

The day started out with a bike tour with the group known as Mike's Bikes. It was not as good as I was expecting, but they sure know their audience. Munich isn't a terribly large city to see all the sites in and frankly, with the bike tour we only saw a little. We spent over an hour at a beer garden for lunch at 10:30 in the morning. We did learn some history from our Canadian and Australian tour guides. It was okay, but I wouldn't do it again. Here are some pictures from the things we saw such as the palace, and the opera house.

 The church they showed us during the bike ride was pretty despite the scaffolding covering the entire outside. The statues of the lions point towards the government buildings on one side and the church on the other. The lion has his mouth open towards the government and closed toward the church symbolizing that you can speak up against your government but not against the church.

The beer garden had nice food. We went to the second biggest one in the world (the largest is also in Munich). We had to finish our food and beer quickly towards the end but it was a nice stop.

After the bike tour, I went and walked around the city with Mike (American from San Francisco, living in Hawaii) and George. We started off in the city center, which is actually the only part of the city that I had seen before.

There are two churches in the city center. Peterskirche is right within the square and has a bejeweled skeleton in it.

Frauenkirche is the other church in the city center and like most of the things on the trip was covered in scaffolding. Other than that it was a cool church to see.

After this, we just walked around the city. Some highlights we saw were the Maximilian Palace and St. Luke's church which is Lutheran.

Munich is kinda small in terms of sightseeing so we were able to go all over the city in about five hours. That is also why there aren't too many descriptions on the photos. We headed to Oktoberfest afterwards and I got dinner there and had a few beers with some friends. It was a good night and Munich was a relaxing day.

Tomorrow, we will head to Switzerland by the way of Austria and Liechtenstein. I'm excited to see what the tiny country of Liechtenstein has in store for us.