Guten Tag, Hallo, and Jambo!

So we officially arrived in Kenya after spending a week in Munich and Amsterdam at about 8 pm Saturday night. The visa line, with only about 30 or so people in it, took over an hour to get through! Luckily our drivers, who had been waiting with UTMB signs since 7 pm, were still waiting for us outside of customs! 

(Just FYI, We = Me, Neeli, Pooja, Trevor, JR, Lauren, Michael, and Rachel)

 

Before going into details about Kenya, I’ll share a little about what we did in Munich and Amsterdam.

We were pretty much zombies by the time we arrived in Munich at 8 am local time. From the airport we took the train to HBF (the central station) just a street over from Wombat’s hostel where we would be staying for the next couple of days. Check in wasn’t until 3 pm so we stored our luggage at the hostel and decided to explore the city / find some good German food to eat while we waited! We stopped at a restaurant called Café Mozart a few blocks away. The food was amazing! Almost everyone else in our group ordered Wiener Schnitzel, but Pooja and I decided to go with a dish called Kasespaetzle. I had no idea what to expect seeing as my knowledge of German food is pretty limited, but it ended up being delicious! It kind of reminded me of macaroni and cheese except the pasta was spaetzle and it had onions in it too. After lunch and a beer we went for a stroll. Ironically our hostel was located near a German medical school! Just can’t get away from school haha. Later that day (after very much needed nap) we decided to try to find Marienplatz. Walking it took about 30 minutes to get there. Unfortunately we didn’t figure out the subway system until day 3 – oops. We had an awesome dinner at a traditional German restaurant. I ordered their “famous” sausage with a side of sauerkraut. Our waitress was super nice so we obviously had to get a picture with her! Once we finished dinner we headed to Hofbrauhaus. I’m pretty sure we took the most indirect way possible, but we finally stumbled upon it! Yay! Liter beers! Hofbrauhaus was a lot different than I expected, but at the same time exactly what you would expect a German beer garden to be like. It was huge! There was a band playing folk music dressed in those green overalls. Anyone know what those are called? The rest of the night consisted of “prosting” (German for cheers!) and singing the Texas fight song! When we got back to our hostel, Pooja introduced us to an Indian snack called batagotagotchia (I have no idea if I’m even near the correct spelling of that word haha). It was super spicy and I think she enjoyed watching us practically cry from the heat! The spiciness still didn’t stop us from having it every night we got back to our hostel!

Me, JR, Rachel, Michael, and Lauren

            The next day we did more exploring around the city. We visited a couple more cathedrals and went up to the top of the tower of St. Peter’s Cathedral. Even though we almost passed out from the trek up, we had a great view of the city that made it all worth it. It’s funny to me how churches that are centuries old are found nestled among modern coffeehouses and clothing shops. While we were walking around we noticed that a lot of the people in Munich snack on ice cream cones while out and about. This aspect of the culture in Munich was very easy for me to adapt to! : ) That night we went to back to Hofbrauhaus for dinner and another night of prosting and German folk music – not to mention the wombar back at our hostel!

            The next morning we woke up early to visit Dachau concentration camp. Dachau was the first concentration camp established and all others were later modeled after it. It’s also interesting to know that the city of Dachau used to be a royal city in medieval times. It was very sad but amazing experience. I definitely recommend that everyone who visits Munich go visit to Dachau. Our guide, Gordi, gave us some history while we toured. It was a very pretty day while we were there which made it hard to imagine the cruelty and suffering that went on there. Even though much of the camp had been destroyed at some point or another, some of the buildings had been rebuilt to provide an example of the prisoner living quarters. When the camp was first established, a prisoner could be killed for not being clean enough, but by 1945, the camp was so overcrowded that filth would pile up more than a meter high. They crammed over 500 prisoners into dorms that were made to hold only 50 people. Once we got back from Dachau, we met up with Flo, a friend of a friend (Allison!) from Berlin. Later we went to BMW world which was really cool. It was located right next to the Olympic stadium in a very pretty part of town. We grabbed dinner at a really random place, but the food ended up being amazing!

Flo, Trevor, and JR

            The next day, our last day in Munich, we visited the Dutch Museum. Even though it is in the process of remodeling, it is an amazing museum. It is basically a huge science museum with different exhibits on electricity, ships and navigation, planes, oil and gas, optics, physics – it would takes days to see the entire thing. Once we left the museum, Flo had to catch his plane back to Berlin. We were very sad to see our friend and translator go! After he left, we took the train to the Modern Museum of Art. There were some interesting things there, but I’m really not that into modern art. I did manage to set off an alarm though! I didn’t touch a painting or anything like that, but I guess I got a little bit closer than allowed! I wasn’t the only one to set off an alarm because we heard it going off again somewhere else later on. The museum was dead quiet. I felt like we were being loud just whispering to each other. There were some strange exhibits – one, called “Deadly and Brutal,” was a series of hand-painted film posters from Ghana that supposedly had nothing to do with the content of the movie.

            That night we took a train from Munich to Amsterdam. Before leaving for Europe, we each bought a ticket for one spot in a 6 person couchette. The ticket was in German and growing up in the US, none of us had any experience with riding overnight trains so we thought the couchettes might be first come first serve. We quickly found out that wasn’t the case after a nice German woman showed us our place number. Unfortunately we were not all in the same couchette, but some of us ended up together. Only Pooja was by herself, but I asked the man in my couchette if he would mind switching with her and he said no problem! I actually slept pretty well (minus the crazy loud alarm going off in the middle of the night – never figured out why) and when I woke up, I was in Amsterdam!  

  

            So I realized I said I would share a little about Europe and I ended up sharing a lot! I’ll make Amsterdam quick – we were only there for two days! Once we got off the train it took us a couple hours to figure out the tram system and how to get to our hostel. It was a pretty nice hostel, just very small. We stayed in the museum district so it was a pretty nice area to be in as well. After getting settled and showering, we had lunch and wandered around the city. I think the buildings in Amsterdam are beautiful. Many of the buildings are painted plum which is one of my favorite colors! We passed a ton of cheese stores while walking around the city so we decided to stop and have wine and cheese at a little café. That night we went to a piano bar in Lancaster Place that was really fun. The piano man even knew the song “Don’t stop believing!” Our second day we went on a canal cruise, walked by the Anne Frank Museum, and visited the Van Gogh Museum. I loved the Van Gogh Museum – I didn’t realize how many of his works I am familiar with. That night we had Indonesian food which is apparently really big there. It was sooo good and I am definitely going to look for some Indonesian food in Houston when I get back in town! Early the next morning we left for the airport to head to Kenya – and that’s where I’ll pick up with the next post!