For our only complete day in Munich, we decided to take a free walking tour in the morning. It was nice, and we got to walk around the inner city area and see a lot of the sights. I like walking around by myself, but it is also nice to have a guide who can tell you stuff that you might not know otherwise. There were a variety of churches and other important historical buildings that we saw. We went by the Hofbräuhaus, which is a famous Biergarten there as well. I met a guy from Singapore, who I talked to for a while (named Neo Kai) as well as some guys who had just graduated from UNC, and a guy from Utah. There were quite a few Americans on the tour with us in fact. After the tour, we headed over to English Garden, to check out the Chinese tower there and have a beer in the Biergarten there. It was a nice day, and ideal for walking about, as long as there was shade. We were a bit lost on the way there, but came upon a member of the tour that we had been on, who knew where he was going. We went with Stanley, a Chinese guy from Hangzhou who lived and worked in Ontario as a software engineer. He was fun to talk to for Joe and I, because we have been to Hangzhou. Marc actually slept for a bit after a beer, for which I can hardly blame him. I tried to steer the conversation to things not necessarily pertaining to China, but it was difficult. After a beer, we walked along the river in the park, which was full of bathers and people just lying around. There were so many people along the banks that there was almost no place to sit. We ended up finding a place at a bend in the river (it was constructed and re-routed using a cement trench), where people would fly past in kind of a frenetic lazy-river sort of fashion. The water was cool and refreshing. After sitting for a bit, we headed back, to do some more sight-seeing. On the way out of the park, we came upon the place where the river enters the park by kind of dropping in. There was a group of guys surfing in the river, on the natural wave that is formed by the water entering. A lot of people were standing around watching, so we did for a while as well. It was really cool, and some of the guys were really good. One of them could even spin in complete circles and get air in the river. Following our park tour we headed back into the city, to get a view from a church tower that over-looks the whole city. This is when Stanley left us. He was a lot of fun. You could see the whole city essentially, including the Olympic stadium and Bayern-Munich's stadium. We saw the Glockenspiel again, only this time from above. After climbing the church tower we bought a few groceries at Rewe, then went back to the hostel to eat, watch Germany play Uruguay and plan Sunday. It was a good game, and we watched it with a very international audience. After the game we had a warm Munich beer each (I don't know why we bought the beers at the store, because we knew that we had no access to refrigeration). The funny thing was that they didn't taste that bad warm, but that is something that I will not do again either way. We then retired to our room, and I talked with Qi and Cris again for a while before going to bed. I also met Shay (I think that's what it is at least), who is from California, and is traveling through Europe for a couple of months, kind of planning it as she goes. Getting to sleep was kind of difficult there because it was incredibly warm, and the streetcars and normal cars were pretty loud, but it wasn't unbearable. Oh, I should also mention that our room included a bathroom, and in related news, I met a Canadian who was familiar with YoungLife (I was wearing my tree shirt) and had been to several camps in the States.
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