Munich

Fruhlingfest (Spring Fest)
BMW museum
3 Series
Dachau Concentration Camp
Mike sleeping in the restaurant booth
It all started on thursday evening, when Mike, Gabe, and I were on our flight to Berlin. We were halfway there, when they alerted everyone we had to make an emergency landing because of the volcanic ash cloud. I was not really too worried, more pumped cause I am loving adventures these days. Easyjet said they would provide us all with hotels, but that ended up being false, so I had to sleep in the Munich airport. We found some benches in the corner of a restaurant and I ended up only getting like 2 hours of sleep because a German lady was hitting the three of us, yelling at us too, probably telling us to wake up and move somewhere else. So we got up and tried to figure out the schedule for trains going to Berlin, but when we found out that the berlin airport was closed, we just got a train to the center of Munich. We arrived at the main train station and just walked around for a bit. All of us were so tired and gross, we went to a McDonald's to wash our faces and I changed my shirt. Then we kept walking around and found a tour group leaving for a concentration camp, so we all looked at each other and said why not. We took two trains out to the concentration camp, called Dachau, which was the very first one. That was some quite intense and very deep stuff, and I was taken back by the entire place. After spending a few hours there, we headed back and went to find a hotel, a cheap one of course. So I got a two person place, then we snuck gabe in later in the day. We dropped off our backpacks, then headed over to Spring Fest (it's like a smaller version of Oktoberfest) which was sooo much fun. It was opening night and so much was goin on, so we just grabbed a liter of beer each, and just started drinking. After two beers, we walked around the place, which pretty much reminded me of a state fair. We found this giant tent with a bunch of tables and a big stage in the back part of it. Folk bands were jammin out on stage, while everyone was just throwing them back. So many american students there, pretty much all studied in Florence. They were definitely making huge fools out of each other. We had a great night there, and we all headed back to the hotel. We realized it was only 11 or so, we decided to take a short nap then go out, but all of us ignored our alarms and woke up in the morning. Next day consisted of us going to the BMW museum and Olympic park/campus. Both were really sweet and enjoyed them soo much. We got back to the main station in the late afternoon, cause we planned on buying an overnight train ticket from Munich to Rome, but we found out we could not get a train back till tuesday night. So we all were panicking because we would be missing classes and feared that we would not be excused for our absences. Then Gabe got a Facebook message from one of his friends saying that there was a bus that would be leaving for Rome on sunday afternoon. So we quickly signed up for that bus, which was a huge relief. Then we all were like, hmm we need to find place to stay tonight. I instantly thought of the site Couchsurfers.org, which Mike had an account on so we looked for places to crash. The site is made up of people that offer up their couch for the night, as a means to give the person a free place to stay. So we finally found some dude named Tom. I ended up called him because it was such late notice, and he said he'd love it if we all stayed over. So the three of us met him and his friend at a metro stop near by and followed them to their apartment. When we arrived at their place, we set our stuff down and they were right there waiting to hand us beers. We talked for awhile about life and politics, and Tom got carried away and just talked too much. He had so much to say to us about life and how he perceived humans as all the same; that every human was equal and all of the societies should combine to one. I thought he was crazy and had way to much to drink, but a Western European German from the outskirts of Dresden is cultured in such a different way, so I was not too surprised they were so open minded about life. After a few more beers and more philosophical talks, we passed out. We woke up in the early morning so we could head back to the main station. On our way out of the apartment complex, we ended up scaling a fence to leave his place because we were locked in. When we got back to the main station, we hung out in the Starbucks till it was time to catch the bus to take us back to Rome. The ride was about 12 hours, but was not too painful because we drove through the Austrian Alps then through Bologna to Florence. So that was my crazy weekend, all thanks to a volcano in Iceland. Looking forward to the next ridiculous trip.