Post first week settling in (Catch up post about Munich)

Sorry I haven't written in foreverrrr, if anyone didn't know already, I was bad at communicating when I was at home, I'm just as bad overseas (I was thinking the time change would make me better or something...) But, I'll backtrack and go through my week at Munich because it was incredible. (Sorry for the length of this post, but everything was just so cool)

Monday: In last blog (I think)

Tuesday: Walking tour of Munich- We walked for about 4 hours straight and it was bitterly cold which took away from the awesomeness (yes awesomeness) of the city, but not by much. We saw a ton of churches (and church organs!!) and every single one had breathtaking architecture. There was a wicked cool one that had the "Devil's footprint" in it- the story is that the architect needed help building the church, so he made a deal with the Devil that the Devil would help him build a church, but the Devil said there couldn't be any windows in it. He (Devil) assumed the church would fail without windows, but it didn't. So the Devil went inside the church one day and saw that there was light, and assumed that the church was illuminated by God, so he stamped in the ground really hard and left a footprint. In actuality, the windows were just set very far back in the walls. It was a neat story. We learned a lot about the different forms of architecture that was used in building the churches, the Royal Home and other places, which was really interesting to see the variety all within a few km of each other.

That same day we went to the Deutcheus (sp?) Museum which had literally every exhibit you could think of in it. We had a tour of a few of them, and then Jesse (the other music major) and I went to the instrument exhibit. AHHHH!!!!! I have about 70 pictures from the exhibit. I didn't post all of them on my facebook for those who have seen my album. It had every instrument family, and an example of each, from basically the time it was created (including bagpipes, bassoons, others that I didn't even know existed.) THERE WAS A GIRAFFE PIANO! Probably my new favorite instrument. So anyways, that museum was wicked sick. Then we wandered back to our hostel and went out to Augustina, the oldest brewery in Munich.

Wednesday: Fussen, Castles& Clubbing. We started the day off with a train ride to a Medieval village called Fussen. More on that later. The cool part of the day was when we went to the castles a bit north of Fussen. They were the "Fantasy Castles" or something like that. Turns out that the guy that built the castle only lived there for ~132 days before he died. There were only 13 rooms finished in the entire castle, but man, they were the most detailed, elaborate rooms I've ever seen, or will ever see in my entire life. Nevermind the stunning views out the windows, the paintings and decorations alone were incredible. We weren't allowed to take pictures unfortunately, but we had the coolest tour guide. There was another castle in that area, but we didn't go into that one. We found a gorgeous lake and hung out there for a little while before returning to Fussen. (That was when Jesse fell through the ice and had to deal with wet shoes and shins for the rest of the day.) When we got to Fussen, we all split up, but the girls followed Konrad around because he knows what he's talking about and always has interesting tidbits. Konrad is the academic advisor/ professor/ cool guy at the college. He's been working for Salzburg College for about a year, but he always seems to know everything. He showed us another church, which was attached to a monastery, (all medieval) and some other views. That night, we went to a club since it was our last night in Munich. I don't know if I'll be visiting clubs much, and that's all I have to say on that topic (:

Thursday: Moving day! We went to the Olympic Park in the morning, which was really cool. Unfortunately it was raining, but you could tell that on sunny days it's an awesome place. (Sorry I use so many generic adjectives for everything, just imagine my excited face and flapping hands to get the point across about how much I am loving everything haha). We went up in the needle in the middle of the park and you could see everythinggg. I would assume it's sort of like the needle in Seattle, but with probably a lot more churches to be seen from this one. There are churches every 100m around here. After the park, we went to the BMW factory. The tour we took was super secretive, I'm afraid if I write about it my computer will get confiscated or something. Everything there was really fancy and... clean. Very clean. The tour seemed to take forever, but after all the walking we had done the entire week, we were ready for the train ride to Salzburg. The train ride was 2 hours, and all but 15 minutes of it was in Germany. Germany is 2km away from Salzburg. I finished reading "The Help" while on the train- for anyone who hasn't read it, get on that now. So good. Anyways, we had a long train ride, and then our host families met us at the train station. I'll pick up my next blog there. (I promise I won't wait so long to write it!)

I miss everyone so much, and those of you who are starting second semester, good luck!! Lovelovelove