Venice, Italy to Munich, Germany

VENEZIA

We spent two days in Venice. Our first day was spent laying by the pool at our campground, Camp JOLLY! It was very refreshing to take a day to relax instead of tour. We spent the entire second day in Venice and it is BEAUTIFUL! It is so cool to see an entire city built upon the water. There are no cars, everyone travels by boat or foot. We had no idea what to do in Venice so we just explored the town by walking along the Grand Canal. The streetpaths don't actually follow right along the canal so you have to zig-zag back and forth through winding narrow passages in order to go in one direction. And the buildings are so close together! We felt like two mice in a maze, it was so fun! While exploring we stumbled upon the Venice Museum of Natural History. We ate lunch in the courtyard and then visited the museum. It was really fun and a nice change from all the art museums we've seen so far. We walked to the famous Piazza San Marco which at high tide is covered in about 6 inches of water. We wanted to take a gondola ride back to the main station that evening but it was far too expensive :( So we got some strawberry and vanilla-bourbon gelato and walked back instead. It was so delicious! On the walk back we found a Music Museum Exhibit. It was really neat, we saw some instruments dating back to the year 800 AD. Tyler really enjoyed seeing everything there. We thoroughly enjoyed Venice. It's a beautiful city and hopefully if we ever make it back we'll ride a gondola. Venice was our last stop in Italy, a great place to end our Italian tour!


MUNICH, Germany


We only spent one day in Munich... our hostel was called The TENT and thats exactly what it was, a giant tent that had about 100 beds in it. Probably the most interesting place we've slept so far... The best thing about Munich was the food and the beer :) It was REALLY cold and rainy so we didn't do as much as we had planned to do in the city. We ate lunch at a Bavarian tavern called FUNKSTADL. We ordered some "schnitzel weiner art" and a mixed grilled meat plate with fries and two beers. The famous Munich beer is the "weiss" beer, which is a light wheat beer. It was really good (and this coming from a girl that doesn't care much for beer)!  The food was delicious too!! We walked through the city market, bought some snacks, and then visited the Oktoberfest Museum. We spent the afternoon and evening at "Tollwood" which is a park area on the edge of the city where they frequently have festivals. The festival going on while we were there was a Food & Music of the World festival. It was fascinating! It was a huge fairground covered with rows and rows of food booths and music tents, each with a different cuisine from countries all over the world and different music styles. We stepped into many tents to stop and listen to the live bands, most were pretty good. And for dinner we tried some African cuisine from the Africa booth. It was a huge plate of different stews poured over rice with plantains on the side. It was really yummy! We ended the night hanging out around the bonfire at the TENT and chatting with other travelers.