Breakfast with Amber

July 2022: Dresden Days

We continue with Daphne's Adventures in Germany. We had two more overnight trips over the course of the program, both of which were in July, and they were on back-to-back weekends. (Well, actually, the Munich trip started on June 29, but it went into July, so it still counts as July).

Like I just said, our next trip was to Munich. It was another five-hour train ride down south. The first thing we did was check into our hotel, which was somehow even more old-fashioned than the one in Heidelberg. For one thing, we didn't have room cards. Each room had one key that both roommates had to share. Who does that?

Once we were all checked in and dropped off our bags in our rooms, we headed off to our first destination: BMW World. Our initial plan was to visit the BMW factory, but it got dropped for whatever reason. The first part of the trip was to go to BMW headquarters for a presentation on how BMW was going to gradually switch to electric vehicles. The problem was we got a little lost. We were all going by public transportation. (By the way, the public transportation in Germany is squeaky clean in terms of punctuality. Taking the bus in San Antonio is making me miss the trains in Berlin and Munich.) It was hard enough getting 28 students and their chaperones from one place to another, but one person missed the S-bahn, and we had to wait at the stop we got off at for them to arrive on the next train. Then we got on the wrong train and had to figure out how to go the right way, and it also started raining.

The presentation wasn't even that interesting. I might have fallen asleep. BMW World wasn't that interesting, either. It was just a showroom where they showed off all their latest electric cars. Afterwards was a walking tour of the old town. I was so darn tired and hungry since we only got sack lunches on the train and it was close to 8:30 that all I remember was wondering why my power bank wouldn't charge my phone.

The next day, we drove two hours by bus to Schloss Neuschwanstein, a castle on a hill that took an arduous uphill walk to get to. The castle was beautiful even if the interior decor was a bit much on the eyes. Afterwards, Aiden and I got lunch at the restaurant at the base of the hill. I got a barbecue burger, and we were assaulted by flies for the whole meal.

That afternoon, we drove to a nearby mountain town called Garmisch Partenkirchen where I got ice cream with some of the other girls. It was sunny for most of the afternoon, but right as we were about to get picked up, it started hailing. Not raining. Hailing. Golf ball sized hail. The bus couldn't even pick us up at our original pickup spot, so we had to run after the bus while it found a place to park. I'm pretty sure all of us got hit by hail at least once. I personally got hit twice. One of the windows on the bus also got broken by hail, and we had to drive halfway down the mountain with a broken window before changing buses.

On July 1, with the exception of lunch and a tour of the Bayerische Staatsoper, we pretty much had the whole day to explore the old town. I spent the day with Aiden and Gabriella exploring the shop, watching the Glockenspiel on the Rathaus play, and I found an American penny. That was pretty insane. More importantly, after a month of eating German food, Aiden decided he wanted some American fare and invited me and Reed to dinner at the Munich Hard Rock Cafe. I ate some mac and cheese that was so filling that I couldn't finish it, and we talked about music and D&D. Apparently, 2E is way more brutal than 5E, which is what I play. There weren't any death saves. If you died, you died, and there were a lot more things that could kill you.

On July 2, we made our way back to Berlin, which wasn't that interesting except for the fact that Benjamin Vau was on the train with us. For context, from 8th grade all throughout high school, my family hosted foreign exchange students, and our first was Ben from Germany. We had already planned to meet on July 3, but apparently, he had decided to ride into Berlin on the evening of the 2nd on the exact same train as us. I didn't even notice until we were at the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin and I saw him on the escalator out of the platform.