Spring Has Come to the City, Beer Fests and Dirndl Season (Again!), and Vacation Plans

It’s been over a week since I last posted to this blog. My apologies – I haven’t been very inspired by my life to blog about it. That sounds much worse than reality, trust me. Life in Munich is wonderful, as always, I just haven’t been doing a lot of ‘blog worthy’ things. There has been a lot of weekend partying but who wants to hear about that? My friends and I realize that we have less than three months together and we’re making the most of it – judgments be damned! We do, however, have a moral conscience and we recognize the moments that our behavior gets out of hand. We make mistakes – we try not to make them again and sometimes we fail. But, ah, c’est la vie! As happy as I am to be here and enjoy these final weeks in Munich, I am looking forward to being home and taking a serious detox from my crazy party life. It’ll be nice to slow down and grow up a little bit. Until then, I fully intend to be young and carry on living my wonderful life.

The best thing going on in Munich right now – SPRING! It’s official – winter is OVER. We’ve had sunny, blue skies all week and temperatures have hit mid to high 50’s. The trees are sprouting green buds and the birds keep singing at all hours of the day and night. The beer gardens are back to their triumphant state – tables spread out and beer drinkers enjoying the sunshine and good company. My girl friends and I spent almost the entire afternoon last Sunday at the English Gardens, basking in the deliciously warm sunshine. It was a beautiful, beautiful day!

There is a beer festival going on in Munich yet and although we have yet to enjoy it – we still brought out the dirndl’s this past weekend to celebrate. We always have fun in our dirndl’s, especially when no one else is wearing them and we get all of the attention. We walked around Munich forever trying to find a  location for the starkbierfest but we failed. So we ended up at one of our favorite hostel bars where craziness ensued and Fio, Brenna, and I had one of the best nights in Munich thus far. We’re still talking about it – almost a week later. Fio’s 16-year-old cousin was in town for the weekend, too, visiting from Ireland and that girl definitely got a good taste of our crazy life. She was absolutely wonderful – we all loved her and hope to see her again before we all leave.

Anything can happen when you wear your dirndl!

At the moment, I’ve got my window wide open – clean clothes drying all over my room, and a blessedly beautiful day ahead of me. I’m babysitting the girls tonight – again. I’ve been doing this a lot lately. My host mom is on a bunch of museum committees and there are a bunch of museum openings lately so I’ve worked three to four nights out of seven for the last two weeks. It’s been okay though – I don’t have much money because of my trip to Cologne – and the nights that I did have off, I made the most of them. The week ahead should be good. We’re actually attending Starkbierfest this weekend (I don’t think I’ll like the beer much, honestly) and next week I have less babysitting responsibilities.

And hopefully I can start planning a trip to Italy over Easter vacation. I mean, I’ve made the plans – I just have to finalize them. I’m hoping for Cinque Terra and Venice but we’ll see! It depends on how much money I have and can manage to save. Ideally I’d love to fly to Pisa, take a train to Cinque Terra, hike one of the trails, get back to the train station, take a train to Venice, spend a weekend in Venice with the girls, and then get back to Munich. We’ll see!

Until I figure all of that – I’m going to continue enjoying spring in Munich! I love it!

I always stick my tongue out when I’m trying to concentrate.

Happy spring!