Day 10 - Prague to Munich

Dec 23rd - It's another travel day, so up early for us - Jan was very accommodating to letting us have our breakfast a half hour earlier than he usually serves it. With a 6 hour train ride ahead, a good breakfast...especially Jan's eggs & bacon are appreciated.

Made our way to the train station & found our platform for the train to Munich (Munchen), and sat back to enjoy the ride. One place Rob had wanted to get to in Czech Republic was Pilsen (Plzen) to visit the Pilsener Urquell Brewery, but was not to be in the schedule, so he settled for a quick picture at the Plzen train station as the train stopped through there on the way to Munich.

We arrived in Munich around 3:00 PM and we wasted no time storing our packs in a locker at the train station & hopped right back on a train headed to Nuremburg (Nurnberg) - it's about an hour ride by high speed strain (we were zipping along at 250 km/hour at some points). From what we had read, Nuremburg is the site of the mother-ship of all Christkindlmarkts :) And given the fact that the Chrismas markets close up at 2:00 PM on the 24th, this is our only chance to check out the Nuremburg Market at night. The market is located around the Hauptmarkt square area , and was a short walk from the train station. This area of the city is defintely very quaint, lots of old buildings and very walkable. The market itself was huge, and occupied the main square, streets going off from it, and then into a couple of more squares. From a size perspective, this defintiely was the biggest, and probably most crowded market (though probably expected since it was the last night and a Friday), and had good quality booths. The Hauptmarket was quite pretty with the church, but we thought the market in Vienna was defintely more impressive from a lights & decoration perspective.

Lebkuchen

We wandered around about half of the market before stopping into a brewpub for a quick bite to eat (breakfast was a long time ago!), and then finished up the rest of the market. We picked up a few treats to try - one of the traditional gingerbread hearts that we have seen at all of the markets (lebkuchen) & something else that I don't know what it was called, but was like an eggnog flavored marshmallow puff covered in dark chocolate, was very yummy. We finished up the night by having a Gluhwine - my faith in the hot mulled wine is now restored, as this one was much better than the one we tried in Innbruck, not sickening sweet at all.

After making our way back to the Munich train station and fetching our bags, we were off to find the S-Bahn (train system within the city) to our hotel. Our EuRail pass covers our fare on the S-Bahn, so will be a good way to get around Munich.

Unfortunately, not a lot of pictures today - when we made it to Nuremburg we realized that we didn't have the camera with us, but managed to get a couple of shots with the blackberry...so quality is not quite as good.

Beers for the day: Barfusser Blonde, Barfusser Schwarze, Tucher Weizen