The rooms in Hostel Ruthensteiner are quite large. They have a good number of outlets (which you’re lucky to find in any room, actually) and even reading lights on each of the bed. The downsides: poor wifi reception from the access point across the street and the single shower/bathroom for 8 people. We’ve not run into the issue before, but here we had to wait for the shower. 4 people needing to use one shower is quite inconvenient. I wish they would have had at least two showers. Chuck had to wait at least 30 minutes for this girl to shower before he could take his. As soon as he opened the door, I shot in there because not only did we have to check out at 10am, but we had to catch a train at 10:20. Time was of the essence, so the others could suck it up and wait. At least the floors didn’t get as gross as they did at the Alessandro Downtown hostel in Rome. That was seriously nasty. I’m not quite sure what my most/least favorite hostels have been but we’ll wait until the end of the trip before I make that decision.
We headed to the Westbahnhof to catch our train to München (Munich) and it arrived a little bit late, but all was well. We got on and took seats right off the bat. We were a bit worried because there were a ton of people on the platform and even with our Eurail pass, seats aren’t guaranteed on non-reserved trains. The next train to München from Wien wouldn’t be for another 4 hours. The sights on the train were actually quite nice! We got to see some fields, mountains and wind-powered generators. I am actually writing this first part on the train right now! The rest of the day will certainly be included later. I just wanted to make sure I used the 4 hours on the train for a good use. There’s no wifi, but I can write the posts in a text file and post them later. Turns out there are power plugs on the train, but I didn’t notice it until we were almost to Munich. The Asus EeePC 1000HE that I have has been awesome on this journey. It is nice and compact and has spectacular battery power. I’ve been using it for 2 hours or so and it still has 64% battery left. That’s including me copying photos from Chuck’s camera memory card, perusing my photos to rejog my memory and writing all this text. It’s not so great for watching video on YouTube because the processor is not high-performing, but it serves the purpose of portable internet machine quite well!
Don’t forget, Railjet has Premium, First-class and Economy sections as well as delicious snacks in the center car. We hear such similar propaganda after every stop… It’s quite annoying!
We’re riding a Railjet train again. This is the one I mentioned the other day coming from Innsbruck to Vienna. These are our favorite trains! It’s got comfortable seats, nice mesh storage, and several screens in each car which display the speed, location and stop information. The cars are very modern, have AC, and good amount of space for backpacks. Booking it through the countryside at 200km/h is impressive! I really wish America had a rail system like Europe. Granted America far exceeds all of Europe in size… still, it would make sense in terms of fossil fuel consumption. Although we’d still have to spend all the energy to build and maintain it… whatever, I’m stopping now! Going to read some for the rest of the train ride. I’ll complete this post later!
Rest of the day:
The first part of this post ended in first person, because I was writing it at the time. Well, two days have elapsed and I am only now just writing the ending. I’ve been busy and tired… that’s my excuse.
We got in to Munich around 2pm. By the time we found the Euro Youth Hotel (where we stayed), checked in and got settled, it was pushing 3pm. After looking at our travel books, we found most things in Munich close at 5pm… so we didn’t really have time to go do anything, sadly. We instead went to the Lidl store, which is basically an ALDI. We picked up some Nutella, chips, bread and I also got some apple juice. For some reason, peanut butter is incredibly difficult to find around Europe. And when you do find it, it’s insanely expensive! Nutella was the next best thing, I suppose.
After we dropped this stuff off in our room, we headed out for a little bit. We walked south a bit and then past a university. We ended up seeing a church spire and headed toward it. It turned out to be St. Paul’s church. We snapped some pictures but quickly ventured back to the hostel because bad weather moved in. It started to rain and we didn’t want a repeat of our first day in Vienna!
The hostel has a bar on the first floor, so we checked out the happy hour. We had some drinks while trying to figure out cricket. That sport is so utterly cryptic that even after watching it for some hours over various occasions, I cannot figure out what is going on, what’s the point of anything is. Oh well, I guess I’ll just look it up on Wikipedia soon.
We also met some people. Talked to a few guys from Denmark, a girl from Canada, a girl from the Czech Republic, and a few others. We later got a kebab from around the corner, and it was delicious! It seems that turkish restaurants are all over the place. They’re sort of like taco shops in Ohio. After the Kebab, we talked with Romana (the girl from Czech) for quite a while before heading to bed. And that was our first day in Munich! Pretty good for not being able to see any sights.