Croatia Study Abroad

After such an amazing time in Munich, I thought Prague was going to have to be a little bit of a let down. However our first night started off great with a fantastic, cheap first meal. Each beer cost just over a dollar after conversion and each meal was around $5 and it was all great food. This was when we realized just how expensive Munich had been and opened us up to the new excitements that awaited in Prague. Here are a few of the sites we saw on our tour the first day and while renting some paddle boats:

During the tour that first day, we also learned that Czechs drink more beer per capita than any other nation in the world and it isn't even close. After confirming on Wikipedia, as much as it can be "confirmed" this way, it was exactly as the guide said- Czechs average 140 liters of beer per person per year and the next closest is Austria with around 100 liters of beer per person per year. After we went out a few of the nights, I could see why. The local brews (they have several international sized breweries and many microbreweries) were all so cheap, usually between $1 and $2 each and even less at a market. Whereas the mixed drinks seemed to be just as expensive if not more so than in the US, usually costing between $5-$10 each.

So while we thought we had left the promise land of beer drinking that was Munich, we were only just beginning. Here are a couple pictures from our brewery tour:

I'd also like to say that the night life here was amazing. We went on a boat party and out to a couple of the largest, most famous night clubs in Prague. I expected these well known clubs to be very touristy and while they were, it didn't detract from them at all. They were so much better than I could have expected. I don't have any pictures from the clubs, but here are the rest of the pictures we got while exploring Prague:

Munich was the first stop for Connor, Michael, and I. We arrived plenty early after taking a night bus from Zagreb and loved it right away. Between the brats, the bikes, and of course the biergartens, I immediately felt that Germans just get me. On our first night, we joined in on a tour of the biergartens led from our hostel. Here are a bunch of pictures from the night when we did the tour and when we visited the biergarten again a couple days later during the day, so you can see it better. We went to 3 biergartens on the tour, but all of these pictures are from the largest one in Munich, which can hold around 6,000 people.

One of the days, we visited the Dachau concentration camp, which is a short metro ride out of Munich. It was very informative and of course solemn to realize how terribly people were treated, sometimes tortured, and even killed in the spots where we were standing. It did help to learn exactly how the Nazis started their system of oppression and how many Germans were victimized themselves and forced to follow the Nazi ways or face the same fates. Dachau actually started as the place where, primarily, political dissidents were sent and it wasn't until later on that most of the Jewish, Polish, and homosexual people were sent there. Here are some pictures from that tour. The first picture translates to something like "work makes you free" which is the typical sort of propoganda/euphemism/lie that the Nazis used to keep people thinking these camps were not bad until they got in them. The bunks and the crematoriums show the real story.

We of course made sure to stop by the Hofbrauhaus, which is possibly the most famous beer hall in the world. Pictured with us is Ray from Philly, who we met on the Dachau tour:

One day we rented bikes and biked over to Olympiastadion, home of the 1972 Summer Olympics, and the BMW headquarters/museum. Unfortunately we went on a weekend, so the BMW factory floor wasn't open for touring.

We also took the bikes through the Englischer Garten, which is a park that's bigger than Central Park in New York. In the park there is a "Chinese" biergarten (called that because of a pogada they have in the middle) and a small river that at a certain point on it, surfers can actually practice because of the way a wave is constantly produced from the way they constrict the flow of the water.