Herzlich Willkommen to Hotel Weiss

As Noah alluded to in our prior Vienna post, we have been rather busy lately.  This is due to all of our amazing visitors that have come through Munich to see us!  Ok, maybe some of them came for Munich too.  As mentioned in the Partnachklamm blog, we have had non-stop visitors since the weekend of May 19^th, and this upcoming weekend will mark the end of this visitor surge.  The other thing the weekend of May 19^th marked was the beginning of the non-stop rain that caused all the flooding in central Europe, which coincidentally ended the day my father flew out… but more on that later.

The second Saturday of my parents visit, we expected our friends Allison and Steven.  They were spending a week in Germany and France, beginning in Munich.  Unfortunately their British Airways flight was cancelled last minute due to an airplane fire on the Heathrow runway, and they had to scramble to change planes to get there only one day late.  This meant the four of us (my parents and Noah and I) had to watch the UEFA finale without them – Germany won!  Ok, to be more specific, FC Bayern won!!!  Sorry Dortmund – this just isn’t your year.  Nope – it is FC Bayern’s!  Winners of all three winning-able things .  Sorry, I should really have had Noah write this paragraph.

Anyways, Allison and Steven came in Sunday, and we tried our best to give them a positive impression of Munich despite the endless rain.  I think we did ok – and they still were able to see quite a bit of the city before leaving 2 days later for France. 

For the holiday weekend/3 year wedding anniversary trip, Noah and I headed to Vienna to see Viennese rain while my parents hung out with the dogs in our apartment.  For more on that trip, you can check out Noah’s blog post from earlier in the week.  It sounded like my parents didn’t even get the one day of sunshine that we had in Vienna, so they spent the whole long rainy weekend inside.  The good news: Tuesday (June 4^th) the sun came out and we finally had a beautiful day!  The bad news (for my dad at least): this is the day my dad flew back.  Sorry Pops – hopefully your next trip will be better.  But it’s ok – he is averaging 2 trips to Europe a year since we moved here, so his life is far from bad.

On our real anniversary

With the sunshine brought our last set of visitors – three of my mom’s friends from back home: Kathleen, Terry, and Pat.  They were lucky to have an entire weekend of blue skies and sunshine, with only a small rain shower their last night in Munich.  I steered them to outdoor activities as much as possible, hitting up two separate biergartens (Hirschgarten and the Englischer Garten’s one by the Chinesischer Turm) the first day alone.  I just wanted to be outside as much as possible – and so did the rest of the city!  We found that whenever we ate inside, a restaurant would be completely empty.  I think everyone was so starved for good weather, that barely anyone wasted their time inside. 

This upcoming weekend will take us to Dresden where we meet up with my mom and Kathleen, so hopefully for us (but more so for the people of Dresden) the Elbe river is back to normal and the city is tour-able.  We will try to help the city out with our tourist wallets – mainly because our hotel refused to let us cancel with a refund… thanks Innside Dresden for that!   We will make the best of whatever is in store, and then on Sunday we will all be back in Munich for their last night in Europe.  Monday we will be back to just us, and will probably miss all the English we were surrounded by this last month.