I just HAD to post this!
I read A LOT of blogs on various things that interest me, one of which is EuroCheapo because well, I love Europe and FamilieSchmitt is a little "cheapo." Usually they post entries about cheap Parisian lodging, free tours in Prague or something equally helpful and interesting. Today though, they posting something that is near and dear to our hearts - Biergartens in Munich!
You see, Mike and I vacationed in Germany for our honeymoon. We left the day after the wedding having experienced one of the best days of our life mere hours before getting on a long 12 hour flight. Luckily for us the ticket counter attendant was a kind soul and when we told her that we were honeymooners, she upgraded our seats to a sort of above average coach section (more legroom, no babies) of the plane. When we arrived in Germany just around lunchtime, we were so overwhelmed by lack of sleep and excitement that we found ourselves wandering around Munich like zombies. After visiting the Glockenspiel with heavy, tired eyes, we retreated back to our hotel for a nap. Our jet-lagged bodies let us sleep until about 7:00pm when our hungry stomachs awakened us in expectation of good GERMAN food. We set off down the street to find something tasty. Just about a minute down the road we found one of the coolest places we had ever seen: it was a biergarten nestled in a grove of trees. It looked like something out of a tour guidebook about Germany. Near perfection. Germans were lazily seated on picnic tables all over sipping their beers and talking excitedly about who-knows-what. We weren't exactly sure what to do, so we found an empty table and waited for a server to find us. Soon after being seated, a stereotypical large German woman in traditional dress, carrying an armload of biersteins called over to us and simply yelled, "Zwei?!" Mike and I both took German in highschool as our language requirement and had stored enough of that knowledge to translate what the woman was asking us, but not enough knowledge about the place we were visiting to understand what she meant. We interpreted it as "Two menus?" or "Two people?," so we excitedly answered: "Ja!" We were wrong. Minutes later that same woman brought over two Colosseum-sized mugs of beer, one for each of us. So let me just put this into perspective for you:
- We are operating under extreme wedding-related fatigue and major jet-lag
- We have not eaten in probably 10 hours
- I was not a beer drinker at this time
We were expecting to order food, not consume the equivalent of a small lake of beer. But hell if we were going to tell this stern, German woman staring back at us that she was wrong! We drank all 64 (or whatever) ounces of those beers happily. We paid our waitress and then stumbled back up the street to a pizza place where we SUCKED DOWN a pizza and laughed about our experience.
We often recall this adventure and one of us will ask the other "Zwei?" when we find ourselves in similar situations. I have never bothered to look up the biergarten though and to this day had no idea what it was called or anything about it except that we fell in love with it. The blog post on EuroCheapo lists it as one of the top 3 best biergartens in Munich. They also say, "the beer,
Augustiner, is from Munich’s oldest brewery and has been proclaimed the “state’s best beer” twice over." Who knew?! I'm so glad that I came across that list though so I could once again relive one of our fondest travel memories.
