Fun in Week 5

Week 5 was full of excursions.  On Monday, we visited a Beer Garden in the Englischer Garten with a Chinese Tower.  We met some students from a similar program at LMU and had a nice picnic.

On Tuesday, after an afternoon visit to GE, we had an excursion called, "Munich by Night."  We went to the Tollwood Festival at Olympiazentrum and basically had access to free food all evening.

View from the top of the hill at Olympia.  Tollwood Festival with Munich in the background

Olympiazentrum from the top of the hill

Waffle with chocolate and whipped cream. Yum.

I ate this yummy waffle, a strawberry smoothie, a chicken burrito, a German sweet bread pastry, and probably more.  A few of us also walked around to lots of different shops.  Then we all sat around and told jokes, and everyone loved my famous jokes :).  It was a nice night.

Wednesday night was Yuting's Singaporean dinner.  Yuting and Clement prepared a Singaporean dinner for everyone on the program, the tutors, and the teachers.  Everything was so good! (Thanks again, Yuting and Clement!) A few of the dishes I remember were chicken rice, dumplings, and chicken skewers.  Here is a picture of most of the group:

On Thursday afternoon, we went to the Oktoberfest Museum.  It was pretty interesting learning about the history of beer. The building we were in was very old (from the 1400s?) and the doorways were really small.  After the tour, we had a tasting of pretzels and beer.

That evening, we went to the Opera! We were seeing La Cenerentola (Cinderella).  Unfortunately, our seats were awful.  We had standing room at the very top balcony, and I could not see the stage at all from where I was standing.  The singing was in Italian, and the subtitles were in German, so I really had no idea what was going on.  We all left at intermission.  We still took a fancy picture together though.

Finding Nano at the Opera

Opera house in Munich

On Saturday, we went boating down the River Isar.  It was cold and rainy, and I had a sore throat.  The river was nice though.  It was about a 5 hour trip, with a break for lunch.  Our boat was singing all the way down the river.  At one point, we went right underneath a very low tree, and we all had to duck down into the boat.

Sunday morning, we visited the Pinakothek der Moderne, a modern art museum near the TUM campus.  After that, we stopped for refreshments at a secret cafe on top of one of the campus buildings. We got to see a very nice view of Munich.  The city is very flat since buildings are not allowed to be taller than the towers of the Frauenkirche.  I ordered a white hot chocolate, and it was really cool because they give you a cup of white chocolate chips that you get to add in yourself. haha.