Europe Tour - Munich, Innsbruck

Breakfast as usual at 6.30 am and it was delicious. In my opinion, the food here us much tastier than the classy hotel in Amsterdam. At least the scrambled eggs didn't look and taste like the ones I had in halls. We boarded the bus at 7.30am and headed for Munich. The weather was brilliant, bright cloudless skies, warm sun and just wide open farmlands, mainly wheat and corn so it's very brown and green. Compared to northern Germany, there are more rolling hills. We stopped at a freeway stop at 9.30am for some coffee and toilet breaks. The toilet system is so high tech! So you pay say, €0.70 at a toll like entrance and it produces a ticket which entitles you to a €0.50 off for food and drinks that you can buy. So toilet entry is actually just €0.20. We returned to the bus at 10am to resume our journey.

We arrived in Munich and drove past the olympic stadium and the Munich university, very fancy, then we stopped outside the opera house (?) and walked down the road for our own lunch. We had pork knuckle to share and a litre of german beer at the famous Hofbrauhaus. Sadly, we didn't manage to down our beers as we had to rush for the bus. After rushing for about 10 minutes under 33°C heat, we just about went past 5 minutes over our set meet up time. From Munich, we steadily made our way towards Innsbruck in Austria. The view was mountainous, being surrounded by the Alps and trees of various variety. It was such a beautiful sight! It was also a surprisingly familiar sight as Ipoh is also surrounded by hills, except just maybe ten times larger. There were houses, cottages, villages and churches that can be seen popping up along the foot of the mountains that looked absolutely picturesque. Strangely enough, half way through, traffic came to a halt. Police cars and an ambulance drove past us and Howard mentioned of a helicopter as well. While we crawled through the freeway, Howard came to collect payment for optional excursions. Let's just say we (four of us) applied for 6 optional experiences and it left a large, painful hole in the wallet (and heart). Anyway, I think we were stuck on the freeway for a good 20 minutes or more until we managed to get past the hold up.

We arrived in beautiful sunny Innsbruck (33°C) at about 5.20pm and went to the biggest Swarvoski shop in world - THE original shop. It's honestly not ginormous, but compared to other shops, pretty large with three storeys. Anyway, obviously we didn't buy anything because of reasons. We didn't manage to visit the cathedral, but I was wearing short shorts and a tank top anyway so it wouldn't be nice. We then made our way back to the bus and headed for to our hotel for the night, the Bon Alpina, located behind the ski centre used during the olympics. They revamped the place and added glass for ramps so training could be done even in the summer. We went up the narrow and twisting road up the mountain and was greeted by a quaint little town Igls where  some houses were still made of wood, had horse thoroughs, and flower boxes at almost every window, amongst other little things that make this place look traditional. The air was fresh, still warm but definitely better than yesterday and in the day.

We had a 3 course dinner, but we kinda arrived late and had to sit separately - my mum and I, and my dad and grandma. We started with a salad and then a soup which I liked. The turkey snitzel (?) was dry, making it was rather hard to finish, but I did anyway. Dessert was an apple something with cream. Not bad, but I liked the soup better. After dinner was free time so we went to explore the little town full of cultural hidden gems. There was even a wooden church with a cross made out of corn cobs!
So we did some sightseeing, enjoyed the cooling weather and took more pictures. Around 10pm (it looked like 8) we headed back and I beelined for the tub when we got back to the room. Soaked for about 20 minutes after first taking a shower.

Went to bed at 11pm and knocked out. Tomorrow we head for Venice!