As I write this I’m staring out the window of a high speed ICE train traveling from Stuttgart to Munich. Munchen, as it’s printed my ticket stub, is a city I’ve heard a lot about and I figured out my Euro rail pass to have an extra day of travel. I am completely blown away by the rail system here in Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium. I can’t say Europe because I don’t have experience with it, but if these countries are any indication it’s impressive. There is different philosophy when it comes to tickets, especially with local trains. In the US and in Asia you need to ticket to go through a turnstile. In Germany you can get on a train and the only time you need a ticket is if they decide to check you, which in the course of 1 week of a lot of trains didn’t happen. The catch is that if you don’t have a ticket when they check, you get a 40 euro fine.

Time passes, I’m actually filling in details much later than actually visiting Munich. I kind of forgot my guide book in Karlsruhe, so I winged it. A visit to an internet cafe and a city map and I’m golden, or at least I had an interesting day wandering through Marienplatz, which is where the downtown is located. My experience with Munich is Churches, cobblestones, the largest outdoors shop I’ve ever been in and slush–more on that later. So there’s a REI 2 miles from my house that my Roommate walks to work at. I’m told that the REI anchor store out west is incredible but this one was the most comprehensive for technical outdoors sports I’ve ever been in, Surfing to Ice Climbing in 8 floors of downtown Munich. It wasn’t so much a wide or deep store, there were just a lot of Floors. I mentioned slush earlier, the one downside to Munich was the snow that periodically would descend for several minutes and then go away. Snow in and of it’s self would have been fine, but this was the “on the verge of freezing lets have 3/4″ of water and slush on the ground” sort. My hiking boots were bothering my ankle so I wore my clogs for the day, which from a planning standpoint was a rather large mistake. However, my socks didn’t get wet in an entire day of trekking through the stuff and that’s nothing short of a miracle, and I’m acknowledging it as such.