We spent our last morning in Munich eating (me) and drinking beer (Luke). A quick walk around town and the markets followed by croissants in a cafe with a great view.

Then a beer at the famous Hofbrauhaus. Even at 10am we were not the only people the beer hall. It was a little weird to have two groups of school kids come through, cameras flashing. It’s hard to accept that a building can be both a place where people drink themselves into a coma and a stop on a primary school excursion simultaneously.

Delightfully displayed produce at the Victualienmarkt.

We walked back to the hostel to meet our shuttle to Cesky. Even though it’s only a 3 hour drive from Munich it doesn’t seem to be a popular route and there’s only one company that does it directly. Although the fare was somewhat steep we did get picked up from our hostel and dropped at the door of our accommodation. On the drive we saw snow, all the more surreal since it was a 20 degree day and the aircon in the car wasn’t working so we were absolutely roasting, even with the windows down a little.

The German countryside is filled with perfect little houses, all white with red roofs, green fields, and more solar panels than you can imagine. Parts of the freeway were lined with rows upon rows of them and nearly every house had an impressive array on the roof.

All that stopped when we entered the Czech Republic. It’s a little like when you drive from Victoria to NSW and there’s an immediate decline in the quality of the road. Except in this case it’s a decline in the quality of everything. Even the trees look more shabby than the ones in Germany (which, to be honest, somewhat reminded me of Duloc from the movie Shrek). There were also several tractors piled with hay that we passed on the road… I’m not sure what it is about the more easterly European countries and tractors with huge piles of hay but it’s apparently a cliche for a reason.

After checking into the hostel and finding that we’d been upgraded to a 3 person room (rather than a 16 bed dorm) which we don’t have to share (woohoo!) we wandered through the town. It’s very quintessentially old Europe.

We bought some canned goulash for dinner and hunkered down with the American manager, Brennan, and had a great evening of chatting and drinking some of our duty-free.

Yesterday was my 37th birthday. Now, it may not be obvious, but I do actually try not to fill this whole blog with talk of food and photos of food and just generally raving about food… but you’re going to have to bear with me for this post because pretty much all we did on this particular day was eat.

We started off the day with the buffet breakfast. I’ve become pretty good with resisting the urge to eat myself sick at buffets since there’s been one pretty much everywhere we’ve stayed so far but I have never seen anything like Lebua’s!

We estimated that if you lined up all the separate tables there’d be about 25 metres of dishes to choose from. Five cuisines were on offer – Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian and Western. Western included all the usual bacon, sausages, eggs, cereal etc but also a make-it-yourself salad bar, cheese board, meat platters… it seemed never ending! Two rooms of food that included a pizza oven for toasting whichever of the 20 or so types of bread you’d like and individual pots of jam and honey.

Breakfast sushi, anyone?

I love food but this was getting a bit silly.

Cereal tracklements! My favourites – toasted hazelnuts and prunes.

My strategy with this sort of thing is to get tiny helpings of all the things I think I’d like and then go back for more of the stuff I really enjoyed but there was no chance of that happening. I was impressed that Luke finished off with a plate of 5 different pastries but by the time we left we were both a bit worse for wear.

This guy’s job was to grill as much bacon and as many sausages as you liked and carve the giant hams. Tough gig.

Back to the room to digest with a bit of reading time and a shower before a quick trip out to buy me a dress for the evening then back to Breeze Restaurant for high tea. We’d decided to spend the day making the most of the hotel facilities and lazing about and achieved this quite spectacularly. We spent two hours drinking cocktails and eating all kinds of cured meat, cheeses, chocolates and cake. There might have been a slice of fruit in there somewhere.

When we got back to the room we found a note, some cutlery and a tiny birthday cake in the fridge, compliments of the hotel! Then we spent an hour dressing up as nicely as we could and  headed up for dinner.

The view was marvellous and we were the first ones up there. The open air restaurant and bar quickly filled up. Apparently it was featured in the movie The Hangover 2, which I hadn’t seen. They had a ‘Hangovertini’, which Luke ordered and which was surprisingly nice. Both our meals were delicious, though pretty pricey – top end Melbourne prices – and we couldn’t justify a bottle of wine. After the band played me ‘Happy Birthday’ and another surprise cake came out, this time courtesy of Luke, we went back to our room and Luke ducked out to buy some much cheaper wine and we watched some IT Crowd and Community before drifting off into a very deep sleep with slightly aching stomachs.

I’d written a bunch of postcards in the afternoon and kept wishing everyone I knew was here to spend the day with us, but that was the only way it could’ve been any more enjoyable. Truly, I think this will be one of the highlights of my trip.

Good times!