Europe Fall 2013 - First stop, Munich, Germany! (Day 1)

All the hotels that we chose are walking distance from the main/central train station. From the airport, there are 2 lines going to München Hauptbahnhof (Munich Central Station), the S1 and S8.

Not to worry! Regardless which line you take, it will definitely pass Marienplatz (city center/main attractions) or Hauptbahnhof.

Since we reached there in the morning, we are able to fully utilize the Partner day ticket. There are various day ticket options depending if you are a single traveler, with a partner and the number of days you will be spending in Munich.

The ticket can be bought from this machine at the airport. Or you can buy it over a counter with a small extra fee. Being adventurous, you will need to fiddle around with options as its not so direct! Sorry as we didn't have time to snapshot the options due to a long queue behind.

We bought the partner day ticket entire network which looks like this:

Some train info while waiting, indeed punctual:

The Munich Central station is huge, we got out one exit, had a long walk only to realize the Hotel (NH München Deutscher Kaiser) is just opposite one end of the station :x

Anyway, we checked-in, dropped our luggage and proceeded to Marienplatz for lunch.

Its all about pork, bratwurst, weisswurst in Germany! We tried out one of the highly recommended restaurants on Trip Advisor, Ratskeller!

Schweinebraten (Roast pork) - the pork is good, juicy and fresh! we didn't how to enjoy the 2 balls... the left yellow one a potato dumpling... tasted like blended glutinous rice (chinese dumpling?), and the one on the right is bread dumpling... which tasted like... blended wheat with a hint of yeast :P

Grillwürstl Schmankerl (Sausages/wurst and fantastic)! We always love sausages, the mash potatoes made this dish a real nice combo together with that brown sauce :)
Since we don't take beef, we exchanged the veal with something else...

Bill came out to be pretty reasonable (don't convert... don't convert...):

Really cozy and colourful restaurant:

Some dessert after lunch! This place is cool! there's just too many snacks and pastry to choose!

Just wished that I had the time and stomach space to try them all!

Forgot what was this called, some kind of plum cake (€2.40), very sweet, very sour, perfect with a cup of coffee (also €2) just further inside the shop!

On the way to the Residenz, there's this delicatessen food store where you should try, its called Dallmayr, lots of food, snacks, dessert, coffee, liquor you name it!

Coffee beans kept in vases :)

We we too stuffed anyway that time... so just just randomly tried some dessert... highly recommend this:
Mango Charlotte! And go with their famous Prodomo coffee, its light yet fragrant, quite similar to Blue Mountain.

 We then continued our journey towards The Residenz. We did not take much photos here because there was an event going on and they were building something in the middle area.

For dinner, we had ours at the famous Hofbräuhaus! Yes, its a beer house, and if you are really hungry OR would like to have a decent meal, skip/forget this place! The beer hall is huge, darn noisy, seriously lack of waiters and for some reason, the staff reluctantly speaks English!
Not only they passed in the German menu, you can feel that the waiter understands but they continue replying us in German and kinda like poking fun at us! :(

We shared tables with some nice gentlemen who spoke some English and spared some time explaining the German menu to us! I'll stop my rant here and bring it over to Trip Advisor...
We managed to order a pan fried fish and cauliflower soup...

Though but one of it came as cold meat, not that its bad, we didn't know how to enjoy it..

For the experience sake, just go for the beer and enjoy the environment and live music.

Some fruits that we purchased over at Dallmayrs, fig and strawberry... Frankly, we have never seen not tasted fig before, its a bit sweet, and slimy inside, interesting... later on a relative brought back some dried ones from Greece, those tasted better :P

Tiring day after a long half day flight and pretty much covered some of the interesting sightseeing places in Munich... time to hit the showers and get some sleep! Early train to Salzburg tomorrow :)