Category: Munich

Munich Outside the Beer Halls

If you visit Munich and you don’t like beer or you just need a break from it, there are plenty of other things to do outside the beer halls.  We kept very busy exploring the other side of the city. Here are ways to spend your time in Munich outside the beer halls.

Walking Tour of Munich

Sandemans Munich Tour
Munich Tour – it was a big group for a cold New Year’s Day

Not much is open anywhere on New Year’s Day, so we signed up for a walking tour. The walking tour of Munich was led by a Chicago-accented German. It offered a lot of info and history on this city and we recommend it. We walked around the downtown area and learned about the history of the city, with a lot of focus on Hitler and beer.

If you’re visiting the city, this is a “free” tour where you are asked to tip whatever you think it was worth at the end. We learned a lot about the city and got some useful tips on where to go for local food to eat and places to visit.

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Touring Munich Beer Halls

More than any other place in the world, Munich is known for its beer halls. As beer drinkers, we had to try at least a few! So here’s what it’s like touring Munich beer halls.

Touring Munich Beer Halls

There are options to go on beer hall tours, but we found it very easy to do on our own. Find a beer hall, walk in, and find a seat and order. The hardest part was finding a seat. Seriously, a self-guided tour of Munich beer halls is easy.

I read that there are over 180 beer gardens in the city of Munich. Other towns in Germany have beer halls and breweries, but they are traditional to Bavarian culture, and as the capital of Bavaria, Munich carries the weight.

Here is a round-up of the beer halls we visited last weekend in Munich.

Augustiner Bierhalle

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New Year’s Eve in Munich

Munich is a wonderful place to spend New Year’s Eve, or Silvester, as they call it here, named after a Pope no less. We had a really fun and entertaining night out in this city. If you’re looking for a great European city to celebrate New Year’s, don’t miss New Year’s Eve in Munich!

Fireworks

Fireworks at Tollwood New Year's Eve in Munich
Early Fireworks at Tollwood NYE – way before the fog set in

They love their fireworks here! Apparently, they are readily available for sale, which is why we started hearing them going off before sunset and all the time after. This also explains the debris in every street into New Year’s Day of firework remnants. The unfortunate thing was, the city was shrouded in fog before 12 midnight so it was pretty impossible to see any of the fireworks, no matter how near.

Tollwood: The Place for New Year’s Eve in Munich

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Easy Year to Travel on Christmas

We got lucky! We had 3 flights plus a rental car trip to take us from Toronto on Christmas Eve afternoon into the Austrian Alps on Christmas afternoon, and all of them were on time and had plenty of room for our non-checked bags! I said we had three flights and still it was an easy year to travel on Christmas. Merry Christmas indeed!

Toronto to Detroit

Easy, on time, and Detroit is a pretty fun airport. They have a tunnel to take you between terminals where they play great Motown tunes and change the light colors so it’s a fun experience for airport movement. We enjoyed the disco tunnel, Detroit!

Detroit Airport Tunnel
Detroit Airport Tunnel

We also had a three hour layover so plenty of time for a couple good ole American craft beers to get us tired for the nighttime flight to Frankfurt.

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