Prague: Bros Like This Post (Here's your shout out Jrich)

Good news, finally able to upload photos.

("Bro"-ing out in France)

I'm going to call it a night early tonight to get ready for a long day of exploring Prague, but Dooley will be adding a post on recent events shortly, and we've also given Elwood the opportunity to post a guest post too as we have reunited with him in Prague.

Dooley:

After a day of train travel, Tim and I have made it to Prague and met up with Elwood. We had a few bumps along the way, like sleepign through he 9 o'clock train so we had to take the 1245 (which was my bad) but other than that things have went smoothly. Tonight we are just going to take it easy and catch some solid zzzz's which we will definitely need so that we are ready to go for the weekend. More on Prague to come, we are in our hostel and Elwood already did some stupid by attempting to high jump into the top bunk.

However, I would like to talk about our last day in Munich as we had an extraordinary time which I will go into right now.

On Monday night during the bar crawl Tim had invited anyone that he talked to to meet up in the lobby around 6:30 or 7 to head out to the Hofbrauhaus to drink some beers. We weren't sure how many people were going to show up, but when about 14 people appeared by 6:45, we knew it was going to be a night of fun: we were rolling deep. And with quite an eclectic mix of people, too. We had a couple of bros from DC, one whose nickname was 'Turpentine' so he was obviously down to party. On top of that we a group of Aussies, a Canadian, and one girl from China. And we were about to head to possibly the best place to drink beer in the world. We were ready to dominate.

Allow me to explain the Hofbrauhuas. It is a giant beerhall which seats over 3,000 people, and it is regularly quite full during the dinner hour. there are two huge, open rooms with hundred of long tables lined up for people to sit at. The room is constantly abuzz with people merrily chatting away and the sound of the 7 piece or so band they have playing, which includes at least a tuba, trumpet, and trombone among others. Wouldn't work everywhere, but it here it managed to create a truly unique, friendly ambiance. Beer-drinkers regularly raise their glasses in chants and cheers to which all are welcome to join in.

So back to our night. On our way to Hofbrauhaus we lost about 6 people, but no worries we were still rolling 8 deep. We got to Hofbrauhaus and each ordered a liter of beer. That's right the beer only comes in liter steins here, I mean I guess if you are taking it easy you could have a half liter but thats the smallest you'll be able to get and you should be ashamed of yourself. After about 20 minutes our waiter finally stopped ignoring us and we were able to get some food aka salted German pork, which went amazingly with the Augustiners we were having. Augustiner was first brewed in 1328 and it has been a hit ever since.

During our time at the table, I was greatly amused by some of the interactions that were taking place at our table between our hostel-mates and Maier. Just about all of Tim's sarcastic exaggerations were going right over the heads of everyone at the table. I felt sorry for them. Example:

Unassuming Australian, trying to make conversation: "Tim, so have you ever tried Budweiser?"
Tim: I don't know, I think I tried it maybe once...

He also highly recommended that they all watch the show 'Jersey Shore.'

And in another instance, Mike "Turpentine" (that's what his friends back home call him, we liked it so it stuck) started talking about a person he had met in our hostel who was from Chicago. Now, the person he had met was clearly Tim, and Tim knew this. Eventually Turpentine figured it out but Maier had had a 15 minute conversation yesterday with him during the free walking tour. Maier jokingly told him that perhaps Tim should have been more obnoxious and got in fights during the tour so that he would be more memorable. The guy felt genuinely bad for forgetting Tim, and I don't think he quite got Maier's sense of humor. Anyhow, more documentation on this subject to come.

After having one more liter of beer to wash down our food, and Maier ingrained a "TDMAY" on the table so he can come back in 10 years and look at it for some reason. We decided to head back to the hostel, content with making it an early night. Once back, Tim our Australian friend Matt and I shared a few more adult beverages and talked about the differences between our respective countries. Matt was the man, and we managed to overcome our cultural differences to have a civilized conversation (JK he's only from Australia, cmon now mate).

There is one more notable thing from our night: the Argentinian dude we met. Let me preface this by saying that Maier was wearing his Lisandro jersey that he had bought in Lyon just to buy a Club Lyon jersey, having no idea who Lisandro is but buying the jersey purely on the basis of that he was the favorite player of the French employee we met in the store. Anyway this dude sees Maier's jersey and comes up to him and says that he has seen many beautiful women today, but this jersey is by far the most beautiful thing I have seen today (Lisandro is from Argentina, where futbol is on par with religion for much of the population). Maier, who has never seen Lisandro play, is forced to make general conversation about soccer in order to not admit that no, he would not even be able to recognize the guy if he walked into the bar. Luckily he was able to deflect questions with his decent knowledge of the European leagues, which I was impressed by.

Anyhow, it's going to be an early first night in Prague and then we will hopefully wake up tomorrow refreshed and ready to see some sights.