Author: Ulises Hernandez

Location: Germany 

On September 20th, I had the chance to travel to Germany along with some of the other students that are also part of the Cambridge study abroad program. From London, we took a plane to a small town called Memmingen, which is about two hours from Munich. From the airport, we took a bus to Munich and we walked around the city before checking in into our hostel. The whole city was preparing for a major annual celebration known as Oktoberfest. Everywhere you turned you would see vendors selling the very famous Lederhosen outfits which are a very important component of the celebrations. After walking around for a few hours, we decided to check into our hostel to leave our backpacks in order to see what Germany had to offer after sunset. For dinner, we stopped at a local market where hundreds of people enjoyed eating smoked meats, bread, sausages, dips, and soft pretzels. After spending some time in the market, we walked to the very famous Hofbräuhaus where we were very lucky to find a table, especially with all of the tourist that were already in the city of Munich for the Oktoberfest celebration. While we were there, we enjoyed eating soft pretzels with our drinks while live authentic German music was being played a few tables away from where we were sitting. After having enjoyed the music, we went back to our AirBnB to make plans for the following day.

On our third day in Germany, we as a group decided to visit the very famous Neuschwanstein Castle located in Schwangau, Germany. It was a three-hour train ride from the Munich train station to Schwangau, but on the way there, we were able to see the very beautiful German countryside. Once we got Schwangau, we took a bus to the castle since the castle is located on top of the mountain. Once we got to the castle, we were able to do a tour through a small section of the castle and hike parts of the beautiful mountain. After spending many hours at the castle, we took the train back to Munich in order to spend some time at Oktoberfest. The next morning we got up very early and took the train back to Memmingen in order to make it back to Cambridge on time for our Monday classes.