Arriving in Munich

Munich Airport

Finally arrived in Munich after a little over 16 hours of plane torture! Jaryl and I flew by Qatar Airways. The service was excellent and they had a nice selection of movies as well (I watched Room on the way here!). Planes are still a pretty claustrophobic experience though, especially when the people sitting in front of you recline their chairs all the way back. I also had to (very apologetically) wake Jaryl and an Austrian lady up from their sleep when I had to use the bathroom. Guess that's the downside of having free flow drinks on board. Luckily, she was real nice about it, and we even got to know her better after that!

The first thing that I noticed about the airport in Munich was the sheer amount of pet dogs that were there! At the arrival gates there were many owners who ran straight to their fluffy best friends first instead of their own families, haha. 

Figuring out the train system was a real pain. There was no one at the information counter and we were so lost. Eventually we kind of figured it out and bought two tickets from the airport to our station, Olympiazentrum. It cost us about 21€ (about $32 SGD) for both tickets. There were no lifts down to the train (or at least we couldn't find any) and we met so many other tourists who were as puzzled as us along the way. Here in Munich, they don't have a tapping system like back home and we walked right in without 'tapping' anything. It was only when we entered the train that we realised we had to 'stamp' our tickets at this tiny machine before going down to the train platform. 60€ FINE IF CAUGHT RIDING WITHOUT A TICKET OR VALID STAMPED TICKET! Of course we rode the rest of the trip in fear although we did buy a ticket. It was pretty stressful because it was 6am, we were jet-lagged and had all our luggage bags to manage.. the last thing we needed was for a train conductor to show up! I did read up on the train conductors here after our airport incident and apparently they're not lenient at all. Conductors still have the right to fine you even though you bought a ticket but didn't/forgot to stamp it at the entrance. Lots of tourists have experienced it on their first train rides from the airport, but we were lucky enough not to. 

We had to change train lines at Moosach station... there were only stairs!!!! Poor Jaryl, being the manly man that he is, lugged my 39.6kg(!!!) bag along with his own stuff up and down the staircase. After he did it, we realized that we were STILL on the wrong platform! His face was priceless. Thankfully, we got directions from a kind soul and we discovered that there were actually lifts down at the end of the platform, ha...

Arriving at Olydorf

We finally made it to our station, Olympiazentrum. 

My home for the next 5 months! I actually thought that we would have a common toilet and kitchen but I was wrong! Each student gets his own double story bungalow WITH a personal toilet and kitchen! How crazy is that. It's like a super mega upgrade from my hall dorm back in NTU. We collected our keys from the nice ladies at the main office and finally got to settle in!

Minions and bananas!

This is what one row looks like. Every row has been labelled alphabetically!

Snoopy painting

Students here are all allowed to paint on their own walls. It's so fascinating. It really gives life to this place. Sadly, my own door is not painted but maybe I'll get a chance to do something about it before I leave! ;) 

Harry Potter themed dorm

Garden gnomes spotted outside someone's dorm! Apparently the Germans have something for these little gnomes. 

One of my favourite paintings!

We visited the supermarket after putting all our things down. The first thing Jaryl and I got was a Ritter Sport schokolade. 

0.69€ per piece!! Thats about $1.05 SGD. We got a tortilla chip flavour in our excitement and it turned out to be really bad. Don't do that. 

And then we had dinner at a Turkish restaurant near our dorm. We were too tired to cook and didn't have our pots and pans yet anyway. It cost 5.90€ for this burger. Don't be fooled by the picture, it was the size of my face. It wasn't spectacular but there was free wifi at the place, so we were satisfied. Also now that we have the password to their wifi, every time we walk past the shop to get to the grocery store it auto connects ;)

All this actually happened a week ago (7 March) but I haven't had the time to sit down and type it all out. After dinner we went back and knocked out in our new home. 

IKEA Eching

The next day when we got up, we decided to head out to IKEA to get some household appliances! We really take the IKEA Tampines we have back at home for granted. From my house I have a direct bus to IKEA... but over here... 

We took a 30 minute train ride to the station Eching and knew that we had to walk to IKEA.. however.. no one told us how far it actually was. We couldn't take the bus because we didn't know how to buy a bus ticket so we just walked.. and walked.. and walked. Eventually we bumped into a nice postwoman (shoutout to Deutsche Post! lol) and we asked her for directions to IKEA. The first thing she did was LAUGH. Now we thought she was just being friendly but on hindsight she was laughing cause she probably thought we were nuts. We followed all her directions and ended up near the autobahn (highway), and obviously thought we were on the wrong track. Luckily we met a traffic guard who (again, laughed) when we told him where we wanted to go. He said that it was impossible to walk, and that we had to either drive or ride a bicycle. 

Well, we had no bicycle or car.. so we walked. Jaryl asked me, "What if all IKEAs are the same? IKEA Tampines is at the end of a highway so maybe it's the same here." We braved the -5 degree cold and strong winds... two Asian idiots walking along a highway in search of IKEA. 

IKEA!!!!!!!!!!!!

We were soooo happy to see this blue building. The first thing we wanted to do was get some IKEA meatballs, and so we did. 

Or not. 

This is our 1€ "bio pasta" from IKEA :'D

All the prices on the menu were the same as Singapore: $5.95 SGD for 10 meatballs.. but in EUROS!! So it was 5.95€ for 10 meatballs (approx $9 SGD). Naaaaaahh. The pasta did keep us full though, so it was all good. We were just happy to have made it there alive. 

The prices for all other household goods at IKEA were a little more expensive than in Singapore.. except for this bedsheet set that I wanted for $39.90 back in SG (but my mom said no! haha) It was only 19.90€ here, so I saved about $10 SGD on that hehe. That made my day. 

We also bought boxes of frozen rosti (1.50€ for 6 pieces!) from the food area downstairs. It went nicely with our weißwurst that we bought from Viktualien market (shall save that for another post). 

Anyway our bags were all full by the end of our trip. It was an experience shopping on a mega budget, haha... Jaryl and I wanted a fluffy bath mat like this sooo bad..

But it was expensive so we (after 15 mins of debating) settled on a 1.95€ ugly white non-fluffy bath mat instead.

 It's ok. Still does the job of drying our wet feet!