Munich, First Impressions

Greetings from Munich. It’s been a rough couple of days for me so far, between getting my bearings of the place and adjusting to a radically different time zone. I’m staying in a condo with five of my classmates in the southwest part of the city, but it’s only about twenty minutes to the city center from our place. I’ve hit a couple of the smaller beer halls already (Erdinger and another one I can’t remember the name of), and a few bars around town. On the first day, we had to take a nap from 8am-1pm local time to try to acclimate without feeling too out of whack. We then stumbled upon a small Hofbrauhaus affiliated brewpub in the south end of town and had a great meal. They brewed their own wheat beer, and the half liters that we had were probably the best beer of that style that I’ve ever tasted.
Doemens Academy—the school that we are attending classes at for three weeks—was bigger than I expected, and has lab facilities in addition to a 500L pilot brewery in the basement. Half of the class got to brew a pilsner on Tuesday, and the automated computer controls made it not laborious at all. While our brief three week stay means that the beer we brewed will not be coming with us on our two week study tour, it still was an interesting experience. We are working in the lab today with yeast and bacteria strains, as well as learning how to identify which ones can and cannot spoil beer.
Thursday is All Saints Day here, and that means that we have no class while the only things open will be the bars and beer halls. It looks like as good a time as any to hit the beer hall circuit on the east side of town, and I’ll be rested up by then after running on four hours of sleep per night for the first three days of the week. Tonight, we're going to the Hofbrauhaus to celebrate a classmate's birthday, and I should get some pictures of the place as well. There’s so much to see here, but I have to budget my time wisely.