First stop Augsburg

After an hours drive from our home on the sunshine coast in Australia to the local air port, three hours in the airport, 3 lots of 7 hour flights with stop overs in between and an hour and a half journey on a speed train we have made it to Augsburg in Germany.
Augsburg
Why Augsburg you may ask? Simple, it's located an hour and a half away from Munich which is home to Oktoberfest and is a quarter of the price for accommodation during this beer celebration.

The plan is to stay here for three nights and once we get our bearings right then leave to stay in an over priced hostel in Munich while we celebrate the local beer with 6 million other people. That's not an exaggeration as this is how many it attracts during the three weeks or so it's on.

I just admit getting off the train at the Augsburg station was what I expected to see,  a small country town with farms as far as we could see. After such a long trip all I wanted to see when I stepped off the train was some where to buy a Germany sausage and a Stein of beer. However how very wrong I was as we emerged through the archway of what looked to be a 500 year old building was a very busy city center. Trams, taxis, buses and cars filled the streets. A massive water fountain and people lazing about drinking wine and eating local produce.

We jumped in  nearby cab (mercades) and after working our way around a large language barrier with the driver set we off on our way to the hostel, Urbernatch or something like that. A 5 minutes drive and maybe 1km of road (bad traffic) we arrived. Definitely could have walked...

All we wanted was to check in freshen up and go to sleep after not sleeping for 2 days and being in the same clothes.. u get the point. But you see it was only 10:30am and check in is not until 3pm. No matter what I tried, check in was yep 3pm. The only good bit of news the lady at the front counter had for us is that we could drop our bags off behind the counter.. 

We set off on to a busy street with construction workers right outside our hostel, (great, even once we check in there is no way we are getting rest). We get to a set of lights look up and down each street and choose left. After we walked under  a sweeping bend a massive ancient church came into view. We walk around the structure for some time contemplating if it was still in use and if you could even enter it. We looked around but everything was written  in German.  As we were about to leave we noticed a bunch of tourists just walk up to the massive wooden doors and proceed to walk straight on in, like they owned the joint. I looked at Cass and said what's the worst that would happen.

This Gothic styled church was  over a thousand years old and absolutely blew my mind.

After walking the streets of the city and lazing about a local park (they are everywhere here) we made it back to the hostel.

We decided to have a quick rest at 4pm and both awoke a short time later at 6am the following day.

We have since explored the city center which is littered with old buildings from pre 1500s and a tower you can climb to the top of and look out over the city. Epic view!
Also visited a textile museum, fresh produce markets, more grand churches and a shopping center which sells beer by the half litre for as little as 0.60€. !!!

This post is already to wordy but the things we are discovering in this town which I expected to be nothing but farms and a whole lot of not much else is quite very different to what I expected.