After marvelous EuroMeetup Events in Krakow, Poland (2018) and Ghent, Belgium(2019) the plan was made to organize the next EuroMeetup in Munich, Germany. @TorM had prepared a full schedule for another 4 day event in 2020, and several dedicated local guides (yourstruly included) had already booked hotel rooms and flights. And then the coronavirus held the world in its grip for a couple of years…
So that was the end of the EuroMeetup history, you might think. Well, then think again. And don’t underestimate the motivation of local guides to meet in person every once in a while. Early 2023, after one of my EuroMiniMeetups, when I visited @Stella2 inThessaloniki, Greece, I reached out to @TorM to check out if he thought it would be possible to ‘pick up where we left off’. A few calls later, the date was set - 3 years later than the original plan. And that event, EuroMeetup 2023 took place these past few days, from 22 to 25 June. And it was AWESOME!
In the course of the event, 28 people took part, from no less than 15 different countries (including some which are quite far from Europe, such as Pakistan, India and Malaysia). For some it was a happy meeting again (loads of hugging and cheering going on, as one might suspect), for others it was their first meetup (they were part of the hugging and cheering soon).
A quite special additional element this time, especially for the participants that are active here on Connect (some of the participants are actually in the category ‘incredibly active on Connect’), was the fact that not only several Connect Moderators and Guiding Stars attended the meetup (as is usually the case) but also 3 Google Moderators - although it should be clear that they were not there as Google team members, but as local guides. It was really, really, really wonderful to meet in person @InaS , @Ivi_Ge and @DeniGu (the last one I had met already before at Connect Live 2019). And they went for the ‘all in’ option, even ordering some t-shirts with the meetup visuals that @AdrianLunsong had created (you can still admire his creative talent in the meetup announcement post) - if only to avoid confusion, I want to point out here that EuroMeetup2023 was not an event sponsored by or paid for by Google. All participants were there at their own expense.
Here you see all 3 of the Google moderators posing on the big stage of the Hofbräuhaus(an area that is normally not accessible for visitors, but @TorM pulled some local strings - he also arranged the best seats in the house in the restaurant 
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This was the venue where EuroMeetup 2023 officially started on Thursday evening (some participants had already met in the course of the afternoon to exercise their drinking skills (not all of it was beer - but admittedly, a fair amount was), while also engaging in creative activities involving stickers and/on unexpected body parts (sorry, sworn to secrecy on the specifics).
One thing I learned that evening is that the word ‘mas’ is not only a word in Spanish (meaning ‘more’), but also in German. If you order a beer, the default size is called ‘mas’ which is a glass containing… 1 liter of beer (and ‘more’ of those were being served all the time).
At the Hofbräuhaus, the regular guests have the possibility to have their own private beer mug, which is then stored on-site in convenient lockers. And even more convenient: owner of such a mug never need to order a beer - whenever they leave it on the table with the lid opened, the staff will refill the mug with another mas.
Obviously we were not only in Munich to drink beer, as meetup host @TorM had prepared an impressive list of cultural highlights to visit. One of them was Shloss Nymphenburg the building you see in this picture (well, the picture only shows a small part - the complex is huge) with host @TorM in the bottom left corner of the picture.
The picture at the top of this post, by the way, was also taken there, in the garden behind the castle.
The number of rooms inside was sheer endless, one even more beautifully decorated than the next. And a LOT of them were bedrooms - not sure if there is a link there to the 24 paintings of beautiful young women hanging in one of the rooms.
And if you would ever wonder what ‘home office’ looked like in the 18th century - here’s the answer to that question. Complaints about slow internet were very rare in those days, however and no one was ever accidentaly muted (although some were purposely permanently muted from time to time, I have been taught in history class.)
Another cultural highlight, in the city centre, was the Theatinerkirche where we were able to answer the pressing question “How many local guides does it take to get a decent picture?” As you can see, the answer is 4 (or perhaps 5 of you also count @MortenCopenhagen - on the left, only partially in the photo - who is taking a picture of the other 4).
One of the “must have seen”s in Munich is the Munich Residenz, where there was even more gold and glitter than in the Nymphenburg castle, believe it or not. There we stumbled upon local guide Neptune, a level 8 local guide visiting from Underworld. He was happy to encounter us, but had a complaint too: the review he posted recently of the ferry service for river Styx was not showing on Maps - we gave him the link to submit the account investigation form and continued our path.
At the entrance of the Residenz there are a number of crests, where the legend goed that you should rub them to get ETERNAL luck - as shown here by local guide @LuigiZ .
(But I guess they were out of order or in maintenance when we were there, as I definitely had no luck when traveling back home: several problems with trains caused my trip to last 10 hours instead of the scheduled 6)
On to a cultural highlight of another type then: by coincidence the Saturday we were in Munich was also the day the Munich Pride Parade was held.
EuroMeetups are all about friendship, sharing and having fun, but still they often also have a component to remind us that, alas, not everything in life is fun and pleasure. In 2018 we visited Auschwitz and in 2019 the Flanders Fields museum. This time it was the NS-Dokumentationszentrum that illustrates how it was possible that the nazi regime came to power in Germany step by step in the 1930s - and draws some parallels to events happening in the present (after all, the most heard slogan after World War I was “Never again”…).
An iconic brand in Munich is of course BMW, whose HQ is in Munich. We visited both BMW Welt and the BMW Museum, where vehicles (and engines) old and new are on display.
There was also a bit of a misunderstanding.
The friendly lady at the information counter explained to us that everything in BMW Welt was for free and that you needed to pay for the Museum. Turned out that the ACCESS to BMW Welt was free, and not, as I had interpreted, that all items on display in BMW Welt were free to take along. So unfortunately I was not allowed to take that nice little yellow car home.
Talking of misunderstandings… if you bring people from 15 countries together and use English for conversation, some misunderstandings are bound to pop up. By far the funniest one was when we were climbing the hill at the Olympia parkto admire the view at the top. The climb (or at least the unofficial shortcut to the top) was quite steep and when @TorM said - halfway up the hill - that “it will be worth it” some of us thought despairingly that he said “it will be worse” 
By now some of you might be wondering “Hang on, this is a multi-day LOCAL GUIDES meetup, so is there no local guides stuff going on then? Of course there was also that. The most condensed example was the photowalk that @MortenCopenhagen had organized on Sunday morning. As you can see in the pictures, Morten had 2 very motivated and eager-to-learn students: @Yasuyo (from Japan, but living in The Netherlands) and @Shreeya_99 (from Mumbai in India, but currently residing in Germany). And I have to admit that I also picked up some nifty tips & tricks.
And in the meantime (in fact, during most of the meetup) Czech local guide Zdenek was busy creating blue StreetView lines, taking advantqge of he fact that the Google policy for StreetView in Germany had just changed. For a long time StreetView images had not been published in Germany as there had been privacy concerns, but now a new survey has shown that a huge majority of the German population would like to have recent StreetView footage wherever possible.
During EuroMeetup 2023 we also set up a virtual meetup to give local guides around the globe who would have loved to join the meetup, but were unable for a multitude of reasons, the chance to participate at least virtually. @ErmesT , one of the local guides unable to attend in person, hosted that virtual meetup and he shared the news that there will be another Wine Meetup in Treviso in the fall - something to look forward to no doubt! (Check Connect regularly for updates.)
Another traditional element of local guides meetups is the fact that participants often bring small gifts from their country to exchange with the other attendees. Check out the picture below to see what this resulted in for EuroMeetup2023. Can you guess which participants might have brought what? Feel free to post your guesses in the comments.
Not really a tradition, but definitely something everyone enjoyed very much was a barbecue on the banks of the river Isar, which we held on the last evening most of us were together.
We simply raided a local supermarket, purchased everything we needed to barbecue for 20 people and then prepared and shared the food and drinks - and used the river as an eco-friendly fridge for the beer.
To finish off this recap, here are some more pictures of things and views that crossed our path.
PS: Some parts/elements are purposely left out to encourage the other participants to write a recap post too 
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Hope to see everyone soon in the next meeting!
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