A Place for Fish

 7/13

Drive to Munich

Going to Munich from Triberg allowed to equal options - one was retracing much of the previous trip (which was gorgeous) though a southern route, or heading more north through Stuttgart and Augsburg. I choose that latter option simply because it was different.

We started the day with a lovely European cafe/bakery breakfast. I love these. Always such a good start to the day. And followed it up with a short drive to the largest Cuckoo clock in the world. I really don’t know how it gets that title. I don’t really even want to look it up. I’m going to take that at face value and just repeat that it is, in fact, the largest cuckoo clock in the world. A euro gets you a nice view of the wooden gearing and the actual pendulum, and the gift shop is as fun as any other I suppose. We waited until 11 when the clock tolled and danced and cuckooed. Awesome. So that was done.

Then the drive began. As with the previous drive, these drives through the hills/mountains/fields/forests are incredibly picturesque. Photos don’t do them justice. As a Wisconsinite, this drive felt like a more dramatic Wisconsin drive. Though Sam pointed out that its probably more similar to Pennsylvania than Wisconsin given that the hills here are more like the Appalachians than our hills. Fair enough.    

Once we got back on to the autobahn, the scenery was far less lovely, but the road racing began. Man, its wild. I had a quick car - a VW diesel golf with a 6-speed manual transmission (lets ignore the fact that I’d never driven a 6 speed and somehow didn’t realize I had that gear for the first day plus of driving it…). For at least a section of the drive, I set the cruise at 150kph (~93mph) and it was cruising along nicely. The out of nowhere, a Peugeot transit van would come FLYING past you, going at LEAST 15 mph faster, if not 25… Definitely a new experience. What I did love was how as soon as we’d approach a city or construction area and a speed limit sign would popup, EVERYONE would just chill right out and get back to the speed limit. Maybe the wild ones would go 3-4 kph faster…

We decided to stop for lunch in Augsburg. Officially, it is part of the ‘Romantic Road’. We had discussed hitting a few cities on this path instead of the Black Forest but had decided against it. This was our chance to do both. That said, while Augsburg was lovely, a quick lunch wasn’t really enough time to really appreciate it - lovely as the lunch was and lovely as the historic city was.

Arriving in Munich was fine - always tough to navigate a city to drop off a car, but we managed. On a side note, I prepaid gas because I really hate trying to figure out finding a gas station and such when driving through a downtown area. This Golf was amazing in that it had a range of 600 miles on a tank of gas. 600! As it turned out, that ended up being almost exactly what I needed as I pushed the car to its final 30 km (18mi) in range - so I feel like I won that exchange overall.

Once we got settled into our Airbnb, we headed off to dinner at the Augustine-Keller biergarten, which claims to the be the oldest beer garden in Munich (they all have some variation of this, but still, its old). My beer-wizard co-worker recommended this one in particular since they still pour directly from the barrels. It was great. A bit crowded, but great. They even had a playground for the kids. The food was excellent and the beer was more than I should have had.

7/14

First full day in Munich

We started the day off relatively early, making it out of the house at 9ish for no real reason other than going to bed early the night before. We headed to Cafe Luitpold for breakfast. It is from the late 1800s, although it was destroyed and rebuilt around WWII. However, it was the hippest place to be at the turn of the century and was also a hangout for artists like Paul Klee and ilk. For us, it was great. Nicest waiter of the trip, and the food was wonderful. One of the best coffees here hands down.

After a calm breakfast, we wandered to the Marienplatz with the Neo-gothic Rathaus and a famous Glockenspiel. The whole area was typical European plaza beauty, and as 11 approached, the crowds gathered to see a fun, and rather elaborate and long top-of-the-hour song. Once the bells toll a bit, the top stage begins moving and shows a jousting tournament with an accompanying song - with the highlight of one jouster winning, and in our case, a group of spaniards cheering loudly for the victor. When that sections ends, the lower stage activates which show, “the Schäffler dance. After a severe plague epidemic, the barrel makers are said to have been the first to venture out into the streets again, dancing to amuse the plague-stricken population.” Lastly, a cuckoo flaps its wings to end the show after about 15 minutes. Fun. Germany seems to love mechanical toys.

When the clock stopped, we headed in to go up to the tower. I always enjoy these just to orient myself, but there wasn’t a ton to see here. The price made up for it, so, I suppose it was worth it.

We continued our wandering to the Frauenkirche, aka Cathedral of Our Dear Lady. From the outside it is fantastic. A full on brick cathedral built in the late 1500s (built in 20 years!!!!) - its great. Inside was nice, but it felt too modern. The obvious answer, which sam pointed out, was WWII. The roof had collapsed and was restored, finishing up in 1994. That solved, it was still nice to see and since Ava had picked up a ‘mysteries of the cathedral’ pamphlet, we learned that at 12:10, there was a clock that had a picture of god unsheathing his sword to smite humanity, only for the active praying of Mary and Jesus to change his mind. Good stuff. Catholicism is awesome.

We grabbed a quick lunch and headed over to the Residenz Muenchen. Having now seen the Palace of Versailles, the Palacio Real de Madrid, and the Schönbrunn Palace (on this trip!), I was surprised at how I continue to be impressed by these palaces. Relatively speaking, this was used later than many of them (1918). But given a cheap ticket and a free audio guide, we were enthralled for about 3 hours. It was very interesting to say the least. Ava was also quite the trooper, not falling apart until we were getting near the end and started to hustle through a bit. Considering how much was actually destroyed in WWII, it had a lot of great recreations mixed with originals.

After the palace, we wanted to ease up a bit, so we - somewhat inadvertantly - wandered to the viktualienmarkt. It was nice, perhaps a good lunch spot for later. But in the end, we just walked through and then back to get some ice cream - to which I convinced sam to get spaghettieis (which a friend had recommeneded) - basically ice cream pressed through a play-dough tool to make strands and then covered with ’sauce’. Its just ice cream, but looks different. Still fun.

As it was getting later, and Ava was hungry, we stopped by the Haufbrauhaus. We considered having a drink and food there, but it was such a tourist location and just didn’t have the feel we were looking for, so we opted to travel closer to our home base and go to the Löwenbräu Biergarten. I think it was a better choice, and much less chaotic. We called it a night relatively early since there would be an early start the next day, but all-in-all, we hit more spots than expected and had a good time to boot.

7/16

A wandering day in Munich

At the outset, we had some vague plans for where to go, but the real plan was to - more or less - take it easy, even though in today’s case taking it easy would involve a lot of walking.

We started off an a calm, but hip local cafe. Nothing historical about it, but great morning food and excellent coffee. The initial hand-waving plan was to check out a couple of churches (one not even my choice!) and then head over to the English Garden (Englischer Garten).

St. Michaels church is in the historic center and was built at the end of the 1500s and is the largest renaissance     church north of the alps and a model for early baroque architecture. Like many of the churches we’ve seen in Munich, it was heavily damaged in WWII, but also restored to its original design as close as they could manage. I am honestly very impressed with Munich (not sure how it is throughout the rest of Germany) with how well, how honestly, and how quickly they restored the city back to its pre-WWII days - both in city design and actual buildings. I really know nothing about this effort, but it seems like something I’ll follow up on through wiki-holes because its honestly just so impressive.

The church itself was nice, and tying in well to the previous days trip, its crypt is the final resting place of Ludwig II (amongst others). Overall, it was nice on the inside and worth a 10 minute stop and look-loo. However, as we were starting to leave, a very small wedding began on the main alter. And to kick off the wedding, the organ began playing. Now, a week ago when we had arrived in Salzburg, I saw that there was an organ concert everyday at noon that I wanted to attend, but it just never fit in with our scheduling. Going to Triberg and then to Munich, I had looked up organ concerts, but to no avail. But hey, what do we have here? Maybe not a concert, but a great 5 minute piece to hear the organ echo through a giant church - which was Ava’s first experience with something like this (she had heard an organ in a church before, but the setting wasn’t quite comparable). Bit of a tangent, but a nice bit of kismet.

Leaving the church, we walked to the next stop - St. Johann Nepomuk, better known as the Asamkirche. Originally this was meant to be a private, family chapel, but it was eventually opened up to the public. Private buildings are always a bit more fun because the builders and designers feel less need to defer to politics or convention, which are all ignored here.  Apparently, the Asamkirche is considered one of the most important Late Baroque/Rococo (basically when the artists went to the logical extreme of it) buildings in southern Germany. The church was built next to the Asam house in the space a normal apartment building would be in - so it doesn’t physically stick out - other than the fact that the facade looks completely different, but its not like towering over anything. Inside the chapel, its just wild wood carvings, frescos, and gold gilded things. Its quite small, so the visit can be quite quick, but well worth the look.

We didn’t have a firm plan from here. We knew we wanted to end up at the English Garden, and were thinking a stop at the viktualienmarkt for lunch, but since it was a bit early we just kind of wandered in that direction when we ran into a crowd of people carrying pride flags and such. We had seen posters previously about a Christopher Street Day, which could be obvious knowledge for most people, but is even more obvious for any New Yorkers that have spent any time in the West Village of the obvious connection to the Stonewall Inn and Pride Celebrations. We looked up to see what the details were and, wouldn’t you know, the parade was today and that would mean events and booths around the Marienplatz. We decided to go through the market to get there and see what there was to see.

When we arrived, we saw a fully setup stage and an impressive crowd of people. A band was on stage doing a soundcheck and seemed about ready to start (as it would happen, the wouldn’t play for many more hours, but the pre and post view of them is quite fun). More than anything, it was nice just to see everything in a different way. We got to play at a Lego stand for a while as well, which is always good.

Eventually we made our way to the Englischer Garten. Build in the late 18th century, it is one of the world’s largest urban public parks - slightly larger than Central Park. As we walked in, we sort of stumbled into something that I had wanted to see but had completely forgotten about (I really should write more things down) - people surfing on the Eisbach river wave. I’m sure things like this exist elsewhere, but I haven’t seen it. Fundamentally it operates like wave machine surfing you see throughout Cali, but it seems much cooler in an urban park in a relatively natural setting. It also seems dangerous as hell - as the wave is quite narrow, the water is fast, and the sides are concrete. But still, it’s great to see.

A bit more of a walk and we made it to another well known biergarten - the Biergarten am Chinesischen Turm, named after the wooden Chinese Tower built along with the creation of the park (yet another thing destroyed and completely rebuilt). I don’t know why its there, but it is, and brass bands play music from it while you eat and drink at the Hofbräu biergarten below. While definitely more for tourists at this point, it was clearly not just us visitors wandering around.

Next was the continued walk to the quintessential urban park event - pedal-boat rides on the lake. We did it. It was great. Ava had a blast and got to steer while I layed in the back and soaked up the sun to the chaotic sounds of her and Sam trying to navigate.

And at the boat dock was another biergarten - Seehaus im Englischen Garten. We really did spend a lot of time in biergartens in Munich. I sure this city has amazing food throughout, but there is no way we’d know it since 95% of our food came from cafes or biergartens (which, in their defense, have pretty good food). We did, however, very quickly stop ordering 1L beers in favor of the 0.5L mugs… so we were totally being health conscious.

Ava was beat (the biergartens both had playgrounds which she happily used) and we considered heading back to the airbnb, but Sam rallied us to go back to Marienplatz to see what was going on now. Once we arrived, the crowd was larger and livelier and the band we had seen at the soundcheck was now onstage in its full glory and the crowd was into it. It was actually pretty great, nothing bad to say about it. We listened until their set was over before now actually heading back for the night.

Well, not quite the end of the night for me. As in Vienna, I took the opportunity for a bit of a night walk. Heading back to Marienplatz via the museum district, I got to see the lights of the city and the pride dance concert in full effect. Always a fun stroll