Munich or München, as they say here…

The location of our Airbnb in Munich is a great one.  We are a block from the Viktualienmarkt, an open air market with a beer garden in the center.  You can buy almost anything here and it’s open every day but Sunday.  We’re very near a tram stop and a bit farther away is an underground station.  We’ve bought multi-day transportation tickets that make it easy to get around.  And, just down the street, is another Eataly, even bigger than the one we found in Florence with a great selection of meats, cheeses, produce and…oh yes…Italian wines.
      

Marienplatz, Munich’s main square is just on the other side of the Vikualienmarkt. Here we found the New Town Hall, that looks older than the Old Town Hall that was rebuilt after WWII. In the tower of the NTH is a Glockenspeil that ‘performs’ three times a day.

When we did our overview walk through Munich, we visited Michaelskirche (St Michael’s Church), an impressive baroque structure with a large barrel vaulted interior, which Rick Steves said makes the acoustics wonderful.  I noted that there was a ‘sung Mass’ scheduled for 9:00 on Sunday and decided to go.  The church was jam-packed…all seats totally full and people standing five or six abreast in every aisle.  Some people had come prepared with their own camp stools!  It was well worth standing for two hours, though, to hear the choir and orchestra perform Gounod’s St Cecelia Mass.  It was on par with the best concerts we’ve heard! But this was not a concert, it was a full Mass with sermon and communion…the works! I agree, the acoustics are fabulous!

(This photo was taken after the Mass when the church was beginning to empty out.  It seemed inappropriate to take pictures during the Mass…)

We rented bikes and spent a half day riding out to Olympic Park on the north edge of the city.  This complex, built for the 1972 Olympics, is impressive.

While there, we came across a memorial to the Israeli athletes (and one German police officer) whose deaths at the hands of Palestinian terrorists marred the games.

From Olympic Park, it was a short ride to BMW Welt (BMW World) and Museum.

This impressive complex showcases the role that the Bavarian Motor Works played in the development of modern transportation and serves as an enormous showroom for the current crop of BMW models with plenty of opportunity to touch and feel the cars…

In keeping with the car theme, on another day we visited the Museum of Transportation (Verkehrszentrum). This branch of the Deutsches Museum focuses on the history of transportation and houses examples of bikes, cars, trains, buses and everything else on wheels you can imagine.

Almost as much fun was watching the little kids outside the museum trying out all sorts of locomotion devices…
        

Rick’s Beaver Creek skiing friend, Alfred Watzinger, met us in town one day and took us on a walking tour that included the lovely Bürgersaalkirche, a two level church that has wonderful frescoes in the upper sanctuary.

Alfred, who has lived in Munich for more than 3 decades told us that he has only recently made time to learn more about the historical buildings in his city.  And he loves showing them to friends who visit.  That evening, we shared a great meal of Weiner Schnitzel with Alfred, his wife Edith and their daughter Stephanie. And later in the week, they invited us to their home for a barbecue in their lovely garden.

It was so nice to get together with friends so far away from our home who would share their home with us!

We rented bikes another day to explore the Englischer Garden, the largest city park on the continent, along the west side of the Isar River.

The guide book said we should expect to see nude sunbathers here but, much to Rick’s disappointment, the only unclothed body in sight was that if a five-year-old boy… There is also a ‘wave’ in the river for surfers, but they were not out during our visit either.

It seemed fitting that our visit to Dachau (concentration camp) was in a drenching rain.  We were part of a tour with a dozen Americans and a very knowledgeable tour guide.

Even though it might have been more pleasant to see this admittedly horrific memorial on a nice sunny day, the fact that we stood in the rain while our guide explained what happened here gave us some small appreciation for the conditions that the unfortunate people who ended up here had to endure for years on end.

This statue of ‘the unknown survivor’ bears a legend that should make us all think…”To remember the dead and warn the living.”

Rick & I have been fans of Reidel wine glasses for a long time. This is the company that has developed a specific glass shape for almost every variety of wine. (I know, we’re nerds and we admit it!) When we discovered that the Reidel Glass Factory in Kufstein, Austria was only an hour south of Munich, we decided that we’d go for a factory tour.

It was a really interesting afternoon.  First we watched the goings on on the factory floor – precise addition of stems and bases to already prepared bowls, and fashioning of a mouth-blown decanter.

Then we walked through a cool multimedia presentation about sensation and taste – there was a gigantic nose in one room and a huge tongue in another!

After this, our guide took us to the Glas Haus (Glass House) built to recall the company’s original factory (1756) in Czechoslovakia and filled with historical displays, and then to the newly constructed museum (that won’t officially open until June 23!) that houses Reidel products from the beginning of the company until today.

Of course, Munich has palaces, and we visited two of them.  Germany’s royal family, the Wittelsbachs,  had an in-town abode now known as the Residenz and a summer place with hunting lodge, the Nymphenberg Palace, just outside the city center.  The Residenz Museum consists of 90(!) palatial rooms, a Treasury and and ornate opera house, the Cuvilliés Theater that was rebuilt after WWI.  Someone had the foresight to dismantle the ornate wooden boxes and store them safely before Munich was bombed!

We saw the Nymphenberg Palace on our first bike ride (out to Olympic Park).

Of course, this account would not be complete without a mention of Munich’s Beer Gardens.  Like all tourists, we ducked into the Hofbräuhaus.  It’s quite a scene!  And there are many beer gardens throughout the city, even two in the Englischer Gardens.  But our favorite was right in our neighborhood in the middle of the Viktualienmarkt.

On Sundays, when most everything else is closed, the locals come out in traditional Bavarian garb to grab a beer, listen to bands, and watch young people dance.

Is this the biggest pretzel you’ve ever seen?!  You need lots of beer to wash this down…

So now we are on to our last three stops (all in Switzerland) before coming back to the States for 5 weeks.  We are doing this segment of our adventure (April-June) all by train.  I wanted to share the picture below to illustrate the comfort of train travel (and no one hassles us when we bring our own wine…).  And, you will note that Rick has brought the beard back!