Munich, Germany 🇩🇪

Murlayna Travel: Yerp 2016

Monday, August 1

We learnt from to say aufgang and eingang and we can’t stop saying them (entrance/exit). I actually love German and we both try out words all the time, often to the point of absurdity. Ente, ente, ente! 🐥

We stayed in a really nice (albeit touristy) hotel with super soft and comfy beds. Oh my god, so smoft. Still a tiny room though with no space wasted and no extra luxuries like a place for the single chair to actually be used. 😜

I noticed for the first time that all the elevators here use -1, 0, 1 as floors instead of B, M/L/1, 2 which is super smart and a programmer’s delight!

The massive grocery store next door is focking amazing: 50¢ bottles of beer and curious foreign items galore. Paying was hilarious as we were so inept at German self-checkout that the attendant had to smirkingly help us 3 or 5 times. Also: shopping cart escalator ramps!

We had a picnic dinner on a towel on our bed (since there’s no other space/tables).

Tuesday, August 2

We had leftovers for breakfast, then bought a 3-day transit pass via phone wifi in order to take the tram to Maximonument.

…where we got out and strolled around for a few hours, meandering around the paths and bridges over the Isar river making our way accidentally/on purpose to Marienplatz within the old city.

When we arrived there was some kind of parade underway and the place was utterly packed.

We walked all the way through the old city then onwards through what seemed like a middle eastern district until we came up to St Paul’s cathedral which we went inside and awed at the architecture.

Then we found a little Bavarian pub for lunch and got ourselves confused over whether to tip…

The food was meh and the service was slow so we ended up paying the exact amount only to research after the fact that it’s customary to tip 5–10% 😅

We walked a bit more to find the main transit station then trammed it home, Laynie couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer so we went to bed at like 15:00 and stayed there all night!

Wednesday, August 3

We woke up early (me before Laynie!) then went next door to the supermarket to get breakfast.

A meager 7€ later and we were full after eating at a cute little playground nearby.

We took the tram to the Deutsch Museum (the worlds largest Science and Technology Museum, and one of the earliest founded in 1903). Spent the morning there perusing the artificial mining caves and 6 other floors of exhibits.

The two rooftop verandas had stunning panoramic views of the city although the pictures don’t really do it justice.

Laynie loved the Astronomy section (black holes are like, fractal portals, man) and I couldn’t stop grinning at the Math/Logic Machines and Computer history wings (so crazy to fathom all these old mechanical calculators and massive analog machines). We retrieved my backpack from the day locker and walked to the nearest underground station. Munich has two underground rail systems: the Subway (which occasionally goes above ground) and the Underground, a traditional tube-like train. When we surfaced again we were on our way to the English Gardens.

We stopped right away at a bustling outdoor cafe in the shade for some refreshments. We each had a beer, shared a delicious clubhouse sandwich, and finished it off with a huge and incredible cherry sundae for two. Best meal of the trip this far, and the atmosphere and waiter were superb.

After a bit more of a hike to get to the gardens, we sat with our shoes off by a massive lakes with ducks, fish, and paddle boats abounding. We downed one of the four beers we’d brought with us in an ice-filled drybag, and decided we would tour around the park drinking one beer per stop for the duration of the afternoon.

At stop two we sat in the shade of a lone group of trees in the middle of a huge field and Laynie lent on my lap as we read on our kindles for about and hour. The atmosphere in the gardens was perfect. All the people there were just there to relax. It didn’t matter if they were reading, drinking, playing lawn sports with friends, or biking, or whatever. Just what we were looking for!

Next up was the Chinese Tower, probably the most famous (and non-sequitur) monument in the gardens.

We hadn’t realized that it sat in the middle of the largest outdoor beer gardens in Munich (the world?) so when we arrived we of course bought a 1L (Maß) stein of Hell (Lager) and downed it in the benchs surrounded by hundreds of others out cavorting on Wednesday afternoon. A lederhosen-clad traditional German band was playing from the tower for most of the night. Here’s a view of a quarter of it:

We poured our remaining two beers into our emptied glass and by the time we finished those we figured we might as well get another liter and keep the buzz rolling (okay we were fucking drunk).

We stayed chatting until after dark (downed a seriously massive pretzel in the meantime), then stumbled back to another underground station to get us home. We kept one of the huge steins to take home as a souvenir 🍻 (hardened criminals).

It was a beautiful night and we felt safe and sound perusing about except for a brief stint where a Georgian guy starting walking alongside us, so we made polite conversation in English in order to sway him from potentially mugging us 😁 He was actually really nice and we likely totally misread him.

We passed out as soon as we got home, probably sometime around 23:00.

Thursday, August 4

We woke up at 09:30ish the next morning; we’d planned on checking out and heading to Salzburg, but we decided it would be unworthily-expensive and out of the way to do so, so opted to extend our stay in Munich for a night (we kind of thought this might happen hence why we didn’t book anything for that night).

We really needed clean clothes by this point so we hauled our asses to a nearby-ish laundromat. (Naturally we stopped at Kaufland, our favorite neighborhood grocery store for breakfast supplies first.)

The laundry machines were more expensive than we’d brought coins for so we only could squeeze one load in. I think only Laynie’s newest white shirt got ruined 😔. We ate our breakfast on the curb outside as we waited — me in the shade, Laynie in the already-blistering sun.

After returning to our hotel room with freshly folded garb, we took the trams across the city to Nymphenburg Palace, which Laynie had scoped out as a possible place of interest before our trip began. It turned out to be her favourite stop thus far — and for good reason: this place is unbelievably impressive. For instance, here is the front yard (from its center):

And the back yard is bigger, by a lot. It literally stretches further than you can see. Here’s a shot from each end:

Surrounding this vast central canal is a network of forests, streams, paths, fields, springs, lakes, pump houses, servants quarters, gardens, villages, fountains, and monuments. We spent the afternoon hiking around, taking breaks in the shade for wine and snacks we’d brought with us.

Eventually we got exhausted from all the walking (I can see why the old aristocrats preferred horses) and decided on a whim to train it over to the Olympic grounds for a different kind of tourisming. (Not without stopping for gelato first, however.)

When we arrived the place was bustling like a fairgrounds (kind of like Stampede meets Folk Fest) and it seemed like there was some kind of event on. We happened by an amphitheater overlooking a pond with views of the nearby hills and cool 70s architecture and were pretty surprised at how big a crowd was watching some gaudy Glee-like acapella band.

We continued walking through and realized we must have jumped some security line as we were now in a fenced-in beer gardens type place, which we eventually escaped in favour of a nearby grassy hill overlooking the same pond as before but from a different, quieter angle. It had a pretty good view of the Olympic Tower.

We quickly noticed that other people were starting to sit around us, most with picnic blankets and some with chairs, and — what luck! — it wound up being a massive fireworks show!

After the finale we realized we were pretty lost in the dark (we’d entered from the opposite end of the park before and didn’t want to go all the way back), so we followed the crowd and U-bahn signs as it started to pour with rain. It was actually incredible, seeing everyone biking and piling out so non-chalant and efficiently (since they’d all come prepared with umbrellas, etc). There were literally hundreds of bikers/pedestrians for every car we saw leaving — something that’s especially humbling in contrast to Calgary’s gridlocked parking lots.

That said, the signage was surprisingly poor (or we were just bumbling awe-struck tourists) and we apparently gleefully trotted past two stations in the rain before finding our way to the main street and subsequent shelter (almost an hour after we started!).

I’d like to say were soon in bed thereafter but what followed ended up being a bit of a nightmare. After surfacing from our first train to switch to the tram, while crossing a dimly-lit street next to one of the main transit hubs, a man seemingly tripped and fell right in front of me/at my feet. I managed to sidestep him completely (as did Laynie, on the far side), but as we turned around to catch our bearings and see if he was okay, we realized there were others about watching, waiting, all kind of shocked and unsure of what to do, until it dawned on me that this was pickpocket attempt (he falls, we reach down to see if he’s alright, his accomplice(s) does too, after us, and fleeces us in doing so). So we hightailed out of there to safer turf until the shock wore off. A couple minutes later we’re ready to go again and we see our tram is at the stop. Throughout the day, this same tram runs constantly — we’ve never had to wait for than 10 minutes — so we figure whatever, we’ll catch the next one. We casually walk in front of it as it departs and look to the time board for when the next one arrives. 20 minutes, fine. Except once it reaches 12 minutes, it stays there… forever, despite many other lines coming and going, passing it on the list. Eventually we realize something must be up so we head back down to the Underground to find another route (there is a tram stop near our hotel but not a U-bahn or S-bahn). There isn’t really much we can do other than get closer and hope by that time the tram will be working again. We finally make it back onto our tram only to get forced out in a couple stops (some German over the loudspeaker and everyone else gets out), then, again, after 15 minutes with the sign reading an unchanging 8 minutes, we decide to just walk all the way home. We walk for 15–20 minutes before realizing we don’t recognize anything (followed the wrong fork of tracks) so need to double back, and only then do we find another stop with our tram (still late). By the time we get home it’s 01:30. Yes, we didn’t get mugged, but that attempt literally derailed us for 2 grueling (and frigid, for Laynie) hours. 😤 At least we slept well.

Friday, August 5

We opted to save money and take the bus to Vienna, so we were up early to head to Kaufland for supplies, then checked out and trammed to the main bus station. The 5 hour ride was surprisingly nice as it was raining the entire day, keeping things cool and fresh, including the views (it was a change of scenery compared to the constant summer sunshine we’d had up to this point).

We somehow got primo seats at the very back of the bus, which was clean and modern, had free wifi, and even one English movie in its media app (Silver Linings Playbook, which we both watched again) that helped us dodge the unbelievably talkative and clearly-native-tongue-conversation-starved Mexican singer on his way to a Polish Folk festival.