Tuesday, December 30, 2008

5 "Days" in Munich

Writing from memory is always a pain in the ass. Events get jumbled and twisted, continuity is snarled and blurred in a haze of good cheer, embarrassment, and time, and the whole course of the history being written is changed in the recollection. Still, since I was too lazy or occupied to write down events as they happened in Munich, I’ll have to settle for this solution instead. I’m going to condense the events of the 20th, 21st, and 22nd into one entry. This will cover all of my time in Munich. Then, there will be another entry, probably quite short, covering our day trip to Salzburg on the 23rd, and then a third entry for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day (the 26th of December for Americans and other aliens).
I arrived in Munich about 15 minutes delayed for one reason or another (European train conductors never tell you the reason for any delay, but personally I blame a combination of weather and Italians) to find my family waiting for me in the train station. Their hotel room wasn’t ready, so they had decided to come and wait for me their, which was a good thing because the hotel didn’t have much to speak of in the way of a lobby. We ate a quick lunch at the airport, dining on kebaps. These sandwiches, which have nothing to do with shish-kabob, are the German/Austrian equivalent of a hamburger, and arrived in Europe thanks to the wave of Turkish immigration in the 1990s. A kebap is a sandwich composed of a kaiser roll, or equivalent bun product, stuffed with roasted sliced lamb or turkey, yogurt sauce, onions, lettuce, and tomatoes. It’s not all that good for you, but satisfying in the same way that a McDonald’s hamburger is satisfying (that is, up until about 2 hours after the fact).
We proceeded to the hotel under a threatening sky which was probably the tail end of the snowstorm I had experienced coming out of Austria. Bavaria, the region of Germany where Munich is located, is primarily plains and forests, with a few mountains in the south called the Bavarian Alps. The storm, it seemed, had been trapped by the true Austrian Alps, and so left Munich with rain, damp, and cold. After settling into the room, I, Mom, and Hannah went for a walk to the Munich Christkindlmarkt, which proved hideously overcrowded. We stopped for a few pictures before heading back to the hotel. That night we had dinner with an old colleague of Dad’s, Thomas Pruegl, and his family, who served us one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten: dumplings in beef broth, roast pork and more dumplings (but of a different variety), and cabbage salad. We went home that night tired and stuffed to the gills.
The next morning we breakfasted at the hotel, under the watchful eyes of the breakfast chef/waitress person, a severe woman with an unending flow of sarcasm (in several languages) who soon garnered the nickname of “Frau Harrumph” from me and my sisters. Then it was time for mass at the cathedral, and then for a walk around the city center. The Christkindlmarkt was just starting up when we arrived, so we walked through the Rathaus, the “town hall” of Munich, although it was quite grand and gothic, looking more like a cathedral than anything else. Afterwards (at around 1:30) we embarked for the Alte Pinakothek, one of Munich’s three famous art museums. The Alte Pinakothek (which is mostly untranslatable, but which means something like “Collection of Old Paintings”) houses works from the late Middle Ages through the 18th Century; the Neue Pinakothek (“Collection of New Paintings”) is devoted to the 19th Century, and the Pinakothek der Moderne (“Collection of Paintings of the Modern Artists) has 20th Century works. We only saw the Alte, which houses no particularly famous work, but many minor works by famous painters (Rubens, Dürer, Raphael, and Da Vinci) as well as a particularly expansive collection of 17th and 18th century art, especially from France and the Netherlands.
That took us most of the afternoon, until about 5 o’clock. We then departed to find a restaurant that Dad had read of which served authentic Bavarian food. The search took us well over an hour, as it was quite dark and the restaurant was located in a small square off the beaten path. It was also closed, unsurprisingly, since it was a Sunday (when nearly all shops and stores are closed). We instead went to the Ratskeller, a restaurant in the basement of the Rathaus. While expensive, the food was superb if rather hard to describe. The menu was entirely in German, and contained a lot of Bavarian-dialect terms that I was unfamiliar with. Still, it turned out well, and we dined on plates of sausages, sauerkraut, tiny dumplings in a cheese sauce in Rose’s case, and Wiener Schnitzel (a cut of tender veal, pounded thin and deep fried) in Hannah’s. Stuffed to the gills again, we walked around the Christkindlmarkt for awhile and took a few pictures before returning to the hotel.
The next day a bitterly cold wind blew, rather than the drizzle of the day before. We went to the Toy Museum, which was rather unconventionally housed in an old tower, with each exhibit located in rooms off of the tight circular stairwell. It was an amusing side trip, and certainly nothing like what you’d find in the US. After the Toy Museum, we took a detour to the Asamkirche (officially the Church of St. John Nepomuk, but nicknamed Asam after the two brothers who designed and built it). While small, the church is crammed with every bit of Baroque finery that could fit: painted ceilings and walls, gold and silver ornamentation, and marble statues. Everything on the walls and ceilings that isn’t a painting is gold or silver, and my poor skill with words cannot possibly do it justice. Check out the webalbum for more pictures.
The Asamkirche was followed by a shopping expedition to the Christkindlmarkt, in which Dad tried glühwein for the first time and started a long-running joke which I’m sure will be with our family until the end of time, and in which I made a rather elementary mistake in my German and which lead to subsequent embarrassment (although, like all good mistakes, I don’t think I’m likely to repeat it in the near future). Around 4, we returned to the hotel, cold and somewhat cranky, and didn’t leave the room except for one expedition to the train station to buy some pizza. Then we bedded down for the night, determined to get a good rest for our trip to Salzburg the next day.
Next, on Cage of Monkeys: What happened in Salzburg! Strange Meetings! Long Walks! Tourists! And the Lions Club! Tune in tomorrow, same Monkey Time, same Monkey Channel!

-JA

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