Munich

A week of travel, and stopping was the hardest part… I would have loved to keep moving, to see a few more cities before I went back to class. It's going to take a few posts to go through everything that happened over the week, and it'll take a bit longer to show you the best pictures from it all. I only took 274, which compared to some of my friends trips is paltry. Clare took over 400… but I'll start from the beginning (of the trip, going any further back would get wordy and tiresome)

Munich (München)

I arrived in Munich the night of Halloween. It was a 4 hour train ride from Strasbourg, straight through. There were small stops along the way but I didn't really pay attention to them. I spent the train ride writing a bit and then reading. I found a hostel near the train station (no idea how, I just wandered down some streets.)

I hopped on a subway (regional train really) and swung out to the airport to meet mom. I had forgotten which city she was coming from, I remembered that there were flights we had looked at that came in from Philly so I went to that area. It was the international arrivals so you'd figure that it'd be ok, but Delta has to be special and arrive somewhere else. Mom called me from a pay phone and we eventually found each other.

After dropping our bags and a quick change at the hotel we headed out into Munich. As it was with our entire trip, churches were one of the first things we visited. A smaller church called St. Paul's I believe? It was just tucked into a neighborhood, I think it was built in around either 1809 or 1909, the script they were using made it difficult to differentiate numbers. We hopped on the subway and went up towards the Residenz, the home of the Kings of Bavaria. We saw another church just built into the city, it was in a block of buildings and looked seriously out of place. It was the Theatinerkirche. The interior was beautiful, it seemed as if it had been whitewashed; there were tons of details, but no color on them. They looked like they might have been gold leafed and painted before but maybe the gold had been stripped. The Residenz was across the street, and we tried our best to find a way in but we were at the wrong end of building and walked 2/3 of the way around it in order to find a way in. The building was beautiful, the former Dukes of Bavaria, later Electors of the Holy Roman Empire and then Kings of Bavaria in their own right had a great place to live. The whole thing was massive, a large complex that had been refurbished multiple times during its use and then presently still under repair because of the destruction of World War II.

Lunch outside (in the cold) at a bier garden with impossibly small sausages and then we went to the Marienkirche, the church of Mary. It had been quite destroyed during the war, and they rebuilt it. There was a little work being done on one of the spires, but it was completed indoors. There was a tile that looked as if someone's foot had been imprinted on it, and the explanation on a little plaque on the wall said that that's where the Devil stood the night it was completed. He stood there and laughed as from that vantage point you can't see any of the windows because the pillars block them all. The story goes that he stood there and laughed saying, "What good is a church with no windows?" Taking another step forward he could see them all and then recognizing his mistake he flew off in defeat.

We had an early evening, neither of us had slept all that much the night before, Mom on a plane and me in a hostel with an extra snore-y guy on of the other beds.

The next day we found how we could get out to Schloss Nymphenburg, the summer home of Kings and Electors. It was expansive, and had extended from one home (still quite large) to encompass two sprawling wings and hundreds of rooms. The paintings on the walls were gorgeous. The atrium was Rococo, and the gold leaf and extra frilly details were everywhere. The tour included a museum of porcelain and carriages. The carriages were as elaborate as some of the rooms in the house, it was interesting to think that they were actually used for processions. there were sleighs too, and I had never actually seen a proper sleigh (Santa's flies so that doesn't count). The porcelain had some really detailed pieces, I was drawn to a lion that looked frightened. That afternoon we went on a bus tour, and i worked to listen to it in French for practice. We went to The Deutsches Museum after the tour, and it is their version of Chicago's Science and Industry. It was a pretty cool museum, they had a lot on things on metallurgy and flight. It kind of mixed the Air and Space museum at the Smithsonian and Science and Industry in Chicago. I was pleased to see a pair of old Hiedelberg presses that were quite similar to the windmill press and the S27 Cylinder at Printing Partners. We ended up at Höfbrauhaus that evening. We enjoyed reading, pretzels and our beer.