Trip Report: Days One/Two - Munich

We arrived in Munich mid-day on Sunday, December 18^th. As always, we were really tired. We’d flown from Raleigh to London and then on to Munich - yet another delirious Heathrow layover in the books! We stayed at the Aloft Hotel right across from the central train station. This neighborhood turned out to be about the level of sketchiness you might expect, but it was very convenient for travel and only about a 10 minute walk from the historic core. The hotel itself was great – dead silent despite being on a busy street, and the room was huge, especially for Europe. It was a bit hipstery, being an Aloft, but on the whole a good place to base the first half of our trip.

After we checked in, we walked around a little bit to kill some time and then went to sleep at 4:00pm and woke up at 8:00 the next morning. Heaven.

Then we set out to explore the city. Bundled up!

 The highs averaged in the mid 30s the entire time we were in Germany, which wasn’t so bad as long as we had our scarves and hats and gloves. We were pretty tired of carrying all that stuff around by the end of the trip, though, let me tell you. After eleven years in North Carolina this serious winter business is definitely foreign territory.

This is the gate into the old city on our walking route from the hotel. 

One of the main awesome things about visiting Germany in the winter is Christmas markets. There are tons of them – even within Munich there are at least a dozen around the city. The markets Christmas ornaments and decorations, food of all sorts (especially sausages), chocolate, fruit, and gluhwein, hot mulled wine served in keepsake mugs. We ran across four markets in varying places completely by accident. The one we spent the most time in was at and around Marianplatz, the big square in the center of the historic old city.

There were stalls selling roasted chestnuts all over both Munich and Paris.

Marianplatz is famous for its glockenspiel in the city hall, which is a metal sculpture type thing does a… performance, I guess? – twice a day at 11:00 and 12:00. We coincidentally arrived right at 11:00 so we stayed to watch. As it turns out, the glockenspiel is pretty boring. 

We watched most of it and were mildly impressed but then we found out later it wasn’t built until 1908, which mitigates the impressiveness pretty thoroughly. If it were medieval that would be one thing, but come on, we had airplanes in 1908! The glockenspiel is the Mona Lisa of Munich. The most entertaining part of it was watching all the yahoos filming it with their cell phones.

Anyway, after that spectacle we walked through the Viktualmarket, with lots of food stalls and vendors. Also very Christmasy.

Here's Ben.

Ultimately we ended up finding our way to the Deutsches Museum, the world’s largest museum of science and technology. As you might expect from the Germans, it was extremely comprehensive. We stayed for at least four hours and I think Ben might have actually been happy there for the rest of his life. They had all sorts of weird stuff.

And of course breast cancer followed me on vacation, in a display about cutting edge cancer treatments (thank you, $692,000!).

We got some good food at the museum, our first of many schnitzels and sausages.

After the Museum we walked back for a pre-dinner break, and then had dinner at Wirtshaus Zum Straubinger. It was a very, very cozy place, a traditional Bavarian restaurant with wood paneled walls and waiters in lederhosen. 

The food turned out to be great, too. Ben got some pumpkin cream soup.

I got beer.

We were both served these balls of some sort of carbohydrate with our entrées and had to re-read the menu afterward to figure out they were dumplings. 

We split apple strudel for dessert.