Trip Report: Day Three - Munich

The next day in Munich was cold. I mean, they were all cold, but we weren't really used to it yet. We set off bundled in our scarves and hats, headed to the Residenz, the palace where Bavaria's rulers once lived. It's right in the center of town.

The attack on the Christmas market in Berlin was the night before. It was a bit unsettling, for sure, to head back out to crowded tourist areas. But as Rick Steves said, Europe is a continent of 700 million people - 3 million live in Berlin alone - and only 12 people died. No fear! I ended up never actually feeling nervous while we were in Germany. In general it's a very orderly and friendly society which felt familiar to us in an odd way, even though neither of us had been to Germany before. But we did see quite a few policeman in the streets after the attack, and their flags were at half mast.

Anyway, we got a little lost trying to find the Residenz and ended up in a park on what we later learned was the back side of the palace. I'm sure it's a lovely place to hang out when it isn't 27 degrees.

Finally Ben figured out where we were supposed to go. We ended up back on the street near Odeonplatz. Nearly all of these big squares in central Munich were used to hold giant Nazi rallies, which is a hard thing to not think about when you're wandering through there. That's a little Christmas tree lot right in the center of the square.

Once you enter the Residenz, the first thing you see is this giant fountain made completely of seashells. The most interesting thing about it is that, like most of central Munich, it was destroyed in World War II. So they went back out and gathered a bunch more seashells and built it again, for some reason.

This room was also mostly destroyed in World War II.

Most of these were, really. This palace went on and on, with one beautiful room after another, and nearly all of them had a plaque about how it was recreated after being destroyed in World War II.

There was a small Christmas market in the central courtyard of the palace. They were everywhere!

Ben walked all the way down this hall for a photo while a museum employee tried not to pay attention to us.

See:

There was a whole room full of relics - bones and body parts of saints. What a bunch of creeps. This is feet, in case you can't tell.

These rooms were gorgeous - and again, mostly recreated after the war. You have to admire their commitment to their history; in the US we would just raze the whole thing and build some mixed-use condos.

The prince had a giant velvet bedroom that was never actually used as a bedroom. It was just set up to impress visitors.

The last few rooms were all gold leaf and mirrored, which I guess was a hot thing back in the day.

The square at the other side of the palace was also a Nazi hotspot.

It's very picturesque.

And now for something completely different, we hopped on the train to visit the BMW Museum, a quick 20 minute ride outside the city center. Ha ha ha. It turns out that the line we needed was closed halfway there, which took us quite some time to figure out given that we do not speak or read German. Once we finally realized what was going on, we studied the maps for an alternate route, but then that line also didn't seem to be working, and we ended up at some random station where I ended up talking to a man in a sandwich shop to figure out how to get where we wanted to go. It turned out to be a 90 minute odyssey. After this adventure, I downloaded a full German dictionary onto my phone so we didn't have to piece together after twenty minutes of waiting that the sign said "line closed; use the bus instead."

Anyway, BMW has this whole complex out in the suburbs near the 1972 Olympic Park. This big building is called BMW Welt (World). I couldn't really figure out what it was supposed to be from the website and guidebooks.

It turns out to be essentially a big sales showroom. It was interesting to walk through. You can sit in all the cars and talk to employees about them.

You can't go inside the corporate headquarters, but the shorter building next to it is the museum.

Again, Ben was in heaven in this place. In addition to lots of cars, they had exhibits about the evolution of the motors and junk like that.

This was the first place we noticed that Germany is a bit weird about its 20th century history. BMW got its start making motorcycles, and in a display about the history of their manufacture, it says something like "the program was halted in 1944." Oh, you say? Why is that? They just assume you know, I guess.

There is also a whole section on the history of the company and workforce. In vague terms they allude to the fact that "forced labor" was used in BMW factories in the 1930s and 1940s, with the implication that they were somehow compelled to do this. We learned the next day that in fact BMW used huge amounts of slave labor during the Nazi regime, more than virtually any other corporation. After the war, most of its engineers and intellectual property ended up on the East German side of the divide, and it therefore took BMW years to get back up and running at the Bavarian headquarters.

It was interesting to cut back through the BMW Welt to see the modern cars after learning about the evolution of the company.

We headed back to central Munich - much easier now that we understood which metro lines actually were and were not running - and walked to an Indian restaurant for dinner. We needed a break from sausage!

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. 

Survivor, I guess.

It's been 679 days since I found the cancer. I'm still here and still cancer-free. I had a mammogram on Monday and was going to update the blog before then, since I assumed the results would be bad and, you know, I could get in one last post before I had to start writing about chemo again. But I couldn't get the app to work so I didn't get the post up, and then it turned out that everything was okay. That tells you where my mindset is, though, and will maybe always be. I fully expect the other shoe to drop. The shoe is too big; if you are a person who likes to be prepared, you can't safely assume it's going to stay in the air.

I also just debated going up and deleting "cancer-free," because maybe that's jinxing things to write it down. But I will be brave and leave it there.

Despite all those dramatic things I just said and the hard fact that I'm never not aware of it on some level, most of the time I'm fine. I tend to worry more about things when I'm bored and don't have anything else to think about. Fortunately my new job keeps me much busier than I was in the past so those times are fewer than they used to be. I have also found that I'm much more sensitive to uncertainty than I was before; I always thought things in life generally worked out to be fine, and cancer showed me this is not the case. Bad stuff happens when you least expect it, when you're doing everything right and are completely happy with your life, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. My cancer being a highly treatable Stage IA is not a comfort, because the fact that it exists at all is cold hard evidence: the jig is up. There isn't any reason it couldn't have been Stage IV. Or pancreatic cancer, or MS, or whatever. We are all subject to whims of the universe over which we have absolutely no control.

I swear I meant that paragraph to be positive! Really. But the point is that a fundamental part of my worldview has been proven to be false on a very deep level, and it's difficult to adjust the rest of my life to this new reality. I've lost the sense of innate confidence that I'm correctly interpreting the world and the people around me. I assume this will get better and easier with more distance from diagnosis. It's already better than it used to be.

Regardless, I press on. I only have one more scan at the 6 month interval and then I'm back to once a year. The odds are good: less than a 5% chance of both local and distant recurrence. Of the women I went through chemo with, none of them have recurred, and almost all of them had bigger tumors than mine that had spread outside the breast. Treatment is the best it's ever been, there is no doubt, and it's getting better all the time. But there's still no cure, either.

I want there to be a cure.

I want a guarantee. But I know none of us have that - the problem is, as a cancer survivor, you can't ignore it anymore. Nobody ever really believes some terrible random thing can happen to them. You can think you believe it, but until you get the diagnosis you don't believe it. I believe it. Now, for me, it's happened. It's real, and it can't be unlearned. We are fragile. Everything in our lives is out of our control.

So, uh, what I'm doing is going to Germany on vacation and having lots of cats. I'd like to say I'm doing a better job of being mindful and maximizing my health and appreciating what I have and all that, but in reality I'm still over here eating twelve Starbursts a day and freaking out about how the best way to efficiently serve coffee at the Board of Directors meeting. Just living, I guess. What else can I do? Tomorrow it will be 680 days.