\

Wanderung 12

Boarding a Bus Bound for Budapest.

April 2006

April 14th; Munich, Germany

We stumbled off our airplane and followed signs to get through immigration, where we for once got a stamp, and Customs, which in Europe nowadays seems to be most noticeable by its absence. Our pieces of luggage had made the flight with us, so we picked them up and rolled across a courtyard that joins the terminal to a small shopping center situated in the middle of the airport. The mass transit system in Munich involves busses, trains, subways, and real street cars, which I like. The density of the network reminded me of the network in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein we had used so extensively in Wanderung 5, and they offered similar types of ticket options. We bought an "all day" card for $15 and headed in to Hauptbahnhof (main train station) on an S-8 train. The airport in Munich lies even further on the outskirts than in Hamburg and the ride in required 41 minutes.

Our hotel, Pension Lugano, was about 3 blocks south of Hauptbahnhof, so we just rolled our luggage down Schiller Strasse (street) to it. Schiller Strasse seemed to be a street of hotels and restaurants; at one point I could see signs for at least five or six different hotels in about a one-block stretch. We signed in, unpacked, and wandered back out on the street to find some lunch. That turned out to be more difficult than it normally would because Good Friday is a legal holiday in Germany and only a few restaurants (and no shops) were open, but we found one around the corner that offered tasty grilled turkey meals.

The meal gave us the energy to walk around downtown Munich for the next several hours, and what a pretty downtown it turned out to be. While many of the buildings were new and sported modern architecture, there were enough of the old fashioned buildings with fancy gingerbread on them to give spice to the mix. Many of the streets in the center of the city had been converted to a pedestrian mall that was clearly an active and vibrant center for shopping, tourists, etc. For me, not worrying about traffic on the mall area made walking and photographing very pleasant. One of the old city gates was even still standing with its crenellated stonework and huge arched doorway.


 

The best known church in Munich was the Frauenkirche, and since it, like all good Roman Catholic churches, was open to the public, we stopped in for a look. The Frauenkirche had been heavily damaged by the bombing at the end of World War II, but the interior was perfectly restored and very bright, cheerful, and graceful looking with those tall Gothic arches reaching up to the ceiling. The only exception to the restoration was that some sections of the stained glass windows were quite obviously, at least to my eye, modern stained glass panels. I know from first hand experience that it is almost impossible to correctly match the color, pattern, and surface paintings of the old pieces, but it was still jarring to see a section of beautiful old glass window surrounded by noticeably modern glass with different hues, textures, translucency, and lead caning.


 

The Rathaus (city hall) was a crowning piece of Baroque architecture. In the central tower section was a huge "Glockenspiel", a clock with moving figures. But like the one we saw in Messina, Italy, on Wanderung 10, this Glockenspiel only played at 12:00 noon, so we were too late to see in in action. While I was wandering back into the Rathaus courtyard, I found a pretty gilded statue that probably represented the goddess of justice. Beside her was a stained glass panel with a rather fine grisaille surface painting that showed the Marienplatz (Mary's Square) apparently as it appeared in the 1800s. I always enjoy comparing the "then" pictures or paintings with the current look of things that I capture with my camera.


 


 

As we ambled about we kept running across brightly painted and decorated lions scattered hither and yon throughout the downtown. The lion is apparently the trademark of Munich and these fiberglass lions were works of street art. It's fun when a city does something like that to see the artistic creativity that is unleashed to customize each of the figures with some kind of theme. I especially enjoyed the lion in front of the Ratskeller restaurant that had been dolled up in a chef's uniform and was holding a whisk!


 

My energy was starting to flag, and by the time we returned to Pension Lugano the combination of fatigue, lack of sleep, and jet lag just wiped me out completely. I zonked out on our beds for a couple of hours, after which I had the time and energy to have an evening snack of milk, pita bread, and "Russian Brot", a curious novelty consisting of the letters of the alphabet baked in a crispy, crunchy chocolate cookie. We watched the 15-minute "Tagesschau" evening news program like we did on our previous visits to Germany (Wanderung 2, Wanderung 5, Ausflug 33), and I worked on the journal a bit while Monika read until it was time to go to bed.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
April 2006
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
Epilog

Return to the Wanderungs Homepage.
Sign the Guestbook or Read the Guestbook.
Comments about this site? Email the Webmaster.
Contact Bob and Monika at bob_monika@hotmail.com.