Muenchen

Well, what can I say? Muenchen lives up to everything its reputation would have you believe. From the enormous beer halls serving up huge 1 litre ‘pints’ (yes they are one litre and they taste so good…) to the amazing architecture riddled with history and the quirky Bavarian sub-culture, Muenchen has it all. There is also a fare smattering of World War II history here as well, if you know where to look. After all, Muenchen was the birth place of Nazism and the Third Reich. Hitler staged his first attempted uprising here in 1923 but was shot down and imprisoned for eight months where he wrote that infamous book, hmmm what was it called again? Anyway besides its darker history, Muenchen is a blast – if there is one place to visit in Germany I think it has to be this.

We left early on Saturday morning for our weekend adventure to Bavaria. Despite one of the usual German ‘phantom’ traffic jams we still managed to arrive in Dachau, the oldest and most famous of the Nazis concentration camps, (our first stop and about 20 km out of Muenchen) about lunchtime. I won’t spend too much time describing Dachau, it’s one of those places you most go and see for yourself to truly appreciate the significance of what went on there during the war years. Suffice to say, the one real gem or piece of advice that really struck home with me while I was there was this quote from one of the tour guides. “We will probably never know what makes people do such horrendous things to each other…However, what we can say is that we do know what political conditions allow for such things to take place.” Sadly, while Germany has learnt the hardest lesson from world war two it appears much of the world has not. Once you take away individual freedom, things get bad very fast.

Anyway, enough politics. After an afternoon at Dachau , we arrived in Muenchen feeling tired and ready for some of the famous Bavarian brown stuff. We checked into our hostel ‘Easy Palace’ (the place is much better than the name suggests), a recommendation from Lonely Planet – never leave home without one. So we hit a local pizza joint grabbed a quick feed, which turned out to be not so quick because the waiter took six years to get our bill for us, and then walked down to the ‘Augustiner Brauhaus’, one of Muenchen’s famous beer halls. This place was full of everything you might expect in an authentic beer hall from hidden courtyards to stags heads on the walls, not to mention the lovely women waitresses serving huge beers, all decked out in their local Bavarian outfits. Then things got interesting, we happened to run across, (or they ran into us) a local Bavarian stag do. The guys, there were six of them, promptly ‘educated’ us in local Bavarian custom. Things such as ‘schultz’, where if someone burps they say ‘schultz’ and everyone must respond by also saying ‘schultz’ and putting their thumb on their forehead. The last one to do it gets a slap on the forehead. I’m not sure if this is an actual Bavarian tradition or if these guys were having us on – I seem to remember getting more than my share of whacks on the forehead. These guys were pretty good company though and we ended up having a pretty good time with them.

Okay so we woke up reasonably early the next day with the intention of having a good look around the various sights of Muenchen. Our first mission, or rather Asia’s, was to go and have a look at the ‘Glockenspiel’ a giant motorized play half way up the new town hall, which incidentally is a pretty amazing building, with or without the Glockenspiel. One of the most amazing things about Muenchen, despite appearances to the contrary is that almost the entire city was destroyed by bombing in world war two. So everything looks like it has been there for centuries but actually is probably only 60 years old. While waiting for the ‘Glockenspiel’ to kick into action we managed to stumble across a free tour of the city. Anyway the best bit about this tour was the Canadian/Bavarian tour guide ‘Oz’. This dude was hilarious and the three hours that the tour took went by like a few minutes. After the tour we grabbed a quick coffee and a bite to eat before the three hour drive back to Gomaringen.

Another superb weekend in the land of beer and bratwurst.