Some of us decided to start our day by pouring full-on cream into our granola like it was milk. I was not one of these people – not eating breakfast has saved me this pain. Apparently it was extremely gross. I wonder what the convenience store clerk who sold us four big bottles of cream thought. (“Wow, these foreigners sure like cream.” or most likely “???”) Our Air B&B owner is definitely gonna enjoy the four remaining bottles of cream we are leaving her.
Failed attempts at making cereal aside, today was a day mostly free of traveling long distances. We decided to explore the city without a plan in mind, so we chose to do a bike tour of downtown Munich with Mike’s Bikes. Munich is an old-looking city with lots of pointy spires. If you were a giant, you would definitely want to avoid stepping on Munich.
But first, before biking, I started my day with a chocolate-filled puff. The most important German word I know is one I learned after many trips to German christmas markets: chocolate. It helps me get all the things that are the most important to me.
Our energetic and boisterous tour guide, Will, gave us an overview of Marienplatz, which is probably the most iconic part of Munich. Dominated by the pokey new town hall on one side which has a fancy glockenspiel on it (which goes off three times a day for 9 minutes), the plaza was relatively empty on this sleepy Sunday morning. All the shops were closed because Sunday. Munich was originally established by monks and was on the salt trade route way back in its beginning.
We got a crash course on how not to crash on our bikes and set off along the streets of Munich! Unlike the time we rented bikes in South Korea, my bike had a working bell. Yesssss
The city center was 90% destroyed in WWII, and most of the buildings are relatively faithful reconstructions of the originals. Munich is exceptionally friendly to pedestrians and cyclists and has loads of cobblestone sidewalks everywhere.
We wound our way through cobblestone streets, learning about some of the more famous leaders and their impact on the city (such as many Ludwigs). Munich was generally progressive for its time, embracing the concepts of accessible education and allowing women to own property and vote (!!) much earlier than many other cities. We passed by lots of monuments to famous leaders (Bismarck, Max Joseph, and more Ludwigs). Our guide also highlighted areas and ways that the people of Munich resisted the Nazi police state rule by avoiding walking past a certain statue, marked with a gold path in an alleyway near the Theatine church.
Sometimes I wonder about what people did near statues before you could take pictures of/with them. Anyway, pictures is what I took.
From there, we cycled through the English gardens, which was like Ueno park but quite sprawling. Lots of gravel paths criss-crossed each other and we got to ring out bike bells and dodge slow-moving tourist hordes. I took some danger zone bike selfies as we rode through the park to our beer garden destination. Will warned us that there is a colony of old nudists that like to galavant about on warmer days. It was thankfully not warmer today, and we saw no old naked hippies.
The beer garden we stopped at has seating for a few thousand people. It was busy, but not too bad, and there was a band caged up in the Chinese pagoda playing polka songs while we ate because this is Germany. I sang “In heaven there is no beer” to every song because I am sure those are the words to every polka song to exist. I naturally got curry wurst as it is generally the best wurst!
After drinking beer, we hopped back on our bikes (10/10 highly recommend beer + biking combo) and finished up our ride through the park’s many paths, until we got to some surfers (??) who were using the city’s clean waterways as a place to hang ten. Will informed us that there are almost always people surfing here, even at 2am.
After the mysterious surfing discovery, we carried on down the river, dodging tourists and witnessing an altercation between our guide and some German dudes who gave him sass about having a large group of cyclists on the walkway (I think). Altercations aside, the river was pretty with golden leaves fluttering down off trees as we pedaled along.
Our tour ended with us back in the main square, and we decided to hit up some of the restaurants our guide mentioned for beers. It’s maybe a good thing that it’s Sunday and literally every souvenir shop and other shop is closed, or I’d have used the time to purchase elaborate ornaments or yet another travel mug.
We meandered a bit before dinner as we tried to find cheesy spaetzel, and ended up going into the St Michael’s church just as an organ performance by the renowned french organist (organ player? organ master?) Jean Guillou was ending.
After successfully finding our spaetzel in the Ratskeller, we headed back to our home base. Tomorrow is a day trip to Neuschwanstein castle and Fussen!
I’ll leave you with some Foohoosia.
