Munich

On Saturday, we drove up to Munich from Axams, Austria where we had stayed for the week. After dropping off our car back at the rental place, we took the train downtown and explored a bit! Munich was quite big and busy after spending a week in the Alps!

We went to an open air market for lunch that had fresh fruits and veggies, lots of breads, honey, flowers and more. It was nice to walk around and eventually we settled on a bratwurst and roll for lunch and ate it under the trees. After getting bombarded by people and tour groups while walking through the main square, Marienplatz, we took off walking to the English Garden to see something a little less crazy.

Here is Chet in the open air eating area... lots of people because it was a Saturday and families like to go to the market for tasty fresh foods. We enjoyed people watching for a bit.

On our way to the English Garden, we got sucked into the above shop. Look familiar? Yep, we didn't intend to go to Starbucks, but Chet really needed a bathroom and we were walking by. So we decided to check it our and ended up getting drinks. It was funny to see a smattering of English and German words comprising the menu. Oh, and if you don't say what type of milk you want, you automatically get whole milk. My chai tea latte was certainly very creamy that day!

We made it to the English Garden but on the edge we found surfers and watched them for awhile! When the Rick Steve's book was describing how to get to the center of the garden by going by the surfers, we sort of laughed. But, no... there is a continuous wave and probably about 10 surfers out there surfing across the wave on the river close to the middle of downtown. We probably watched for about 40 minutes because they would try to do tricks and each had a slightly different style.

Here is a view of the Munich skyline from the park. It was such a lovely place with walking trails, lots of greenness and a bit of quiet. In one area, there is a Chinese pagoda that had a German band playing over top of a beer garden. I guess this park has areas that are known for nude sunbathers in the summer so we both agreed that we were glad it was cold, gray day.

That evening, we actually scheduled ourselves a tour. We went on an educational Bavarian Beer and Food tour where we learned about the culture around food and beer in this region and sampled different types of each. It was all English speakers so we had a great time talking to couples from Scotland, England, Sweden, Australia and the US. The guide was also very informative and entertaining. We both agreed it was a fun evening.

The next morning, with limited time before we needed to head out to the airport to head north, we took off to spend time at the Deutches Museum. It is a large museum about anything technical... has 6 huge floors of exhibits and likely it would take days to go through! We both loved it and would love to go back. It has areas about mining where we were in "mining caves" and saw tools and techniques of mining. There were areas about marine navigation, musical instruments, power tools, electricity and more.

Here are pictures of the airplanes. So cool! The one above is a Wright Brother's airplane... one of the model ones when they made about 10 around the turn of the century. The plane to the right is a replica of the "Red Baron" WWI airplane. None of the tri-planes survived from that era so they recreated it for this museum.

One funny thing is that in the Rick Steve's book, it said that all buttons were meant to be pushed! It was true except for... Chet pushed a button just inside the door to the electrical exhibit when we first arrived to the museum... it was red and newer looking... and it closed both the doors automatically! Guess that wasn't one to be pushed! I don't think anyone was watching though... :)

Well... as we took off to fly north, this wonderful section of our trip came to an end. Then, the travel woes and bumps in the road began...