Munich – Lots of Beer, Lots of Tourists

I arrived in Munich at about 4pm and immediately jumped on the hostels free WiFi to upload Salzburg blog and photos. This is not because there was any great need to upload them immediately, but because the line for check-in was out the door, and I don’t do lines at the best of times, let alone when I’m tired and hungry.

After grabbing a slice of pizza to hold me over, and then checking in after the line had depleted, Nic and I went for a walk through Munich. I needed some credit for my mobile, and a new camera after my 7 year old Canon decided to play silly buggers for most of the time in Salzburg. Nic needed to get a train from Munich to St Johann organized for the next morning so we went to Haupbahnhof train station first t organize that. Once the ticket was sorted, we headed into the main shopping area to find a Vodafone and a camera shop.

What immediately struck me about Munich was the old style ‘German-ness’ of its architecture. Well, that and the shitloads of tourists, locals and crazies out of the street. I put this down to it being a warm Saturday afternoon, and being as Munich has no Sunday trading, Saturday would obviously be the busiest day of the week. I got myself some credit and a new Canon camera, much the same as my old one but smaller, lighter and better quality.

After wandering through the city, Nic and I decided to go and check out the Augustiner brau-struben, which is the Augustiner beer hall that is not advertised, and mainly set up for locals. Due to this the steins are about 20% cheaper and the food nearly half price. Nic and I both had the mixed pan which consisted of a pork knuckle, pork steak, quarter duck and a big dumpling. It was freakin awesome. A meat fest indeed, and the beer was good too!

After enjoying our meal, we went back to the hostel, got cleaned up and met some people in the bar. We had all decided to go to Kultfabric, which depending on whether you believe lonely planet, or the staff at the hostel, either was, or was not an old potato factory. Either way, it is now a massive complex of clubs and bars, just a few hundred metres away from Ostbahnhof train station. In the end there was a group of nearly twenty people coming out, and somehow I had become the person with the information, so I was the person people were asking all the questions of. This effectively meant that I was running a pub crawl and not getting paid for it. I was reasonably confident what I was doing, but it still seemed a bit retarded that I was being asked directions by people who had been in Munich for a couple of days, when I had been there for a couple of hours. In the end we all got there with a little trouble and I was happy to have not been responsible for getting the group lost.

Kultfabric looks pretty awesome, and the idea of 25 clubs in one location sounds pretty awesome. Unfortunately the reality was that every club played pretty much the same cheesy music, had exorbitant cover charges and drink prices and overall was filled with the same mostly tourist, mostly douchebag crowd. The two things that kept me occupied where the antics of a 50 year old bald dude, who danced like Peter Garret and smelled as if he had been dancing without a shower since the early eighties. My own cheesy dancing with Nic and others was also amusing and overall, despite the 8euro cost of drinks, I still had a good night. Five of us decided to leave at around 3am, and being as I hadn’t got to sleep till 4am the night before in Salzburg, I was definitely ready to go.

Sunday morning I awoke surprisingly refreshed, as I got up in time for breakfast and then waited in the lobby for the Munich city walking tour to start. It was very interesting to hear all about the history of Munich, both its Bavarian history and more recent history as the birthplace of the Nazi party. Ozzie, our tour guide was very knowledgeable on all things Munich, but gave out a few questionable answers regarding what happened in West Germany and Munich post WW2. However, overall it was an informative and very entertaining tour. After the tour, I met up with Carly and Ash after they had done the New Europe free tour and it finished in the same spot. We walked back to the hostel and checked a few things on the internet before deciding the weather was good enough and it might be worth checking out the nude park for a bit of a chuckle. I didn’t really care about the nudes, but wanted to see the surf wave, which is in the same park.

Almost immediately after leaving the hostel, the weather started to turn shit. At first it was just a small sprinkling of rain, so we pressed on. We arrived at the park and it was windy, cold and raining gently, hardly the weather for nude sunbathers, so we searched around for the surf wave. We found the surf wave after a short walk through the park, and I was quite surprised at both the size of it, and the amount of people waiting around in full surf gear to ride it. I’m sure all the surf shops in Munich are pleased that what was originally an unintended accident resulting from some work to the waterway, had resulted in so many Munichians taking up surfing.

That night I went back to Augustiner Brau-Struben again, this time with Ash, Carly and Chris. We all go the mixed pan, and it was again fantastic, although Carly preferred to call it ‘pretty good’, saving her food admiration for the new Chicken Nugget burger at Burger King, which she described as ‘sensational’. After a the stein and meal we went into Hoffbrauhaus, which is the most famous beer hall in the world, and also a massive tourist hotspot with high priced steins and Bavarian behavior almost a caricature of itself. However, as much as it is expensive, and full of tourists, it is still a must see while in Munich, not just for the German band, German outfits and pretzel girls, but also for the fact that Adolf Hitler’s failed “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923 occurred in the same building. Woo was at Hoffbrauhaus with his Contiki group, which he happily ditched to hang out with Chris, Ash, Carly and Myself. Woo spent the time catching me and the group up on how much he hated his Contiki and how much he loved New York City. At the end of the night, Woo returned to his very drunk Contiki crew and we headed back to the hostel.

On Monday morning I slept in far too long and missed breakfast. I decided a pretty quiet day was in order, so I spent the first few hours getting my accommodation sorted for the remaining stops I hadn’t booked. I’m going to be burning massive amounts of cash over the next two months, so I’m gonna have to figure out some self control. In the afternoon I went out to look through some of the massive cathedrals in Munich as they were being used the day before when we did the tour, and hence couldn’t look inside. It’s weird being inside a Catholic church. They are so ornate and over the top, and seem to celebrate the death of Christ so much more than his life. Oh well. I don’t understand organized religion anyway, so why should Catholicism be any different? I went up the tower of St Peter’s Chapel, and got a lovely view out over the city of Munich, although by far the most amusing moment was when I passed a woman who was taking her dog up to the top, as I was coming down.

That night I went out for what Chris had described as the ‘best kebab of his life’ the day before, with Chris, Ash and Carly. To Chris’s credit, it was a pretty good kebab. Even Carly had to give it a better than ‘pretty good’ rating. We then said goodbye to Ash and Carly as they were off to Venice the next morning on the bus. I would probably catch Ash again in London, as she’s planning on staying and attempting to get a job. Chris and I again headed to Hoffbrauhaus, as a group of Busabout people were supposed to be meeting us there, but they had gone to Augustiner and decided to stay there. We met up with a few other people we knew and had a stein with them before heading home.

Tuesday morning I got up a bit late and had to rush to be ready for the Dachau Concentration camp tour. The camp tour itself was very sobering, as can be expected when one is walking through gas chambers and past ovens. It was, however, a very different experience to Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. As I did not have a guided tour of Sachsenhausen and could sit on the grass and take everything in at my own pace. I found that this gave me more opportunity to feel the place, whereas with Dachau I was being given information overload by Gordon, our guide, so it was all I could do to try to take in all the info, and was given little opportunity to feel it. Neither was better than the other, and I’m sure when looking over my Dachau photo’s I will have more of an opportunity to mull it over in my head and gather my thoughts and feelings on the place.

After returning back from Dachau I met Charlie in Marienplatz, the main square of the city where the infamous Glockenspiel is housed. We went for (another) stein at Hoffbrauhaus, as I do believe every visitor to Munich has to do it at least once, and Charlie had not been there before. After that we got some food and walked around, catching the 5pm Glockenspiel show before walking back to the hostel. After Charlie did some stuff on the internet, getting very excited about her friend meeting her in Geneva for her next workshop, we went for a walk on the opposite side of the hostel. When we got to the park, we couldn’t figure out what all the construction was, until we realized that this park is where Oktoberfest is held and they were already setting up the tents for it. I say tents, but really the looked more like aircraft hangers, huge sheds displaying the local brewers logo and easily capable of seating thousands of people.

I dropped Charlie at Hauptbahnhof to catch her train and then went back to the hostel to get a decent night’s sleep before negotiating two train changes on my trip to Bern the next day. Unfortunately, one of the three American dudes in our room actually snores loud enough to be heard clearly through my ear plugs, so my night was uneasy and listless and left me kinda cranky the next morning. I had plenty of time throughout the night, awake due to the sound of worlds colliding in the bunk above me, to think about Munich. I had first stated to think about how I felt about Munich while speaking to Ozzie, the tour guide a few days earlier, as he was almost comically pro-Munich, Anti-Berlin, and this grated on me a little due to my love for Berlin. I mentioned that I felt Munich was the Sydney of Germany, whereas Berlin was the Melbourne. He said I was the first Aussie to say that, a point which I found hard to believe due to the amount of Melbournites that had agreed that Berlin reminded them of Melbourne. So, as I lay there trying to ignore the snoring, I ran through it in my head.

Melbourne and Sydney both contain much of the history of the European settlement of Australia, just as both Munich and Berlin are filled with a rich history of their people over the last 1000 years. I think the differences come from how the tourists see them, and the feel of each city. Ask a tourist what they think of when they think of Australia, and after kangaroos and koalas, Bondi beach, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge are bound to come up, obviously these are all Sydney. Ask anyone what they think of Germany, and after WW2, most likely you will be told beer halls, and lederhosen. Both of these are not actually German traditions, but Bavarian traditions. Hence as you walk around Munich, it has a tendency to feel ‘more German’ than Berlin. Just as Melbourne doesn’t care that it has less of a touristy feel than Sydney, I doubt Berlin cares. Both Melbourne and Berlin exude a ‘do what you want, I don’t care’ attitude that is extremely freeing and pleasant in today’s society. It’s not as obvious as a giant bridge crossing the harbor, or the most famous beer hall in the world, but Melbourne and Berlin survive and succeed due to the way you feel when you live there.

I really miss Melbourne at the moment (can you tell?), and it’s made worse by the fact the Sarah and Nate will be moving there shortly. Hopefully some white water rafting in Lauterbrunnen and four days on the beach in Nice should make me feel a little better.