The weekend was spent in Munich. What a great city. There was a thick carpet of snow everywhere we went and the smell of broth floating out of every restaurant. As you walk past you can smell the rich aromas of goulash, all kinds of winter soups, roast meats, sizzling and boiling wursts and all manner of goodness floating from every old pub, restaurant and street vendor. Principally, I was here in Munich to plan a weekend excursion for our up-coming study tour, and that did happen, but it was also great to catch up with old mates from my time in Bavaria 20 years ago and enjoy the best Munich has to offer. If you are coming to Munich with students there is an endless array of things to do. You will almost undoubtedly start in the Hauptbahnhof (Main Train Station). It is a good place to start, just on the subway head just one stop to ‘Karlstor’. Tip: Check with the Bahn office, but you may be able to use your train ticket as a subway ticket also, depending on which one you have bought. That can save you some money. When you get out at Karlstor you are in the main pedestrian mall and shopping area of Munich. As you walk down the Kaufinger Straße (the pedestrian mall) you will see tourist shops selling Bavarian trinkets and loads of stores selling all manner of cool stuff, none of which you can afford. A few hundred meters down on the right hand side there is Munich’s most famous Lederhosen and Dirndl store, also very expensive but worth a look in. There are also myriad beer halls on both sides, but if you are underway with the kids, you may have to come back to enjoy what they have to offer. Tip: if you want to eat Munich Weißwurst anywhere (and you will), you have to eat it before 12pm. It used to be illegal to sell Weißwurst after 12pm before the days of refrigeration, but almost all restaurants have taken it on as a custom now and it proved devilishly hard to come by as we arrived at 12:20. As you head further down Kaufinger Straße you will come to the ‘Rathaus’ (Munich’s city hall). It is a fantastic old building with a Glockenspiel built into the tallest central spire. Tip: The Glockenspiel plays at 11am and 12pm (and only in the summer, again at 5pm). We missed it this time, but I have seen it before and I highly recommend it. The FrauenkircheAfter you have seen the Glockenspiel play through, the tourism office is just a little further down on the left. The people in there are lovely and will help you with anything you need, but you can also ring or email in advance and they will be happy to make sure you are ready to roll on arrival. Near the Rathaus you will see two tall towers belonging to the same building. Head over there and take a look inside. That is the Frauenkirche (Women’s Church, is the direct translation of its name. but I think it is called something else in the English guide books). Inside the Frauenkirche about 5 meters inside the doorway you will see a footprint embedded in the cement floor, this is called the Devil’s footprint. The story goes that the designer of the Frauenkirche (many centuries ago) set out to design a church with no windows that would be filled by the light of God from within. Short story is that the Devil made him a bet that he wouldn’t be able to do it and he took the bet on, assumedly at the risk of his eternal soul. He built the church and it had no visible windows and was nonetheless full of light seemingly impossibly coming from within the church, proving to the Devil that God loved him and the parishioners of his church. The Devil needed to see it for himself and came to Earth, entered the church and indeed saw no windows and but the inside of the church glowed with light seemingly from within. He was naturally angry to have lost the bet and, stamped his foot hard enough to break through the concrete and leave a permanent scorch-mark in the shape of his foot embedded in the ground before fleeing in a fit of rage. And that’s the story of how the Devil’s footprint came to be there. As a matter of fact, when you stand on the Devil’s footprint and look into the enormous, cavernous body of the church, you will see not a single window but nonetheless a glorious church full of natural light seemingly emanating from the walls of the church. Of course it is not the love of God that lights the church, but actually … actually I am not going to tell you. It is not miraculous in the biblical sense, but it is naturally lit and it will fill you with wonder. The RatskellerOnce we left the Frauenkirche, we moved towards the tourist office (Tip: open until 6 most days apart from Sunday). We had googled the location and it is at the bottom of the Rathaus. On the way to the tourist office, Max spied a doorway with 2 lions and an oversized bottle of Hessian wine, a type of wine which he insisted we all must try. Try as we might to persuade Max that we had other things to do, he insisted, we relented, and we all went into the Ratskeller (City Hall Cellar). None of us had been in there before, in fact none of us were even aware of its existence. As we descended staircase into the cellar, we were struck by the incredibly beautifully painted ceilings and the gorgeous old interior of the room we had entered. Apart from the electric lights and fridges, it could have been any time in the last few hundred years. At the bottom of the staircase, we saw a sign that read “If you have made a booking, please wait here to be seated. If you have not made a booking, wait here anyway. Don’t worry, we will find you a table, no matter what time, no matter how many people”. We looked around the room and saw maybe 100 seats. We exchanged a few sideways glances, we were all thinking that same thing, bollocks! We asked a waiter for this particular bottle of wine and he said ‘that way’, pointed and kept walking. We walked to the end of the room in the direction of his finger and ended up at a corridor, presumably leading to the toilets or something. We asked another waiter for a bottle of wine and she said ‘that way’ and pointed down the corridor. We asked to be seated and have the wine brought to us instead of the other way around and she said, ‘we don’t have it here, you have to go that way’, and pointed down the corridor. Unless the wine was kept in the toilets, I couldn’t see the point, but go that way we did. Walking down the corridor we saw the corridor open up into some small side rooms that were obviously restaurants, but were not open. At the end of the corridor we entered another corridor, this one with the photos of the “Wine Queen” every year since 1951 on the wall. We stared at these photos as we walked and quietly wondered what was going on. We asked another waiter for the wine and he gave us a map, pointed along the corridor and said, you guessed it, ‘that way’. A map! We were in a cellar, how big could it be that it needs a map! We looked at the map and it suddenly became clear that a map was just what we needed. Turns out that the Ratskeller, built under the Rathaus, is a series of rooms, some bigger some smaller, all connected by a winding series of corridors ending up in an 1100 seat series of restaurants which are ultimately all one restaurant, but in which different things are served in different sections. Incredible! If you are Munich you absolutely must visit it. When we finally found the section that served the particular wine Max wanted us all to try, I think we had probably walked 300m or more and passed at least 15 ‘restaurants’. But find the wine we did, and as we sat down to try it, the waiter recommended a plate of the local delicacies that pair very well with the wine. We relented and ordered that, too. When it came out it was a plate of a series of slices of thick, dark Bavarian bread. Each slice of bread had a different topping, and the various toppings included, but were not limited to raw pork mice with spring onion and pepper, goose fat with burnt bacon bits in it, and a series of ‘Presse’ (various meats pressed into a loaf and held together in gelatin). They were incredible! The wine was also very good. We left the Ratskeller and visited the tourist office. I had a plan in my head of what I would like to do on a two day tour of Munich and that has pretty much remained the same, but it was great to get all of the information in one spot and have get suggestions as to the order, opening times, ticket prices, age restrictions and other things. I won’t go through them all here, but you can contact me on the contact page of this blog and I will be happy to share my more detailed plans with you, if you wish. Here I will just give the outline.
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