August 26, 2015

August 26, 2015

We are up early because we have a train to catch.  On the way to the station we buy some snacks and a bottle of French wine for the journey.  One of the joys of train travel is being able to eat, drink, and sleep (or knit) while somebody else does the driving.

In less than an hour we are in Zurich close to the border with Germany.  Switzerland is surprisingly small.  It would just about fit between Tucson and Phoenix.  In Zurich we catch a train east across the northern section of Switzerland.  It is very different; mostly flat with rolling hills, larger farms and no snow-capped peaks. The terrain, once we cross back into Germany is similar. We see lots of solar installations in the German countryside. Surprising considering how little sun northern Europe gets.

Aimee and I perused a German language paper left on the train.  We are able to discern the gist of several articles.  German is not the inscrutable language I thought it was.  We studied a little German for this trip, but you can decipher quite a lot with just your ears.  After all English and German have a common Teutonic origin.  Many words of German seem like English spelled very poorly with a thick accent.  For Example, the train regularly flashes “Nachster Halt”.  Knowing it is pronounced “Nexta Halt”, you can readily guess it means “Next Stop”.

After a 5+ hour journey, we pull into Munich and walk to our nearby hotel.  At first I think we got off in the wrong city.  I don't see any Germans.  All we see are people of Middle Eastern descent.  Probably Turkish. After WWII, Germany imported lots of foreign labor to help with rebuilding their infrastructure.

After checking into our hotel, we walked to the nearby Old Town.  I was here some 31 years ago, so I give Aimee the dime tour showing her the Glockenspiel on Marienplatz and St. Michael's Church.  We walk into the famous Hofbrauhaus intending to have a brew, but it is mobbed with tourists.  So we instead head to the nearby Residenz, the home of the ruling family of Wittelsbachs.  They ruled the kingdom of Bavaria for some 700 years until the end of WWI.  We first tour the palace theater.  It is very lavish and and can easily hold hundreds of audience members.  When the Wittelsbachs hosted symphonies they must have invited every German royal. Afterwards we toured the Treasury Rooms where we saw lots of gold crowns and jeweled scepters and ornamented everything.  The Wittelsbachs had a lot of money.

We had intended to leave the palace museum till tomorrow, but we discovered the large tour groups are gone by late afternoon.  So we go for it.  It is a chore though.  The Wittelsbachs city home is palatial.  It goes on and on and on. Unfortunately much of it was destroyed in WWII. Over the years a lot of it has been restored, but it is still a mixture of original with recreation. Some of the rooms are fantastic.  The oldest, most authentic, and most impressive is the Antiquarium, originally built to house antiques, but turned into a banqueting hall. I have mixed emotions after seeing this palace.  On the one hand I am saddened by the breadth of cultural loss by the bombing.  On the other hand, the restoration seems kind of fake because of what is missing.  But seeing these kind of riches, I am always surprised how these monarchies got away with sucking the wealth out of society for so long. In the end, we have to sail through it, to finish before closing.

We are tired and thirsty so we stop at the first biergarten we see and have potato soup and a couple Bavarian pretzels with a big mug of Spaten beer.