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An early morning of a brisk walk to the train station, a quick zip to the airport, and 1.5 hour flight later I have arrived in Munich! i wasn't sure what to expect, but maybe I was thinking more along the lines of Roman-style cramped city since that's what I'm used to seeing now, but looking through the windows that were collecting frost as we descended upon our destination I found grids of green grass and farmland interrupted with clusters of trees and small pinches of houses every so often in little communities of several hundred people. The buildings did look traditionally German with their crisp, flat lines, dark accents, and sloping rooftops.
I hopped on the S-Bahn to arrive city center where the hostel is located. I passed by the green spaces and industrial remnants I had seen from above, bare-leaved forests flashed by and I could make out darker shapes (people taking walks) through the thin trees that soon turned back into farmland. My trip was accompanies by the background noise of rambunctius German teens chattering away as they slapped playing cards across their thighs playing a game of some sort. I went from knowing the ins and outs of Berkeley like the back of my hand to understanding tidbits of conversations and basic signs and descriptions in my Italian immersion, but now I feel like I am completely lost in translation as I can only make out the grumbled "Hallo"s and meekly say "Danke" in hopes that my atrocious accent will not offend the locals. All I can say is that goodness everything is priced in Euros because otherwise I'd be holding up the line even more than I should.
I arrived safely at the hostel which is minutes away from Marienplatz and the main central station in town and reunited with my friend who had arrived a day earlier (sigh, travel logistics). Grabbing just my camera and some cash we went out to explore the city and take advantage of the €1 museum admission on Sundays as we walked through Marienplatz and marveled at the Glockenspiel, entered a church upon curiosity and found an ornate procession going on as people were dressed in traditional costume and attendees sang in unison. The church itself was beautiful and smelled on incense, and the smoke wafted towards the gold-encrusted frames around the paintings lining the top of the ceiling. We also passed by the Residenz and the garden on our way to the Neue Pinakothek where we spent a few hours moving through the twenty-odd rooms gazing at portraits of Ludwig and arrived at my favorite room of Van Gogh and Impressionist artists where I probably hogged the space in front of Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Monet's Water Lilies for a bit longer than I intended to.
Mid-museum visit we noticed that the weather outside was whipping white flurry into the air... yep, SNOW!! I think that was one of my first times being in real falling snow that wasn't just piled up in Tahoe. We walked around outside as flakes hit our faces, basking in the strange sensation until it let up not too long after. A decision to skip the Alte Pinakothek and to take a quick peek into the Pinakothek der Moderne had us face to face with a weird furniture display that took up an entire floor, showcasing groovy 70s chairs, dressers that looked like they were from a vintage IKEA catalogue, and old MAC computers and inkjet printers (did you know that they are so "old fashioned" now that lining them up on a display table is considered modern art? Neither did I). Audi also hosted a model exhibit on the ground floor, which featured a wall of small model cars and two full-size skeleton cars mounted on the wall which I will admit looked pretty cool, even for a non-auto buff like me. The rest of the museum displayed everything from lightbox photographs which explored the idea of photo v. TV v. cinema and our changing perceptions of medium and reality to an installation of a few black strings breaking up the emptiness of a white room which toyed with the perception of space and form. Another floor up led to discovering paintings by Picasso and Matisse alongside the works of Dali and Klee. While modern art is not always my cup of tea, this gallery did host some interesting works.
We decided we were ready for a break after the last floor and headed back towards the center of town in search of a hot beverage (mmm, chai tea latte) and lazed around for half hour in the forest-like common room in the hostel, complete with fake trees, hammocks, and fairy lights. For dinner we went to the famous (though we literally had no idea its significance at the time of our meal) Hofbräuhaus for some beer and sausage. We decided we needed to partake in some cultural immersion and ordered ourselves each one liter of the so-called liquid gold that came in a jug as big as my face... but it was delicious! Upon major food-coma thanks to the hearty Bavarian feast we decided to call it an early night and passed out before midnight. It was weird to just spend the morning traveling and the rest of the day in a new city because I am so used to dedicating whole days to travel, but I'm glad to know that I am actually capable of taking planes and making it to places on my own, and that hostels aren't that scary after all!
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