Quite a bit, it turns out. But the beer was fine.
The train here from Zürich was a fast 4 hours, very scenic and relaxing. I loved the old style train arrival/departure boards; you know, the kind that have the old mechanical panels that all of a sudden come to life, clickity-clacking the new times and destinations, eliminating the trains that have already departed.
On the train we met Eric, who is getting his doctorate in music therapy. He splits his time between living in Switzerland and his home near Salzburg, Austria. Turns out he is a huge Neil Young fan, and don't you know I just happened to have a bunch of Neil Young on my iPad, including his newest album. So we had a great time talking and listening to music until he got off when we crossed into Austria.
Since then we have kept in touch by email.
We walked to our guesthouse, which was really a small hotel, about 15 or 20 minutes from the train station, back in a quiet residential area near St. Paul's Cathedral. It turns out this is Oktoberfest Central, but since it was June, all was quiet. We again had a simple, yet clean and comfortable room, dropped our bags and set out to explore.
Munich (München in Deutsch) actually smells like beer. I mean the grains. You smell the grains; maybe the slightest hint of hops wafting on the breeze.
It is a wonderful smell.
We decided we must taste and compare as many German beers as we can over the next two and a half days... uh, for our friends, of course.
We wandered up past St. Pauls, past the Oktoberfest grounds, noticing lots of church towers, bell towers, castle towers, with bells ringing all the time. Our first brewery - beer hall was Augustiner, founded in 1328.
So, let me describe the beer hall once, and you can apply the same basic idea to all the places we visited, though to be fair each place does have its own individual character, its own sort of sense of place.
The beer hall is enormous, open, with open beamed ceilings and light colored walls. There is an aisle down the middle, flanked by long, picnic table type tables running out to the walls. There might be a few windows, mostly no. The servers wear those white, puffy type blouses under a dark dress; the blouse may be low cut to emphasize the rather well-endowed younger waitresses, or it is a high-necked, buttoned up style for the older, more serious staff. The men servers all wear leather shorts with suspenders (lederhosen), white shirts, knee-high socks and heavy hiking boots. The universal talent, probably a job requirement, is that they can carry about eight fully loaded mugs of beer in their hands. There are tables occupied by the locals (they usually have a reserved sign on them) and then the open tables. If all the tables are full, you just crowd in and join the fun. Each beer pub serves its own special beers, so you are really going around looking for the style and taste you prefer. The standard beer is one litre (Think about that a minute. A bottle of wine is 3/4 litre.) though in many places you can order a half litre.
If you are a sissy.
It is hard to taste test at too many places in a day.
Anyway, I will save you time reading, and testing (when you go) and cut to the chase: you like history? You should stop at the Hofbräuhaus downtown. This is the place where Lenin used to drink, Hitler used to go discuss politics, drink, and give speeches, and Mozart lived just around the block and composed there. During the Thirty Years' War in 1632, Munich was spared because the Swedish invaders took a ransom of 600,000 barrels of Hofbräuhaus beer.
That being said: If you like beer, I mean really like good beer, and excellent food, then skip the others and just go straight to Der Pschorr.
Oh. My. God. Beer heaven. Up to this point in life, it was the best beer I have tasted.
All those stories about "warm" German beer... Not true. It is very hard to describe the beer as I have never tasted anything like it. Like very complex, sweet yet tart, coats the tongue and great after taste. Sort of has a wheaty taste to it, with maybe a hint of cloves? It kind of coats your whole mouth, feels silky, full bodied and tasty, yet very light like a Corona, with 13% alcohol and like I said, so full of taste. That is the surprising part: for such a light feeling, non-heavy, non-bloating beer, it has such rich taste. Hoppy like a pale ale but not bitter, more sweet like one of those dark ales, but not heavy like they are. Not syrupy at all, refreshing. Clean. Very clear beer, no sediment, even though... get this...
They roll the chilled, ten-gallon sized wooden barrel out and hoist it up onto the counter, then take a big wooden mallet and WHOMP! Drive in a tap, then POP! An aerator on top and the first glass or two out is all foam, as you can imagine... But then the clearest beer comes out, light brown. It keeps a one inch foamy head on it the whole time you drink. It never goes away. Amazing. They go through ten gallons in about a half hour, so all through dinner you hear RRRrrrRRROOOLLLL WHOMP! POP! I grew to love those sounds.
*Note: Since this trip I drank at Strahov Monastery in Prague. With all due respect to Der Pschorr... to read about it, simply click on Prague from the CATEGORIES list to the right ->
Anyway, I had two kinds of pork and that was also great, like I had never really tasted pork before. They are famous here for pork, ham and so on. Crispy, flavorful, with a gravy on it.
So we returned again the next night to eat and drink, and the only single regret I have about our time in Munich is that I simply could not hold more than a couple beers and one meal at a time
Back to exploring Munich:
I had lots of opportunities to practice my German. There are some nice fountains here, and a big cathedral with two towers. Frauenkirche. There are a lot of people buried in the walls of the church, in crypts, and their headstones line the road as you walk past, weird carved skulls staring out at you. I climbed the tower and got a great view over Munich.
It rained every day we were here, as it had in Zurich, so we were off to a wet start on the trip.
The U-Bahn (underground train) and S-Bahn (fast metro system) transportation system was a quick and easy way to get anywhere, fast, though when it wasn't raining we preferred walking.
We spent a wet day visiting the three Pinakothek art museums (Alte, Neue and Moderne), though the Neue (New) Museum was our favorite, simply because we like that newer era of art as opposed to all the older style, religious stuff. We also wandered over to and through the Brandhorst Museum, which had a really cool exterior of some kind of candy-striped ceramic rod design.
We ate little appetizer type foods in small cafes, drank more beer, were disappointed by the pretzels and surprised by the wurst.
At night we wandered the streets, people watching and window shopping, and ran into the best street band I think I have ever heard singing "We Are The People" by Empire of the Sun. Across the street at Benetton they had video cameras set up pointing out, so as you walked up to the moving-video ads you were inserted into them. Down the street a couple stores there was a waterfall, but the water falling was backlit, and the water was choreographed to spell words as it fell. Very cool stuff at night.
By some weird coincidence, some guy filmed the same group, singing the same song, less than a month after we saw them, and uploaded it to YouTube.
See the video below: if you want to get to the best part, skip right to 2:00.
We spent our last day at Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial.
It was a very sobering, sad and rainy day.
What can you say about visiting a site of death and destruction? I mean, what can you say that hasn't already been said, that doesn't sound trite?
One thing: you really should go, to see it in person.
We ended the day by taking the free shuttle bus over to the village of Dachau, which was a lovely little town, passed over by tourists. We ate at the Old Schoolhouse, where Gail finally just got frustrated trying to read the German menu and asked, exasperated, "Just a cheese plate, please!"
Turned out to be one of those fantastic meals you just stumble upon: great cheeses with wine.