I wanted to love Munich. Really! But perhaps it was due to a time constraint that I didn’t see this lovely city as thoroughly as I should have that caused me to love it less than the other wondrous cities that I had just visited on this trip. Could I have slaughtered a sentence more than that last one?!? Whew! Let me explain….
We arrived in Munich late in the afternoon, and I settled into my room with an adorable gingerbread cookie resting on my pillow. What’s not to love about that?
I ventured out with two sisters, Jolene and Julie, and their friend, Denise. We rushed to Marienplatz, Munich’s central square, to catch the last demonstration of the Rathaus-Glockenspiel in the New Town Hall consisting of 43 bells and 32 life-sized figures which Wikipedia aptly described as a tourist attraction.
I was standing next to Julie, and we both agreed that it was probably pretty good in its heyday, but it simply can’t be judged by today’s standards. Whatever! We saw it with our own eyes in Munich…once again, what’s not to love about that?!? Another tour friend, also named Julie, said that she liked the Shrek version better.
After the show was over (or maybe before?), we checked out the vendor area and little shops, eating our way through Marienplatz, of course!
My one regret is that I didn’t capture a photo of Julie putting the pretzel over her face proving that Munich pretzels are larger than a person’s head (which they are!).
I know this is silly, but I love the positioning of Julie’s feet in the upper corner of this photo…too cute!
We wandered around for a bit to do a little shopping. When we returned to our hotel for a little bit, we saw Sandro, our bus driver, who recommended the Ratskeller in Marienplatz as an excellent choice for dinner. He warned us that we might not get a table because it was so crowded, especially due to Oktoberfest. Because we are four stubborn gals, and we were thinking good thoughts that we could flirt our way to a dining table, we walked over to Ratskeller, and we were seated immediately. No flirting necessary, which was good because the servers weren’t very cute!
I’m trying to remember if all four of us were beer drinkers…I’m thinking not…but they have a mamby-pamby beer called Radler, consisting of half beer/half lemonade so we ordered that so we would look like legitimate beer drinkers.
After a full wienerschnitzel dinner (I still can’t believe I ate food like that),
we wandered through Marienplatz.
Soon after, I called it a night so I could rest. My poor aching feet! There is always a silver lining which is that I hadn’t gotten any blisters on my feet. You only have to know how much I suffer from blisters to understand how much of a miracle that is. I can deal with sore, tired feet….I simply can’t deal with blisters.
We woke up to a large buffet breakfast (no one can ever say that we didn’t eat well!) before heading out to the traditional costume parade. I was looking forward to that.
Once again, please believe me when I tell you that I have 100 more parade float photos.
Jolene and I left the parade early to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp around noon that day. We easily made it to the train station to buy our Dachau tour tickets all thanks to Jolene’s excellent map-reading skills.
On our way there, we saw many Oktoberfest revelers departing the train station for the fairgrounds.
On to Dachau.
I don’t want to post many photos of Dachau for the simple reason that it is an incredibly sad memorial site to visit, and it was hard to edit even these images. Here are a few.
One of the most important points to make about the insanity of Dachau is that you walk away with such a profound feeling of sadness that human beings can inflict such cruelties and inhumane treatment upon other people.
After what turned out to be a full day at Dachau, Jolene and I were too tired to consider going to the Oktoberfest fairgrounds, so we took a train ride back to Marienplatz and had dinner at the Hofbrau House. Let me just say that we were all missing vegetables added to our entrees. It was all meat and potatoes….yikes!
So, in the end, my regret in my not loving Munich was hardly the city’s fault but was merely due, as I said, to time constraints on seeing everything the city had to offer. I had wanted to photograph the fairgrounds and experience the beer hall festivities, but there was simply not enough time and energy to do so. It was nice to know, however, that other tour members had the best time there, meeting friendly people from all over the world and having wonderful memories because of that. For me, I was simply grateful to be in Europe, especially knowing that we were heading off to Italy to visit Venice next….WOO HOO!!!!
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