Tag: Munich

Finally a night when we sleep like normal people! After breakfast John leaves for Oracle, Munich. Our plan is for me to take the S-bahn out of downtown Munich and meet him at the Moosach stop at 4 PM. Since I do not know how long this will take, I am nervous about making the rendezvous on time.

I stay at the hotel and finish a book I am reading and leave around noon. I walk down Leopoldstrasse and look in the shop windows until the Giselastrasse U-bahn stop. I take the train into Marienplatz. I decide to be brave and have lunch. But not too brave since I only manage to go to McDonald’s where I have a hamburger royal, pomme frites, and a coke. Then I saunter down to the Hauptbahnhof and look in the shops there. I buy a magnet. I sit in the waiting room and finally take the S1 to Moosach, the end of the line.

I am way too early. I walk around Moosach hoping to find a cafe but it is Monday and nothing is open. I people watch for a while. There is an obnoxious drunk. Finally John picks me up just before 4PM.

We drive through the beautiful countryside on our way back to Stuttgart. We had missed much of the scenery on the way to Munich due to the fog. We check back into the Hotel Movenpick and eat dinner at the hotel. After watching CNN for a while we fall asleep.

Last night we fall asleep at 7 PM and wake up at 11:30 PM with only maybe 1/2 hour of sleep after that. It is a rainy day. We have a tour of the city at 10AM. Breakfast is the usual, cold cuts and such. We pass up the head cheese (as usual.)

We catch the U-bahn and take the tour. It is raining quite hard while we watch the glockenspiel at the Rathaus. The tour is interesting from the point of view that although Munich was 90% destroyed in WW2, the guide dates the reconstructed buildings from their original dates as if nothing has happened. “This church was built in the 13th century” when really mostly everything was built in the last 50 years. Their famous landmarks are rebuilt to look like the original old buildings but lots of buildings are ugly post-war 1950-60s architecture. I like Stuttgart better.

John falls asleep on the bus. We catch a cab back to the hotel. The cab driver is nice enough to come running after me with the umbrella I left.

We share a sandwich at the lobby lounge and a beer. I am totally exhausted but afraid if I go to sleep I will end up awake in the middle of the night again.

We call John’s father but there is no answer. Next we call the kids who sound OK. Sarah is angry because I do not want her to go out on Halloween with her friends. I think she is too old and the possibility of being involved in some mischief is too great.

We go to sleep around 10PM. Tomorrow we should be starting to recover from the jetlag.

Morning comes too soon today. I guess we did not get to sleep until well after 2AM and the alarm goes off at 6:45AM. After breakfast we leave for Munich around 10:20. Some of the countryside along the A8 is beautiful—hills and valleys with multi-colored leaves. It is kind of New England-like.We run into some dense fog which slows us down but arrive without getting lost around 12:45PM.

Our room at the new hotel is quite small and very noisy from all the traffic on Leopoldstrasse. We walk to the U-bahn and take it to Marienplatz.

We see the Rathaus with the Glockenspiel clock and the church with the two onion tops (Frauenkirche) and St. Peter’s. We buy a shot glass for Sarah. Munich is not as clean and tidy as Stuttgart. There are many more people.

We go to Weiss Brauhaus for an early dinner and order wurst, kraut, kartoffel, and bier. It is good.

On the way back we decide to try a different stop on the U-bahn and end up walking a long way. Exhaustion hits and we fall asleep around 7 PM.