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| From Germany-Munich-5 |
I think it was a summer palace for the royal family, but don't quote me on that. For 8 euro a piece, we got to tour the royal apartments, including the "Hall of Beauties", which is a portrait gallery of beautiful women. I'm not sure who commissioned this gallery, or why, but there were, indeed, some lovely young women depicted. We also toured the Marstallmuseum, which houses the collection of royal sleighs and carriages and porcelain.
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| From Germany-Munich-5 |
All I can say is: these people rode in *style*. (And did not believe in hand-me-downs.)
There is an absolutely gorgeous, and huge, garden surrounding the Schloss, so we took a lengthy stroll and stopped at the Amalienburg to see the hunting/entertaining mini-castle. The first room had several doghouses for the hunting dogs to rest and gun cabinets.
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| From Germany-Munich-5 |
The kitchen was also really interesting. We spent several hours in the grounds around Nymphenburg. There were many more buildings to see, but our feet were getting tired and we were getting pretty hungry.
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| From Germany-Munich-5 |
We have been debating what to do for our last 2 days in Germany, but we definitely want to see Neuschwanstein Castle. The castle is about 2 hours south of Munich, so we have to book a tour bus to get there. We could take the train and go without a tour, but it's cheaper and easier to do the pre-packaged tour. We got some info on the tours available at the Hauptbahnhof and then headed over to Marienplatz to find a yarn store and a Birkenstock shoe store (both for Autumn...). We were also starving at this point so we strolled the shops in hope of finding something that might gives us a meal that didn't include a pretzel. As luck would have it we came across a chinese food place that had a vegetarian menu with such exotic German delicacies as tofu and rice noodles. We ducked in there, ordered to lunches and destroyed them in no time at
all. Seriously. We stopped all communication for 10 solid minutes as we inhaled our food. Classy, I know. It hit the spot though. We've been having such small meals during the day - mainly consisting of snacks - that an honest-to-god stir fry was like a miracle.
After a late lunch, we went to the yarn store near Marienplatz. There was a ton of yarn, but not really anything spectacular. The yarn was arranged prettily, but there was mostly wool or things that I could have found in the US. The buttons, however... I told Allen that I sepnt an obnoxious amount on buttons. I didn't want to tell him how much and he didn't want to guess. We'll leave it at that. I will have you know, however, that I am now the proud owner of several eidelweiss buttons, some buttons with hedgehogs on them (!) and four - count them, four - sheep buttons with yarn legs. Totally worth it.
After the yarn store, we headed down the street to Tretter - the largest shoe store in Munich, according to the lady in the yarn store. As we hit the center of Marienplatz, we noticed a big crowd standing around, facing the Rathaus. We realized that it was 10 minutes to 5pm, and everyone was waiting to watch the world famous Glockenspiel. It's a big clock tower on the Rathaus with dancing (and jousting!!) figures, and it goes off only three times per day, including 5pm. We were hesitant to wait the 10 minutes in the huge crowd to watch it, but how many times in your life are you going to be standing in Marienplatz 10 minutes before the Glockenspiel chimes? We decided to wait. There was an American couple next to us, and the husband was helpfully counting down the time until the clock struck 5pm. "45 seconds... 30 seconds... 20...." At least Allen knew when to start recording the video. Allen took a rather lengthy video of the whole thing - close to 10 minutes of chimes and dancing figures. It's a neat sight to see, but a bit anti-climatic for being "world famous". The jousting knights were pretty fun though. We'll try to get the video uploaded, but it's huge, and long, and hi-def videos are hard to take. It looks like a squirrel on crack has hold of the camera most of the time. The Glockenspiel video is better as Allen has learned from our previous attempts to keep the camera fairly still, but it's kinda jumpy.
Once the Glockenspiel show finished, we kept walking until we saw a sign for Tretter. We ducked in and found the Birkenstock section fairly quickly. They didn't have the exact shoes I was looking for, but I still found a perfect pair. They're a bit eye-rollingly stereotypical, as you can see below. But I don't care. Know why? Because I have KITTY FEET!
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| From Germany-Munich-5 |
After dropping some swag off at the apt we're staying in, we went over to the Augustiner-Keller Biergarten. With an unassuming appearance on the outside, this Biergarten can apparently seat 5,000 people. When we went in there were so many different rooms with different feels to them (i.e. level of formality) we were pretty confused as to where to go. There's a basement section where you walk down this pretty precarious spiral staircase into a cellar that turns out to seat a vast number of people.
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| From Germany-Munich-5 |
There was a private function room where we almost sat down in the middle of some reserved meeting, a formal dining area, a couple of pub-esque rooms, and I'm sure we didn't even see it all. We took a seat outside among the chestnut trees where they had free standing gas heaters to make the seats more comfortable again. We had some beers and more pretzels but it was a nice time.
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We then got to so far as to make to Starbucks for the nightly blog post but unbeknownst to us, they closed at 9pm and we got there around 8:45. This was exacerbated by the fact Allen went across the street to buy tickets to tour the Neushwanstein and Linderhorf for our trip Sunday. Then, exacerbated by the fact they only accepted cash such that another trip to the EC cash was needed (or at least decided upon). And lastly exacerbated by the fact Allen got totally turned around within the Hauptbahnhof station such that he didn't surface again to our world until closer to 9:30; made for a difficult 45 minutes. We fortunately rendevoused at the next closest coffee shop which theoretically had internet too, but by this point we just wanted dinner and didn't want to go inside to buy more coffee so we could ask them how to access their internet.
So we finally head to dinner at a cute little Indian place by the apt. We had some Dal and Chana Aloo and it too was a comforting taset of "home". We had a good laugh by the end of the night that our "comfort food" has become international cuisine that we know we can (at least generally) trust.
Exhausted after another long day with lots of walking we packed it in for the night and prepared to plan the excursions for the next day.
But wait... What's that on my feet, you ask? Why, yes! Those *are* limited edition, made-special-for-the-200th-anniversary-of-Oktoberfest, Birkenstocks! Complete with gingerbread hearts, eidelwiess, mushrooms (!) and lederhosen (on the side)!
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| From Germany-Munich-5 |
(Turns out there was *another* Tretter - a HUGE one - that had the limited edition Birki's in my size!)
The shoes are cute! Hope the last day and trip home are smooth sailing...
ReplyDeleteJennifer