Germany Day 2 - Quirky Combinations

Traffic signals for bikes too

Another great day, and one for odd combinations - pastries at McDonald's, surfers in an English garden, teacups at a beer hall and drag queens at the glockenspiel. It started with us wanting an early start, and sleeping until noon We slept right through breakfast this morning, in part because I couldn't figure out where I'd packed our alarm, and our hotel doesn't supply a clock, and in part because of jet lag. So much for my optimistic report yesterday that we'd mostly avoided that. We had lunch at a sunny café near our hotel, one where we had to climb steps to get from little room to little room, like an airy, glass-enclosed treehouse, until we got to our table perched near the very top.

Paul's last German class was about 35 years ago, so he understands only about one word in five these days, which is not enough to decipher a menu. The one word we recognized easily was "quiche," which is apparently the same in every language. It's not that we're not adventurous, more that we were starved, and that once we recognized the word, quiche sounded imperative to all of us. So our second German meal was French. It was served with a yummy yogurt herb sauce, and some sprouts in a balsamic reduction, and huge cups of strong coffee and rich cream. Mmm. Excuse me while I have a moment.

The McDonald's pastry counter

We'd planned to do a one-hour bus tour of Munich's highlights this morning, and instead did it this afternoon, which worked out well, given that it rained all day. In fact the rain is drumming against our hotel window now. Any other year we might have been disappointed, but it's been months since we've had rain at home, and we're enjoying the novelty. We saw some historically important and architecturally beautiful buildings, from the top of a double decker bus, and drove through the lovely English garden, where people were surfing on the river. Seriously.

Hungry again after the bus tour, we stopped at a McDonald's, because how can you not go to McDonald's, when you're an American in another country? Especially an American with a kid? And it was worth it, because this McDonald's had a gourmet coffee bar with an amazing assortment of desserts. We got ourselves some triple chocolate mousse pastries to tide us over until dinner.

The McDonald's also provided Kyra's first experience of having to pay to use the restroom. So naturally I had to teach her a rhyme that I must have learned as a kid, I'm guessing from my dad:

Here I sit, all brokenhearted;
Came to sh*t, but only farted.

Kyra found it hilarious (and repeated it often) but it also makes her a little sad.

The infamous Hofbrauhaus

Even though we weren't ready for dinner or beer, we had to see the Hofbrauhaus, the famous Munich beer hall where my mother got drunk, back when she was 19 and on her honeymoon. We went to the gift shop and bought her an official commemorative Hofbrauhaus teacup, which is probably more to her taste these days than the liter-sized steins (the only size they have here, which goes some way toward explaining my mother's only known bender on record.) To be fair, she claims (without any effort at being convincing) that she wasn't drunk -  she just felt like singing Jingle Bells that night, even though it was only May, and it wasn't her fault that nobody else felt like singing.

Glockenspiel in Munich's Town Hall

Our last stop was Marienplatz, home of the famous glockenspiel with dancing and jousting figurines, which only plays three times per day, and which was scheduled to play at 5:00pm. We arrived early, and enjoyed the end of a drag review going on in the bandstand on the plaza, the last of the gay pride street fair going on this weekend. The review stopped promptly at the stroke of five in deference to the glockenspiel, and started up again at 5:10. The audience was an interesting mixture of drag review and glockenspiel fans, and Kyra fit right in with her rainbow-striped umbrella.

Korean food in Bavaria

We made our meandering way back to the hotel after that. It's a nice enough hotel, but the pictures on the hotel's website show palatial rooms, and we're not really sure where they got them. Our room, a two-room suite, is small enough that the door to our bedroom only opens halfway before bumping the bed. You need to close it again to get to the door to the bathroom, and that entrance is also partly blocked by the bed.

But it has a Korean restaurant, a good one (with staff that can speak Korean, German and English, which is pretty impressive) and so our third German meal was Korean – Kyra's first experience with Korean food. We kept her away from the kimchee, because we're not idiots. But she tried everything else and loved it all, even the stuff you wouldn't expect. And I quote: "Can I have some more tofu, please?"

Now we're planning tomorrow, an earlier start, and a day trip to see Mad King Ludwig's famous castles.