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.

Day 1 in Germany - Discovering Munich

Day 1 – Discovering Munich

Theatinerkirche in Munich

This morning we woke up near the United Kingdom, ate breakfast over France, and landed in Munich around noon. We flew on a Lufthanza airbus, a pretty new, pretty nice plane that had a lower level with bathrooms, which kind of impressed us – none of us had ever gone downstairs on a plane before.  It was an easy flight, and we slept for a lot of it, sure, squashed into an uncomfortable sitting position with a child draped half over us, but still we slept, so jet leg wasn't too terrible.  We made our connection in Chicago easily, all except Paul's suitcase, which for some reason hadn't been checked through to Munich, and was still sitting in Chicago, waiting for him to pick it up.  We hope it will get here tomorrow.

View from St. Peters

The fun thing (probably frustrating is a more accurate term, but it's vacation, so it's kind of fun too) about going to a different country is that everything is different, and it takes a while to figure it out.  For example, until we missed our exit ramp from the highway between the airport and our hotel, we didn't realize that our rental car comes equipped with a GPS that doesn't tell you when to exit.  And until we held up traffic on a busy street trying to parallel park the rental car, we didn't realize that we couldn't figure out how to put the car in reverse.  Turns out you have to lift a thing on the gear shift and squeeze while you shift.  The manual was no help, not only because it was all in German, but also because it was about a different kind of car.

Window shop[ing for ladybug-shaped chocolates

We finally got to the hotel in the middle of the afternoon, and were pretty hungry, so we set out to have a look around.  Of course first we had to find a place to get some money, and it turns out ATMs aren't as thick on the ground in Germany as they are back home.  We didn't get a receipt, so we don't honestly know how much that cash cost us.  Then we had to find a restaurant that was open, because in Germany, lots of restaurants aren't open in the middle of the afternoon.

Paul and Kyra in Marienplatz

But it's good to have an excuse to get out on the streets of Munich to explore, and looking for an ATM and a bite to eat did the trick.  What we found was Mexican food – our first German dining experience.  And it was great.  We ordered our bottled water without gas.  We could have gotten it with, but it hardly seemed necessary with Mexican food.

We weren't sure how much Kyra was up for, given her first go at jet lag, and we were a little nervous about going to the tourist center, given that our hotel clerk warned us about a demonstration going on there that had closed the public transit stops in that area for the whole weekend.  I'd pictured mobs of angry people, hostile political diatribe, maybe violence.  After all, we're from Wisconsin.  Turns out there was some important meaning lost in translation, and that the demonstration turned out to be a street fair with an LGBT theme.  We got a tiramisu-flavored ice cream cone (excellent) and a free balloon.

When you're in another country, even something as trivial as buying a subway ticket can be a major headache (or adventure, whatever) when you have to do it at a machine, and the marketing guru who came up with the snappy names for types of tickets didn't take into account that someone who had been in the city for approximately 90 minutes wouldn't have any idea what any of it meant.  We probably wasted about 20 euros and about 20 minutes, only to discover that nobody ever collected or checked the tickets.

Kristin and Kyra at the top of St. Peter's

We discovered some of the usual tourist stuff, and it was great.  We went into a church that was 400 years old, with an unbelievably ornate baroque interior, while mass was in progress, which added a hushed reverence to the tourist experience.  We climbed the tower of St. Peter's, another old, old church, built in 1060, that had 303 steps, which is more than Holy Hill, and more than the old courthouse tower in West Bend.  And the view of the city, in all directions, was exceptional.  And then we climbed back down again.  And then jet lag caught up with us.

Kyra on the Playground

On the way back to the hotel, at 7:30pm, which was only 12:30pm West Bend time (and that's how you can really tell when someone still has jet lag, when they still care more about the time back home than the time where they are) we came upon a small park, with a playground that wouldn't meet any American safety standards, but was fun, and a basketball court with a sand floor (nobody was playing) and several ping pong tables, and some cool concrete Hippo sculptures for kids to climb on, and a couple of German girls who looked Korean.  Kyra's stated goal for the first day of the trip was to go to a playground and play with a German kid, so we stopped and she did.  And now we're back at the hotel, ready for another day.