Munich Day 2

Apologies for the layout; it's a mix of my pictures and Rochelle's and I don't have the time to put them into proper order - I'm behind enough already! But I will come back and fix things up when I can.

First order of business today was a walking tour of Munich - after having probably too much breakfast at our hotel. German breakfasts are quite unlike anything I'd ever had before; there's hard-boiled eggs, something that is almost but not quite bacon and a lot of cold meat for starters and the muesli (at least the one I had) had chocolate in it. They make good coffee here was well - we knocked off a pot between us.

The walking tour went for about two and a half hours and was led by a great guide named Matt (a Canadian by way of the USA) and his brindle French bulldog, Rufus.

We went places like the Rathaus, the Frauenkirche, the Theatine Church, Feldherrnhalle, the Hofbrauhaus and a bunch of other Munich landmarks. Matt really knew his stuff and had a great manner, so we learned a lot and had fun.

After that we caught the train out to the part of town where both the BMW museum and the Olympic Stadium are - we intended to go to both, which we did.

Yes, our feet got very sore today.

Came back into town having decided to have dinner at the Hofbrauhaus - a very old-fashioned German place; picture people in traditional dress, huge beers and hearty Bavarian food. And yes, there was a band playing. But the beer was nice and the food was good.

And that was about it for day 2 in Munich. Pictures!

This was actually the second of two shibas we saw today; there was one earlier that we weren't quick enough to snap a pic of. That's three in two days!

Matt the tour guide.

BMW 850s outside the museum - one of my favourite models, almost entirely due to the pop-up headlights.

BMW also own Mini, if you're wondering why there's one of them here.

I don't think I've ever seen a real F1 car before.

Serious pipes.

I liked the look of this 1964 model. Turns out it was styled by an Italian.

Possibly my favourite of the museum.

Apparently they made a few hundred thousand of these weird door-at-the-front things.

I've always liked the M1, but I'm not sure about the colour of this one.

I think there is a Rugby 7s tournament coming up.

The BMW museum has a creepy robot lawn mower.

Dinner at the Hofbrauhaus.

Munich - Day 1

I still hate flying, for the most part. But, since it's the only practical way to get me to the other side of the world where all the places I want to visit are, I'm going to have to live with it.

Stopover in Dubai was pretty standard - though we got to our gate seemingly not long after the flight before had departed, so there was an abundance of seats. We had a few hours to kill, so we just kicked back for a while and had some fairly decent coffee.

After a good flight - we were playing some word search game on the onboard entertainment system and barely even registered taking off; the A380s are just that smooth - we landed in Munich.  There appeared to be some kind of power outage, though, since in the terminal we were in most of the lights were off and the escalators weren't working. Getting through passport control took ages since there were a lot of non-EU people on board and only 3-4 staff. Eventually some of the security decided to wander along the queue and ask where people are from so they could pull out those who were from the countries that don't need visas. Thankfully, this includes Australia, so we got though a lot quicker.

Rochelle's suitcase was on the conveyor when we got to it, so I grabbed it; mine, however, was nowhere to be seen. And remained unseen for quite some time - long enough for me to get the kind of concerned/paranoid/frustrated that I tend to get when I've been awake for 36 hours straight (not counting the few hours of the non-continuous/poor kind on the flight from Adelaide to Dubai), which made me head in the direction of the luggage desk to check whether all the bags from our flight had come off. They said they hadn't, and when I turned around I saw that mine had come out and Rochelle had grabbed it.

After finding the part of the airport that had useful signage (for some reason the section we were in lacked any reference to trains) we bought tickets for the train to town. Next was getting from the train station to our hotel (a bit more challenging thanks to phone data taking a while to come online plus the failure of the backup plan for that exact situation*) but after going in circles a few times we worked out where to go, found our hotel and checked in.

After getting to our room and having showers, we had a bit of time to run around and look at things, specifically the Munich Residenz.

Pictures!

It seems that it being three years since my last trip has done little to diminish my fondness for creepy/ugly people in paintings.

One on the ceiling

After the Residenz, we went for a bit of a wander. Found the Theatine Church.

And the war memorial.

The new town hall in Marienplatz.

Us, in front of the Feldherrnhalle.

We found a nice-looking place to have dinner at - though it took us a while to work out that they had a pretty extensive food menu and weren't just a pub; we looked at a couple of different menus and couldn't find one in English. But we got one when we asked. And we wound up with all of this, which includes a half pork knuckle with dumplings, steak & potatoes, a salad and spaetzle - which, if you're unfamiliar, is essentially German mac & cheese. And this had dried onions on top and was amazing.

No, we didn't get through it all. Yes, our waitress judged us severely for that*.

We saw a shiba!

*Screw you, Google; your offline maps option is unhelpful fucking garbage.

*She was right to do so; we ordered way too much.