Maps

We had two lists (in German) of things to do in/around Munich, so our first objective was to find a map. Stephanie had given us directions to the City Hall which we "couldn't miss" and said that there would be maps at the information center there. Soon enough, we were more or less lost, because guess what? The city Hall isn't called "City Hall" in German. But, it was sunny out and we were walking past some yummy looking bakeries and nice looking shops. There were lots of people out so we figured we were probably in a good area.

Then we heard some music that sounded like bells. It was noon, and Stephanie had said the Glockenspiel was played at 11, but we had no clue where we were or if what we were hearing was in fact the Glockenspiel, or if the Glockenspiel was anywhere close to the City Hall and/or a map. We were thoroughly disoriented; maps are my savior in a new city. But we were in front of a huge, gorgeous building from which the music was coming from. There were colorful miniature statues of people spinning around and it definitely sounded like bells. This building was facing a large square which had quite a few people staring up at it, many taking pictures. So I assumed that yes, we are somewhere well-known at least, and we probably just heard the Glockenspiel.

After starting to walk away from this main square, I figured we must have missed something and that the City Hall must have been back in that huge square. Maybe we just needed to look a little closer? Sure enough, on ground level beneath the bells was a little blue "i" that globally stands for Information. In other words, one of my best friends when traveling.

In the tourist information office though, all of the maps were for sale. How ridiculous! Every city has free maps somewhere, if you just know where to find them...There also weren't any just plain maps, just Munich guide books with way too much information in them for our 48 hours here and lots of pamphlets advertising guided tours. I had the clever idea to go talk to somebody at the information desk. On the counter taped in front of her was a city map. Hallelujah. It cost 0.40 Euros. Lame. I had seen somebody outside with a "Free Map & Guide" booklet which I assumed was for Munich (this company does "Free Map & Guide" booklets for tons of major cities, so I recognized what it was from a distance. When I told the tourist information lady this, she said she didn't know where they had gotten it, perhaps at a hotel. Well, whatever, we needed a map so I'd pay 40 cents for it if I had to. Then she just handed me a city map and a subway/S-Bahn map. I asked her if these were 40 cents together, because the counter clearly said that just the map was 40 cents. Then she said, no, she had just given them to me for free, and if she was going to charge me for them she would have asked for 40 cents! She came across as a little snappy but I said thank you very much and shuffled away with my new free treasures. I loooove free treasures.

Also, I don't think I've written about this yet, but I am trying to collect maps from each city we visit. I like it when they look worn or have places circled on them or stuff written on them as a testament to what we did there. I plan on using all my maps to make some homemade wallpaper someday. In my head it looks sweeeeet! So getting a map was good for multiple reasons.

Once oriented and after the information shop, we realized that we were in Marienplatz, Munich's famous square, and that the building we were in, the "Rathaus" was the City Hall, and the music we heard was the Glockenspiel. So we accidentally accomplished quite a lot!

We wandered the streets to go take a look at the Hofbrau house. Everybody we talked to (the man on the train and Stephanie) said that it was exclusively filled with tourists, but nonetheless, everybody would ask if we went there. Stephanie said we could just go take a picture of it and that would suffice (since Laura and I aren't really into tourist traps). So we took a look and I took some pictures. The inside of it was huge, well lit, and mostly empty. There was live music playing and the walls were colorfully painted. It reminded me of a church...for beer. Nobody could really tell us why the Hofbrauhaus was famous so we read a little bit about it at the information office. Apparently, in the olden days, you had to have a special license to brew beer and the Hofbrauhaus held the only license for around 200 years. This means it was pretty much the only place to drink in Munich and became well known for its beer. Later on, just before World War II really got going, the Hofbrauhaus was the location of the first large meeting of Nazis. So there is some interesting history behind the place.

That seen, we walked to the Englischer Garten. It is the biggest garden/park in Europe and one of the biggest in the world. We were told to go see the Chinese Tower, somewhere in the middle of the garden. It was a perfect day for strolling the garden paths. It was sunny and warm, and tons of people were out. A lot of old people and a lot of miniature people with mommies and strollers in tow. There were lots of streams, creeks, miniature water falls, ponds, lakes, etc. We eventually reached the Chinese Tower, which oh-so-conveniently happened to be in the middle of an enormous beer garden! I think this was the first "real" beer garden I've ever seen, and it was beautiful. I've seen little beer gardens at festivals like Bumbershoot but not one like this. There were just sprawling green tables and green benches in a loose circle. The circumference of the circle was filled with pretzel and bratwurst shops (as well as a host of other German food) and of course beer stands. People at each table had a huge mug filled with a liter of beer, usually one per person. And that's what they were doing on a random Monday afternoon, just sitting in the sun in this huge garden drinking enormous beers together. Fantastic. Laura and I got a pretzel the size of my head, a 1/2 meter long bratwurst, and a white breakfast sausage and split all of that. I was very brave and ordered for us in German. It was really scary, even though it was very few words. I know Europeans generally think Americans are either terrible at languages or too lazy to try out the local languages (which is all true), so I just said what I could, terrible accent and all and hoped they understood and/or appreciated my effort. To my surprise, they either didn't pick up on my American accent or didn't know English (again, not tourist season) so they responded to me in German. At that point I had no clue what to do and just looked at the numbers on the cash register. Still, I am glad I tried it! It's a little scary, but fun to try. I really enjoy learning a few words from the country I'm in. And seriously, ordering one of anything requires 3 words, "one" "food item" "please". It was quite a hearty lunch so it filled me up with my portion of our liter of beer. A delicious lunch and very cheap. Also, I think it was mostly locals there which was cool. I heard little to no English, and it's not tourist season yet so it definitely felt very German. We sat at our table in the sun for a while, each of us fell asleep at some point. It was wonderfully lazy.

When we finally decided to peel ourselves off of our table, we saw a lake on the map that we started aiming for. While we were walking away from the beer garden, I saw something in bushes. I have a bad habit of looking at the ground a lot when I walk, but every once in a while it pays off by me finding some really cool random thing (usually small coins). But today, my eyes were caught by the glint of sun on clear glass. A BEER MUG. Surely, it must be broken, I though, since it looks quite carelessly (read: drunkenly) thrown into the bushes. If you were going to take it away from the Beer Garden, wouldn't you be more careful about stealing it...? Anyway I rushed over to it and found it to be dirty, but whole. It was a large, one liter mug (the kind that everybody drinks out of here). It had the famous Hofbrauhaus logo on it with "Munchen" written beneath. Very plain and basic, but I loved it. A similar mug in the HB shop would cost 8.9 Euros (I checked). So it's not like I found something extremely valuable. It looked like it had been sitting in the dirt and leaves for a while, so I decided to adopt it and carefully put it in my bag. Yay! I really couldn't decide if this was stealing or not. But when you get a beer from the beer garden, as we just had, they give you a token. When you return your mug and the token, they give you a Euro back. Not a sizable incentive for NOT stealing, but it was something. We obviously didn't have our token before, and everybody there had only spoken German to us. My German was definitely insufficient to explain that I found it and didn't steal it. Also, it looked pretty worn so I figured they'd been missing it a while and had probably gotten over it. Later I asked Stephanie's opinion and she said that there are soooo many of these mugs that they really wouldn't care about losing one. Conscience cleared!

The lake was beautiful and reminded me a lot of Green Lake. There were a lot of runners and bikers going around, and there were tons of ducks and swans and at least one peddle boat meandering through the water. We duck-watched for a while which was surprisingly amusing. These were the funniest ducks I've ever seen! A lot of them were fighting with each other and chasing others out of the water. Then some would venture on to land, only to get thoroughly involved in a high-speed chase with one of the many leash-less dogs running around. Incredibly funny to see a small little fluff-ball chase a duck around. Oh yeah, and some of the ducks were HUGE! Like 3 normal small ducks could fit in one of these ducks. We walked all the way around the lake and ended up finding an entirely different map of the park that extended much further than we originally thought. This place was really, really huge. But we decided to head back to the center of town and get on with our now early evening.

We walked to Maximillenium Platz, a round-about with a big statue at the end of a street filled with all the big name designers. There was also this incredibly gorgeous building that wasn't on our map and we had no idea what it was used for. Later, we asked Stephanie and she said that the really, really smart students in Germany get to live in this building, completely paid for by the German government. It is not a dorm though, only a few special students get put up there. They also get a cleaning lady, and somebody to wash their clothes etc all courtesy of the government. Crazy!

We told Stephanie that we would make dinner for her - I really love cooking - so we went to a grocery store and got some essentials. Back at Stephanie's place, Laura helped me chop vegetables and I made pasta with seasoned chicken and pesto, and also a delicious seasoned vegetable dish with lemon zest. Laura and I also bought a bottle of white wine for the three of us and it was such a cute little meal. I was much happier with the way things turned out this time around than I was when I cooked for Arthur. Everything just tasted better. Poor Stephanie had a 12 hour day at work with no time to even eat lunch, so she came home around 9 and we had ourselves a little feast. The benefit of hosting CouchSurfers even if you're busy - they'll (I'll) cook you dinner!

After dinner, Stephanie kindly helped us find places on the map to go visit and we worked out a rough itinerary for tomorrow. She also showed us the female equivalent of Lederhosen. It's a dress outfit called a Drindl, and Stephanie let me try it on! It was so much fun to dress up, and the outfit was so cute. These typical Bavarian outfits are now only worn at the Spring Festival and at Oktoberfest. Since it fit me and since Stephanie was going to be coming from work to meet us at Spring Fest tomorrow, she said I could wear it to Spring Fest! You can imagine my excitement :) Oh, also there was an American boy named Zack who requested to surf Stephanie's couch. Obviously she was already booked but I sent him a message via CS to let him know our plans tomorrow in case he wants to meet up. We'll see what happens with that.


Quotes:
"Something famous is happening right now!" - Laura, upon hearing the Glockenspiel and seeing all the people crowded in Marienplatz.

"Wow, you're really filling out." - Jon, upon seeing my new chubbiness via a Skype video chat :/

Accomplishments:
Found a map.
Spoke German.
Found a Hofbrauhaus beer mug.
Cooked a delicious dinner.

Travel Tip:
I think it is really good travel etiquette to learn the basic words and try to use them even if it makes you feel silly!


Going to bed is always fun when you have a beer festival to look forward to the next day...