Munich

We weren’t expecting a lot from Munich: another city on our way west and a good way to break up our train journey into the mountains of Austria and Switzerland. We were, however, blown away by how much we loved our few days in town! The atmosphere in the city during our visit – when Oktoberfest is usually underway (it was canceled for the second time since World War II due to COVID) – was so vibrant with all the locals traipsing around in lederhosen and the beer gardens absolutely brimming with people. Someone definitely flicked the autumn switch as we left Prague though: the warm weather was replaced by cloudy skies and decidedly cold mornings, and I donned jeans for the first time since Alaska. I can already feel our hard-earned tans from Italy and Croatia disappearing!

I think my favorite beer garden was the massive Augustiner-Keller property just outside the city center. Augustiner-Bräu is Munich’s oldest independent brewery, family owned since 1328. The Augustiner logo was impossible to miss around Munich, there seemed to be an Augustiner restaurant or beer garden on almost every city block! Like Seattle and Starbucks. The Augustiner-Keller beer garden was a sprawling complex of shaded benches with a huge playground for the kids off to one side, we spent the better part of an afternoon there enjoying all the action. It has a capacity of about 7000 people (three zeros), I don’t think it was quite full when we visited but we certainly had to search around for a little while before finding a spot to sit. Beer gardens and bräuhauses in Bavaria are a communal ordeal: any spare seat at a bench or table is an open invitation to sit down, so we spent our afternoon at Augustiner-Keller sharing a table with a couple of gents from Switzerland and Lichtenstein. At most of the beer gardens and bräuhauses in Munich, including Augustiner-Keller, beer was only served in one liter steins and there was typically only the beer of a single brewery available at each establishment. Choices were pretty minimal: light or dark lager with the occasional option for wheat beer, and during the Oktoberfest period there was generally a special Oktoberfest brew on tap as well. The atmosphere was so fun, with beer drinking songs from inebriated patrons ringing out above the din and brass bands belting out tunes all afternoon. Quite special to see the table next to us order a full keg and hammer the tap into the barrel while we were sitting there. The kids had a ball as well, we didn’t see them much as they spent almost the entire time on the huge playground complex, occasionally returning to check on Mum and Dad and for a bite to eat. I’d hate to think how much beer was consumed at Augustiner-Keller during the course of the day, it had to be an incredible amount!

Hofbräuhaus München is also a must see on a visit to Munich, we enjoyed a few steins and dinner there on our second night in town. It gets a bit of a rap for being quite touristy, but when we visited the huge halls and beer garden were jammed with a healthy component of locals in lederhosen as opposed to tourists like ourselves. The fresh horseradish on the plate of bratwurst the kids ordered was so tasty, I don’t think I’d ever eaten freshly shaved horseradish like that before. Even Wild Man – whose palate isn’t as adventurous as his sister’s – was downing it with each bite of delicious German sausage. The ability of the waiters and waitresses atHofbräuhaus to carry eight or even 10 full liter steins of beer in a single hand was incredible. At Augustiner-Keller there was a self serve area where I carried a couple in one hand back to the table, but there’s absolutely no way I could carry more than three or four in one hand. Quite a bit of interesting history goes along withHofbräuhaus (thank you Todd Baldwin for this): the upper beer hall was the location of Hitler’s February 1920 “Twenty Five Theses” speech, as part of which he outlined the core tenets of the German Workers’ Party. One of those tenets was that citizenship was to be determined by race. The story goes that Hitler organized an annual meeting atHofbräuhaus following the success of his initial 1920 speech. The Bavarian flags painted on the roof of the halls pictured below are supposedly there to cover the swastikas that were originally brushed onto the stucco.

Another favorite of ours was the Viktualienmarkt right in the city center. The Viktualienmarkt is an open air market that runs every day except Sunday, a dizzying array of fruits and vegetables were on offer as well as everything from cured meat to flower stalls. The Münchner Suppenküche was probably my favorite lunch spot in the city, with a dizzying array of delicious local soups on offer for lunch, their goulash was absolutely divine! We also enjoyed a few beers and sausages at the beer garden in the center of theViktualienmarkt on another visit. It was a little surreal sitting there in themarket on the Saturday we were in town, all the locals strolling around town inlederhosen and dirndl on their way to a beer garden orbräuhaus. Such a fun atmosphere!

With so much of Munich bombed during the war there weren’t a lot of historical buildings around the city like the ones we saw in Prague and Vienna. The exception was the area around Marienplatz in the city center. Neues Rathaus (the new city hall) was a particularly beautiful structure towering over the town square, a big draw for crowds at noon every day when the Glockenspiel fires up. The Glockenspiel demonstrates the wedding of Duke Wilhelm V and Renate of Lorraine, celebrated in February 1568.

A visit to Munich wouldn’t be complete without a trip out to the BMW factory on the outskirts of the city. What we really wanted to see was the BMW factory tour, where one gets to walk on elevated catwalks through the main production line area where all the robots weld and place the panels. We didn’t realize that even in normal times the tours book our six to eight weeks in advance. When we visited there were even less tours available, not directly because of COVID health restrictions but due to the fact that the production line was not running every day of the week as a result of semiconductor shortages around the globe. That said, BMW Welt was still an eye-opener for all of us and well worth the trip out there, all the gleaming BMW vehicles lined up in the futuristic Welt structure. My favorite was definitely the M section, the M3 was a beast of a machine. Not a big fan of all the electric vehicles on which BMW is starting to focus – so much plastic and nowhere near as robust of construction as the gas guzzlers – but I guess they need to save weight to get range out of the current generation of batteries. The kids loved the motorcycle section (I think because they could climb all over the bikes), I know a certain grandfather who would have been in heaven looking over the current offering of BMW bikes at Welt.

We strolled over to the BMW Museum as well, a multi-floor chronicle of BMW vehicles from their beginnings to the current generation. The kids weren’t too keen on going through the whole complex after more than an hour at Welt so we took a pass (I don’t think it would have been as impressive as the antique museum in Fairbanks anyway!). We also walked through the Munich Olympiapark – located right next to the BMW complex – whilst in the area. Pretty amazing to learn that the BMW complex and Munich Olympiapark were built on top of Munich’s original airport and that the hills (which were actually quite large) around Olympiapark were manmade: they were built with all the rubble of the Munich buildings destroyed by Allied bombers in World War II.

I have to give kudos to Lisa for finding some excellent adventures for Max and Lilia whilst in town. Can’t be all beer, playgrounds and fast cars! An afternoon dip at Müller’sches Volksbad on the banks of the Isar River downtown was a relaxing break enjoyed very much by all four of us. It also seemed to be quite a well kept locals secret, as it was almost empty when we visited during the middle of the afternoon on a Friday. The neo-Baroque Art Nouveau was completed in 1901, and at the time was the largest and most expensive swimming pool in the world as well as the first public swimming pool in Munich. The construction was a donation from the Munich engineer Karl Müller to the city of Munich, combined with the requirement to build a bath for the “poor people!” Traditionally the two main pools were segregated by gender, but these days the only thing differentiating the two is the fact that the “men’s pool” is kept at 27°C/81°F and the “women’s pool” at 30°C/86°F. The atmosphere was kept quite relaxing – something that challenged both of my kids somewhat – with no horseplay, no jumping into the water, no running and no loud talking. It was a beautiful spot to spend a few hours, I felt like we were in a bathhouse in Turkey laying there in the warm water, all of us were quite pruned by the time we were done.

The other kid-centric adventure – one that I very much enjoyed as well – was an afternoon at the sprawling Deutches Museum across the road fromMüller’sches Volksbad. For a country with such a rich history in engineering, it’s not surprising that a museum celebrating the technological and mechanical achievements of the republic was so well done. Six floors dedicated to everything from steam power to electronics, physics, music, pharmaceuticals… We split up as the kids wanted to explore different exhibits, Wild Man’s mental cogs were on fire as we explored some of the exhibits on steam engines and electromagnets. (I was actually a little proud of myself that I could still explain to him the concepts behind the function of electric motors when he was peppering me with questions about the towering examples of motors and generators on display. It’d been quite some time since I’d had to think about magnetic fields and electromagnetic force…) The physics floor was great for the kids as well, with an almost endless number of hands-on exhibits demonstrating the basic concepts of nature. I think Lisa and Lilia both put the mine at the top of their list: an amazingly constructed full-size mine in the basement of the museum that had us all feeling a little claustrophobic at times. My personal favorite was the oceanography floor, and in particular the German U boat that had half its hull cut out so one could see the inside. Our afternoon at the Deutsches Museum was easily worth a week in school for both kids!

Originally we’d only planned on spending a day in Munich, instead focusing our time in Bavaria on the mountain town of Mittenwald. But every hotel and AirBNB in Mittenwald was booked when we wanted to stay there, so instead we lengthened our stay in Munich to three nights. (It’s actually quite interesting why Mittenwald was all booked: according to the locals, Germans are so afraid of the government changing COVID travel regulations on them that they’re all vacationing in Germany this summer instead of venturing across the border into other Schengen countries. Mittenwald is as far south as they can go before crossing into Austria!) We’re all so glad we had more time in Munich than originally planned, such a fun city during the Oktoberfest period. I’m now kicking myself that I didn’t go to Oktoberfest with all my mates from Saint Mark’s when I had the opportunity all those years ago…