At the head of the contrails – Its good to be flying again, even if it is only short haul. That at least makes taking a window seat a pleasure not a curse. Watching nightfall from above the clouds lends it a strange air, with the stark division between day and night being almost a sharp line rather that the gradual decline we see from the ground.
More amazing was looking up to a higher plane at the head of a dark trail picked out in contrast to the bright background of near daylight.
I arrived at the hotel after a minor detour leaving Munich Hauptbahnhof from a different exit to that I thought I’d used….only I found the wrong Kings Hotel, there are two on adjoining streets, I thought the one I found was plusher than I’d expected. They soon set me straight and directed me around the corner to something closer to my expectations.
The first task after checking in was to attempt to find some food – it was gone midnight by this point. The receptionist directed me to a restaurant about fifteen minutes walk away, which is open 24 hours. So I set out attempting to follow his directions.
I turned right too soon and got lost in a district not dissimilar to the area around Tottenham Court Road station, a mix of seedy clubs, technology shops and cultural supermarkets. But what amazed me about this area was that few of the shops had shutters on their windows – in England we’re used to *all* shops having shutters, no matter what they’re selling. Obviously they have security systems – alarms and such – but they’re clearly not so afraid of being raided.
Soon enough I figured out my mistake, headed out to the main road where the directions started making sense again – and found the restaurant, Lamms, in the corner of a Platz. Somehow this seemed to be the German equivalent of Jonathans – Japans 24 hour restaurant – but with more drinking and 99 Luftballons on the jukebox.
Walkabout – Friday I headed out for a walking tour of the city – to find my way around and see some of the sights. I walked down through Karlzplatz and Marienplatz to the river, stopping on the way for a coffee served by one of the most outlandish mullets I’ve ever met.
Then, heading north along the pathway seperating the two halves of the river. For some reason the two halves appear to be kept at different heights, with a barrier between, there must be some engineering reason for this seperation, though I couldn’t work it out. Further up there is a monument and fountain at the head of a boulevaud leading back toward the old town.
The games they used to play – Heading along the boulevaud I found the Munich Museum, a large old palacial building which now contains a series of historically important pieces of art. Unfortunately they are presented in an exceedingly dry way making them difficult to appreciate, they were also labelled only in German – a local museum for local people, I’m sure. And things picked up somewhat once I figured out how to escape from the collection of 14th century porta-jesus’s, into the games room, a journey including various diversions into a tapestry room, a conference room and the armour chamber.
There were a number of games in the games room, though mostly they were variations on backgammon. There were a few chess sets and a multifunction table including a nine-mens-morris set. And a small wooden hedgehog with an extension – I’m not sure what that was supposed to be. Next to that was a room full of musical instruments, a lot of early music by looks of things. The tin violin looked a little awkward to play, but everything else was pretty much identifiable and reasonably typical for its time.
When that surf comes in I’m gonna get my board – Further along, on the south of the English Garden, there was a bridge with a lot of people looking over down onto some activity below. I was amazed to find they were looking at weir surfers, there were, maybe, 7 people dressed in wetsuits clutching small surf boards, standing each side of the river. They would take it in turns to jump in and surf on the wave generated by the wier. Mostly they would be there for a few seconds, but one guy was really good and stayed for a couple of minutes before getting tired and letting the others have a go. Of course the flow was quite fast once the wave broke a little downstream, so once you lost it you were swept to the calmer waters a hundred yards away. But it was clearly not a dangerous passtime, and looked like a lot of fun.
Later in the evening, while looking for some food, I passed a group of punk and goth kids sitting atop a monument by the market square, although tucked out the way they were making plenty of noise – I wonder whether its always like that, or if I just caught them at a bad time.
I found a steakhouse tucked down a little backstreet – and suddenly the Japanese baked potato with cream served alongside steak made rather more sense, thats how the Germans serve it.
…part two tomorrow…
7 comments