Grüß Gott Bayern

For the past couple of weeks I'd spent every spare moment sitting at a computer trying to cram as much German into my cluttered brain as was physically possible. It didn't go all that well, but for what we paid for our copy of Rosetta Stone, If I learned anything at all it would be worth it. Filled with a few German words and big dreams, we piled into a plane on Wednesday with travel buddies Dave and Kathy and made our way to Germany. W's employer has recently upgraded some of their vehicles, so we got to play with the new video games and on-demand movies that are available in Business class. You can play Tetris against another passenger, which turned out to be pretty cool or hold em against several others, but it wasn't working that well. Unfortunately for me, I was so entertained that I didn't sleep very much on the new lay flat seats and arrived nice and tired. We landed in Frankfurt, and decided we'd grab the short flight from there. On a 45 minute flight Lufthansa manages to get you a nice little meal in business class, and we were suddenly on the ground in munich. It's a 45 minute S-Bahn ride from the airport to the Hauptbanhopf (main train station), and only a short walk from there to our destination. We rested and freshened up at our hotel, The Courtyard Marriot Munich City Center. Not much of a view, and the service isn't spectacular, but it is only 2 blocks from Munich's Central train station. Plus, it's right next to a discount clothing store and an Aldi. The Kik is particularly handy if say you forgot to pack your long underwear and need something to stop your legs from freezing at night. After a little time for rest and a refreshing shower we wandered off to the train station and took the S-Bahn to Marienplatz. The Christmas market hadn't opened up yet, so we made our way to a restaurant that Tanta Rosita recommended for us. We sat down for dinner at Haxnbauer and had some really delicious roasted pork products. Kathy who had originally turned up her nose at the idea of pork knuckle but was a good sport and ordered it anyway. It was worth taking the risk. Dave had what turned out to be the best Weiner schnitzel of the trip. We enjoyed the first of many tasty beers, and had a really fabulous apple strudel for dessert. W and I dropped them back off at the hotel and made our first trip over to the Tollwood festival. On our visit last year we thought we'd just happened upon the timing of this festival, but it turns out it lasts most of December every year. We even recognized a rude crepe vendor from last year (we got our crepes elsewhere). No pictures the first day, except for the restaurant, we didn't see anything we hadn't seen on our first trip.

Guten Tag Munchen

Night Time Cathedral
Originally uploaded by jrherron.

This weeks adventure began with my alarm at 4:45 a.m. on Friday, which brought me back to an old familiar place. I jumped in the shower, grabbed my carry on bag and rushed out the door for the 5:45 bus, just like I used to do back in my first days at the MOHP. The Newspaper guy was shocked to see me so early again, it has been at least 2 years since I was on that schedule. Every working day he sells me a Chronicle for 25 cents, and even lets me borrow one on the one day a month or so when I forget to grab a quarter on the way out the door. The same guy was driving the 6:08 BART train too. He always pulls up to the station waving both hands, and sounds just like Bootsy Collins when he makes the station announcements. I crammed out a bunch of work in the morning and grabbed an 11:40 train to the airport to meet up with W and traveling bud/awesome dinner party hostess Francie. We knew there were only 2 first class seats for 3 people, but W graciously offered it to me, knowing that she'd have 3 of the roomier economy seats (trademarked name intentionally omitted) to herself. Just as I was finishing my second glass of preflight champagne, a flight attendant comes by with a new ticket for me and swiftly banishes me back to one of W's 3 magic seats. I was furious, but because someone who had actually paid for a business class seat that was broken wanted it, I had to go to the back. Francie provided us with the occasional first class ration, carting cheese, champagne, port and ice-cream back to us, and the flight attendants felt bad, and kept us equipped with beverages to ease our pain. 9 painful hours and a viewing of Transformers (again...) and Stardust later, we finally arrived in Frankfurt. We had decided that as long as the timing and the financials were right, we'd take a 3 hour train ride through the German countryside to Munich. It seemed like the perfect plan until we were faced with a 3 hour ride costing 100 euro per person, or a 5 hour ride costing 60 euro per person. We took option C, the one hour standby flight on a certain European airline that's a business partner of W's employer. Of course after we made that decision, we found out the flight was delayed. To compound the delay the had a plane change, and a crew change and once we got on the plane lots of seats were double booked including mine, so after shifting us all around we finally got under way. We finally arrived in Munich and grabbed our first German food, and then took the 45 minute train ride into downtown. After all the delays and this train ride we arrived at the downtown station a few minutes after our 5 hour train would have gotten us there. We checked into our hotel which was an extremely convenient walk from the train and made our way to the Aldi. We picked up lots of chocolate and goodies and some food to eat for breakfast, and then dumped it in our room. The front desk said we should visit the Tollwood Festival, it would be open until 10:30 and was easily walkable. They even gave us a real map and circled our starting and finishing point. It was a welcome relief from our Beijing post office incident.

Old and New
Originally uploaded by jrherron.

To get to the festival we had to walk by the Paulskirche, and it was just begging to have it's picture taken. We were hungry so I promised the girls I'd wait until we were on our way home. As we walked past the bells were ringing, and it was an amazingly powerful sight and sound. It seemed to be ringing all the way in to my bones. The festival was huge and crowded, but there was beer and food and gluhwein everywhere. Because it was a cultural festival, German food was actually the hardest to find, but find some brats we did, and then we settled in for some beers too. W's new favorite beer that we buy at the Englander in san leandro was on tap, so it was nice to drink the Franziskaner Weissbier directly from the source.

We settled for a while near some Mexican Tex mex food that included chicken wings? and a few other things that were more than a stretch at Mexican. We sat with a nice young German couple who at first pretended not to understand English but were quite helpful and fluent when I had asked W to try to interpret a sign for me, They snapped a picture for us too. After enjoying some food and drink we headed back to the hotel, I took some pictures along the way and we crashed early, it was going to be a big second day.