Munich, Germany

The train ride between Berlin and Munich is long. I didn’t book my tickets in advance, as I wasn’t sure when I’d get up, and it’s very hard to find a seat – but when I finally do, it’s a smooth and comfortable ride all the way.

The pilgrimage

It is absolutely freezing, and the weather alternates between rain and hail. A true throwback.

I’m going to try to avoid oversharing here, and have done a lot of introspection and gotten closure on a lot of things while walking around. For those who don’t know me, I think the only necessary background is that I used to live here, on my own, not going to school and not speaking the local language well, when I was 15. Predictably, it went haywire.

Given that I have a guided tour of the touristic part of the city tomorrow, I decide that this afternoon will be a pilgrimage to this time of my life.

After some intense Google Maps Street View exploration, based on triangulating the public library (which sometimes had books) and the BMW Museum (an unexpected solace for teenager Alex), I find the house and head there. It’s in a very quiet neighborhood, far from pretty much anything interesting.

The main building hasn’t changed, and I remember the cafeteria quite well, but I completely forgot what my own building looked like and can’t find it anymore – although, given the look of some of the buildings, I’m pretty sure there have been some extensive changes. I’m not sure the white house I was in still exists at all.

There have been extensive construction works in the neighborhood as well, and my usual route to the training center is now a landfill. I take a parallel street. I have a playlist of my favourite songs of 2009 for full nostalgia, but the wind is too strong to hear anything.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the BMW tower, though.

Finally, I get to the Olympiahalle icerink and get up the stairs to the Trainingshalle where most of our training happened (the main rink is for hockey, I think). There’s a figure skating training session going on inside, so I can get it and look at the ice rink. It hasn’t changed… but the short-track skating billboard disappeared, and the figure skating one says they’re moving to a new ice rink in a couple of months, so maybe this trip was truly my last chance to see the place.

That’s it for the trip to memory lane – I can now enjoy the classic tourism.

There’s a Bratwurst food truck and I’d love to go, but people are already queuing in front of it: there’s a « Lord of the Rings live concert » showing in Olympiapark tonight and the place is crowded with very weather-resilient nerds.

Remembering what I learned when I was writing the French Wikipedia page for Olympic villages, I head to one of my favourite villages of all time: the Munich Olympic village is big buildings but also tiny cube bungalows that have since then been painted in bright colors and repurposed for student housing.

I then get dinner and head home for an evening of introspection and a night of sleep.

Stats

• Train: 3h50, 2 839km total
• Steps: 14 521

A day in Munich

I wake up and find out my glasses have fallen under my bed. Breakfast is blurry but excellent.

At 11, I arrive at Marienplatz, the center of the Munich old town, where I get a treat: at every hour, the bells of the city hall (which looks like a very fancy cathedral, but isn’t) ring, and there’s a whole animatronic show of several minutes complete with a marriage scene and wooden dancers.

We start the walking tour with our guide, Anouchka (that’s my spelling guess), who takes us through the whole place. She tells us that Munich is historically a rather left-wing city in a very right-wing region, and that the mayor of the city and the region administrator have to share a beer together every year, which is always a relatively tense moment. (She also tells us that the current mayor is a Löwen fan, and that his other not-so-fun yearly thing is that « every year, he has to announce that the Bayern is the champion again ».)

Turning around, we see a white church, which is also not a church, but the old town hall. Münchners have a thing with very catholic public buildings. The old town hall looks newer that the main one: it’s because it was destroyed in World War II and rebuilt in the 1980s.

Big parts of Munich, actually, were destroyed in the war by the Americans who were flying in from Italy. There were rebuilt slowly after that, usually faithfully to the original. One classic example is Alter Peter, an actual church this time: the ceiling paintings date back to 2000!

After our church-and-city-halls tour, we move on to the famous Viktualienmarkt and learn a bunch about the history of Biergartens. We also learn that the fridge was invented in Munich, specifically to keep the beer fresh. That’s why Munich has only 6 breweries: all the others went down when only the richest companies could buy fridges.

The Hofbrauhaus is a huge and rowdy building where the meat looks good and the beer flows in abundance. We walk through it, enjoy the view, and immediately get out to a more serene experience. I suddenly remember that Munich is no fun at all if you don’t like beer – but that’s fine, I’m taking the morning train tomorrow anyway.

We learn a lot more during our tour:

• Prostitution is legal in Germany, but illegal inside Munich, since 1972 and specifically because city officials felt it would give a bad reputation to the Olympics. (Unfortunately for them, they had bigger issues to deal with in the end.)
• Napoleon promoted Bavaria from a Duchy to a Kingdom. Good ole nap-nap is still doing his thing everywhere I go.
• There’s a huge statue of a king (Maximilian, I think) sitting on his throne in front of the royal residence and national opera. The king bitterly complained about this statue, saying it looked like he was taking a shit and bemoaning the lack of horse, sword, or other very manly accessory.

During the tour, I make friends with Helen, a retired Californian who lived many years in Luxembourg and speaks flawless German and French. We go get a delicious lunch at Rischart, a café on the main plaza of the city.

After lunch, we go our separate ways and I walk past a statue to Roland de Lassus, except… it’s covered in pictures of Michael Jackson? A quick search tells me it’s because the pop artist used to stay at the Bayerischer hotel, right behind the statue, when he was touring in Munich, and the statue became a memorial to him after his death.

On my way to the museum of modern art (Neue Pinakothek), I walk past the nazi documentation center and do a small detour there. Or so I think.

There’s one person whose job is to walk around and answer every possible question we could throw at him. It’s very impressive!

There’s also an audioguide – they can give you one, or you can use your phone and their free wifi. The main text is written in German and English, but all details are audio-only. The audio segments are all between 6 and 10 minutes long, so after one floor, I have a headache and I’m extremely restless (the lack of places to sit down doesn’t help) and I start just reading the text from then on. It’s a shame, because the audioguide has a lot of interesting information, but there’s just too much.

The final floor of the museum is a very interesting exhibition about right wing terrorism, mostly in Germany, since 1945. It talks about dog whistles and radicalization and holds memorials to victims of these recent attacks.

It’s sunny for a minute, and I bask in the sun until it starts hailing and I go into a bar to eat a (disappointing) sausage. The waitress is the one and only person I’ve met in Munich who was actually nice, or even just trying to put up with my terrible German.

I swear, if I ever hear someone complain that French people are rude to English speakers…

On my way home, I walk past a strip club with a very enticing name.

That’s it for today – can’t say I’d want to go back to Munich. Maybe if I liked beer, it would be different? I’m glad I went because I got closure on my personal history, but I also hope I’ll never need to return there.

Stats

• Steps: 10 626
• Sausages: 2

To Salzburg

Salzburg is the last city I really want to see: after this, everywhere I go is just an excuse to take the long way back home and stretch the holidays a little.

My mom is a Salzburg diehard, and she’s been hyping the place for years and years, so my expectations are high. Let’s see how it goes!

• Previous stop: Berlin, Germany
• Full trip
• Next stop: Salzburg, Austria