Time Difference: -8 hours (from Brisbane)
Soundtrack: Still Mozart, barbershop, Enigma. Been chilling.
Currently Inspired by: Life
Words written: 73,770. I have sent out the first draft of the first five chapters for some friend feedback. Anxiously awaiting the results. I wish I could just write, get paid for it but have no one ever read it! This is the worst part!
I heart Munich.
Happy, friendly, Brisbane-sized, good looking, interesting, diverse, cultural,
mild weather, easy to navigate, full of “the good life”, birthplace of
Nazism... er...
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| "New" Town Hall |
Apparently there is a saying about Munich that it is really
the northernmost town of Italy rather than the southernmost town of Germany,
and it does have a bit of an Italian vibe to it, but overall I found it to be pretty
German, with all that my preconceived notions about Germany entailed. It’s efficient and tidy, full to bursting
with sausages, pork schnitzel, potatoes and giant steins of beer, and (my
favourite part) easily half to two thirds of the women there are my height or
taller, and many of those are... let’s say well built, so I didn’t feel like
such a giant! I could look most of the
women in the eye pretty easily. It was a
great feeling.
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| The famous Hofbrauhaus |
I had a break from bread and now I’m back on it again, like
we never parted. However I’ve been getting
quite fed up with the taste and smell of meat lately after so much travelling
and so many meat dishes (and so few vegetables), so I haven’t eaten any meat since
Prague, and it will be interesting to see if I go back to it. Right now I feel perfectly happy without it, but
who knows? I haven’t touched a drop of
alcohol since early March and I feel well and truly over that as well. So being in Munich without drinking beer or
eating meat felt very strange and at first like I was “missing out” on something,
but I saw and did so much while I was there, I wondered more if it is the
people who spend thousands of dollars to fly there and then sit around in beer
gardens the whole time who might actually be missing out. The Germans find a way to get stodge into you
without meat anyway, with their national vegetarian dish which is basically
cheese noodles, and a variety of salads literally drowning in mayonnaise. I enjoyed it while I was eating it but regretted
it afterwards!
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| Beautiful Spring flowers |
Australians are embarrassing. In Munich they joke about Aussies a fair bit,
because of Oktoberfest. First, let me
recount the astonishing numbers I heard.
Munich, a city of 1.3 million people, hosts SEVEN MILLION visitors every
year for Oktoberfest. From all reports
you get your drinks and tent seats relatively easily, the toilets are plentiful
and tend to stay pretty clean, there is one security guard for every ten
people, anyone who is drunk and rowdy gets thrown out quickly, and last year
they had the most fights ever, which was something like 30 (and unfortunately
Australians and Brits are involved in most of them, almost never Germans). Incredible.
I don’t know any other country that could pull off organising like that. However the craziest part, and something that
the Germans I spoke to thought was hysterical, is that every year the
Australian embassy from Berlin comes and sets up a mini embassy in Munich
because out of the thousand or so passports that get lost every year, about 900
of them are always Australian. Why? Who knows.
Perhaps we are just careless drunks.
My question is why bring your passport there in the first place? Lock it in your hotel! Idiots.
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| "Hard Work Will Set You Free" |
I was hosted by two lovely people from Couch Surfing, one of
whom suggested to me that I check out Dachau Concentration Camp on one of my
days. I initially balked at the idea,
feeling like I’ve seen more than enough of war and mistreatment on this trip,
thank you very much, but I realised that later I might regret travelling all
that way and not seeing it in person, so I relented. It sucked.
I don’t know what anyone else would expect, but it was just as bad as I
expected it to be, and I left feeling as depressed and with the same cracking
headache that haunted me for hours after visiting the killing fields and S21 in
Cambodia and the Vietnam War Museum in HCMC.
The way some people treat each other... the mind boggles. You can click here to see photos from Dachau.
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| Old Town Hall |
Munich sustained about 80% damage during WWII bombing and
they have calculated that only 2.3% of it was completely undamaged, which is incredibly
low. As a result, the city is a
hodgepodge of newer style buildings that were clearly built in a hurry to get
people into homes, old buildings that have been shored up sometimes with
obviously new patches, and old buildings that have been carefully mended in
their original style. You can walk down
a street fairly easily and say “that was damaged, that was replaced, that is
original”. You can do that in a few of
the European cities I have been to so far, but it is most marked in Munich and
the scars remain as a constant reminder of its role in the war. Not that anyone who lives there would ever
forget! The actual city itself is
gorgeous however, particularly when viewed from the bell tower of St Peter’s. Click here to see the general pictures from
Munich.
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| River Surfers waiting |
There is a gigantic city park in the centre of Munich called
the English Garden due to its landscaping style, which, and there is some
debate about this (although why I don’t know because it should be easy to tell),
is in the top five city parks of the world in terms of size, and is apparently
larger than Central Park in New York. It
is lovely, but in a park that size you can’t ever really enjoy all of it. You just find your little corner and sit
down, which I did. The river Isar runs
through Munich with its icy Alpine water, and a few crazy Germans were jumping
in from the park banks, screaming their heads off, on the warm afternoon that I
sat there listening to Mozart and lazily swatting at flying insects. Only slightly more sensibly, surfers in
wetsuits jump on their boards, one after the other, from the banks of the river
onto a man made “wave” near a fast running portion of the Isar, and are able to
surf there for as long as their luck and strength holds out. When they get swept away, the next one jumps
on, and so forth. Apparently they do this
all the way through winter as well, which to me is unimaginable. I dipped the tip of a toe in the Isar and nearly
threw myself back ten metres with the shock of it. Not if the pits of hell were yawning open in
front of me, would I willingly get into that water. Pack of mads.
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| "The Killing Machine" |
I saw, or I guess *heard* a very interesting art exhibition
while in Munich at the Haus der Kunst, renowned for its avant-garde exhibits
and not the kind of place this Renaissance girl would normally go, but it had a
few shows on and one of them was a sound exhibition which is a genre I have
always been interested in. The first
installation was just weird, a guy climbing a hill and filming it so you could
hear his breathing. The second was a
movie in a strange box that once inside made you seem as though you were right
at the top and back of a massive cinema, and while the actors were talking on
the screen, there were other sounds of people eating popcorn and worrying about
leaving the stove on around you, like they were in your ear, and finally a
menacing man making weird threats and laughing into my ear which freaked me the hell out! Third there was a huge padded room with an
amp and a pedal in it, and when you pressed the pedal, The Star Spangled
Banner, played on guitar Jimi Hendrix style, came blaring out at
just-under-unbearable volume. That was
amazing. The final one was the best, in
my opinion. It was called the Killing
Machine and based on Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” about an execution
device, and it was so strange because I had literally just read that story for
the first time a few days before, as I was curious about Kafka after visiting
Prague. The story itself really
resonated with me and obviously with the artists too. It had a huge emotional impact. All the components of it kind of danced in
this strange jerky animatronic rhythm to a dark and haunting piece of music
that had been electronically distorted.
It was absolutely amazing. If
these artists come to Australia I recommend checking out their stuff. Their names are Janet Cardiff and George Bures
Miller.
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| One of many |
The Residenz, Munich’s Royal Palace and now also museum,
takes about two to three hours to go through properly, and by the end of it I
had rather inevitably got my cranky on about the amount of money wasted
throughout history on gilding and ornamenting the homes of royalty and the
houses of “god”, be they temples, cathedrals or whatever, while whoever isn’t
so lucky as to be born into the right family sits outside the gates in rags and
starves. I mean we still have it today. People who have more money than they would
ever know what to do with are essentially, through the creation of their
wealth, maintaining the rest in poverty, but today’s royalty – dot com
billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, at least appear to have
philanthropic urges and support a variety of causes. “Let them eat cake” springs to mind as an
example of the indifference of royalty in previous times. Still, the Residence is almost overwhelmingly
beautiful, each room giving way to another, more ridiculously ornate than the
last. It’s as though each room was
designed by someone different and they were all trying to outdo each
other. I’m glad I got some photos
because some of it has to be seen to be believed. You can see them here.
I headed to Zurich without doing much research (complacency strikes
again) and there is really isn’t a whole heap of stuff to do here and also it
is outrageously expensive. Taxis start
their metres at about $6.50 AUD and then it’s $4 per kilometre. I’m not joking! I had a dull mushroom ragout with rice today,
a bottle of sparkling mineral water and a saucer sized plate of not very nice
salad, and it was nearly $40. I had
arranged to stay with someone again via Couch Surfing in Geneva tomorrow for
two nights but I forgot to get back to them until this morning and now I don’t
know if I can stay. There is absolutely
no accommodation in Geneva that I can afford (and hostels are all booked up,
and would still be about $70 per night for a shared room) so if this person
doesn’t get back to me by tonight I’m going to have to figure out somewhere
else to go for two nights, tomorrow morning before I check out. The other places I would like to go in
Switzerland are Bern and Lausanne, but the accommodation situation is the same
there. I can just suck it up for two
nights I suppose. Or maybe I’ll be able
to find somewhere cheaper in France! I
did go for a wander around Zurich old town today and as my expectations were
low I found it surprisingly nice. There
really isn’t much to do past two days here I would think, tourist wise, unless
you have a particular fetish for large concrete financial institutions. You can click here to see today’s pics.
Til Next We Speak
*LOVE*
N
You do sound tired!
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