A long time ago, I was on a little pedestrian street in Frankfurt and ordered an apricot pastry from a Konditorei. I walked away, devouring the pastry. A few bites in, I turned back to see if I could still find the shop to buy another, but I had lost my way. I still think about how good that pastry was.
I set out today in Munich to find anything nearly as good. I love Germany and Munich. It is the 5th best place in Europe to settle as an ex-pat, according to a listicle I just read. Number one is Helsinki, and while I loved Helsinki, just looking at the Northern location on a map would rule it out for me. Toooooo cold. And who knows if they like apricot pastries as much as they do in Germany?
Following my own travel rules today, I made my way around part of Munich. My first rule is that you should go to the place you want to see most, first. That way, in the event you take your daughter to Paris and the thing she says she wants to see most is the Eifel Tower, you should go there first. Because if by any chance Trump makes an unannounced visit to Paris at the very time you are visiting and they close down the Eifel Tower, you won’t be disappointed. So I went to Marionplatz to see the Glockenspiel. That means “play bells”. I was in the Galeria Department Store eating a butter pretzel and apricot pastry for breakfast when it started chiming and doing its dancing thing but when I went out on the street it was still playing at 11:10 so I actually got to hear it too.
The tourist office was in the Neues Rathaus (New Town Hall) so I went in and, following travel rule number two, I bought a 48-hour pass to all of the art museums in Munich.
After a trip up the Neues Rathaus tower, I started walking to the Deutsches Museum. I passed by and went into the Munich City Museum. It was mildly interesting and had a big section on how Munich has always had a lot of immigrants, including now. There are many, many people of color currently living in Munich. I learned too that there was a brigade of women called Trümmerfrauen, who, after WWII, were hired to pick up the rubble from the war by hand with buckets.
I also visited the MUCA, Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art. There was an elaborate presentation of an expensive, diamond-covered platinum skull in a bomb shelter and some other works.
I pressed on to the Deutsches Museum, passing by a Jewish Memorial. The tech museum did not disappoint. It’s been about 26 years since I was there before. There were fascinating exhibitions about music, chemistry, flight, cameras, film, radio, bridges, nuclear energy, pendulums, astrophysics, and so much more.
I took a street car back to Karlstradt, the above and below-ground area where you catch public transportation, eat, shop, and drink coffee/tea/beer., It’s near where I’m staying and I did some shopping, I’m going back there in a few minutes to eat dinner at a Thai restaurant I noticed there before.
