Another Car City - Munich, Sep. 25

Welcome to Munich, the home of the German stereotypes! Most people here are actually pretty normal, but I have seen a number of people wearing Lederhosen and Dirndl out in the wild. I even went to a Biergarten with those 1 liter beer mugs, plus lots of meat and bread. I've got a couple days worth of insights to document, so here we go!

My last night in Nuremberg was fine, no issues there. Although one problem is that the room cleaning staff came through pretty early the last couple days, around 10:30 in the morning. But on the last morning, they knocked on my door at 9:30! Why did they come through so early? I had to checkout by 10:00, so I was in the middle of getting ready and packing up. Could they not wait until after checkout at least? Felt like I was being rushed to get out.

Anyways, I made my way to the station and grabbed some breakfast there. I got on the train to Munich, which was another high speed ICE train. At one point I looked at the screen, which showed us going at 285kph! I also took another collection of photos for those who enjoy those, here ya go!

After arriving in Munich, I made my way to my next hostel. I chose the same company as my place in Nuremberg (a&o, they seem to be everywhere in Germany), since I was satisfied with the room I got in Nuremberg, and I figured they would be fairly consistent between places. However it's not as consistent as I'd hoped for. For one thing, the a&o in Nuremberg offered single rooms, whereas the a&o here doesn't. Instead you have to just book an entire 4 bed dorm to yourself. It is cheaper than reserving all 4 beds individually, but it's still a bit silly that they don't have any single rooms that could take up half the space.

When I walked into the room, I was immediately presented with the smell of cigarettes. It's not a strong smell, but it's unpleasant when entering. It's at least easy enough to stop noticing after a couple minutes, so there's that at least. Also, there are no outlets near the beds! I can't have my phone nearby when I'm sleeping, it has to go on the other side of the room. So this one is definitely not as nice as the place in Nuremburg, but it still beats a dorm with strangers.

Anyways, enough about living accommodations. Once I'd gotten settled in to the hostel, I met up with a family friend who lives in Munich, Elise and her friend. They are both around my age, so it was nice to hang out with them few a few hours. They took me on a bit of a tour around Munich, which was a good introduction to the city. I was more focused on chatting with them than looking around, so I did some more exploring of the same places today in order to get a better feel for them.

The biggest thing I've noticed about Munich is that it's very much built around cars rather than people. That is probably at least somewhat influenced by the fact that BMW is based in Munich, so the city does its best to accommodate cars. I forgot to mention it before, but I think Nuremberg is somewhat similar with the amount of cars around. Nuremberg does have a nice large pedestrianized area in the middle, but it's basically all car territory outside that.

There is a pedestrianized area in the old town part of Munich, but it's really crowded there. It's more of a touristy area, and many of the shops there are selling stuff for tourists. Meaning it's a lot of junk I don't care for. I did try to get lunch there, but the only places selling food were sit-down restaurants that were packed with people. It didn't really make me feel comfortable during a pandemic, so I got takeout elsewhere.

Speaking of food, I think I've realized another reason why I've been anxious about buying food on this trip. There's no way to tell what the food and ordering experience will be like, because the restaurants always different. There are very few chain restaurants, most places are independently run, meaning you don't know what it'll be like until you go. That's fine if you're living in a set place for a long time, because you can get to know all the restaurants. But as a traveler only staying in each place for a couple days, it's really hard to know for certain how good the food will be, what's on the menu, what kind of restaurant it is, etc.

​Anyways, we visited the English Garden yesterday, which is a really nice large park near the city center. Lots of green space with lots of people around, plus a creek running down the middle. Very nice place to be on a summer day!

We went to a beer garden in the park, which was a first for me! I was definitely glad to have some locals taking me through it, there were a few specific details I was unaware of including some COVID-specific things I probably would have gotten in trouble for. But overall it was really nice! Plenty of trees around combined with decent food made for a good time. There was even a band playing music, since tourist season still isn't quite over yet.

During my exploration today, I followed the creek through the park, which starts at the south end (I think it actually runs under the city for a while). It comes out under a bridge at a very high flow rate, and the way it hits the riverbed creates a wave that people can actually surf on! There was about a dozen surfers taking turns while a couple hundred people watched, it was pretty cool to see!

Elise and her friend also gave me a bit of an explanation of the university campuses in Munich. There's 2 main universities, Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU). Both universities have buildings scattered all over the city, so there isn't a centralized campus in Munich. However just north of Munich is Garching, where a number of TUM departments have gathered to create a more unified campus location.

These split up campuses are very strange to me, I'm very much used to schools having all their buildings in a single area. I'm definitely biased, but a unified campus just makes more sense to me. The work I like to do requires expertise from multiple fields, such as physics, engineering, computer science, etc. So having all those departments and their resources located in one area makes it easy to get what I need. These split campuses seem to make that a lot more difficult, plus it sounds like you could have some classes in a completely different town. I'm sure there's reasons for having split campuses, but I've not heard any of them yet.

After we'd finished exploring around yesterday, we spent the evening by the river running through town, which was quite pleasant. The only downside is that the air got chilly really quickly, pretty much as soon as the sun went down. But it was otherwise a nice way to spend the evening with a couple friends!

That's all I've got about Munich for now. I have to admit that I'm not really a fan so far. The fact that it's built around car transit means that places I want to go are often further than walking distance. For example, there aren't a lot of restaurants near my hostel, I have to take the public transit to better food areas. And the public transit here has been decent, but I've noticed trams and busses can really get held up by traffic. Once you do get on a tram or bus, it's nowhere near as fast as it could be since there's cars always holding them up, it seems.

A really great example of that actually happened to me today. I was heading back to my hostel, which required me to get on a bus and then a tram. The bus needed to make a weird turn, but someone parked their car in a way that completely blocked the bus. So we just sat there for a few minutes, blocking even more traffic. Excellent!

And for those who've not been following Germany politics, there's a major election tomorrow! I don't know a lot about German politics, but I'll be watching the results at least. Should be interesting!