Monday morning and time to head on. Our "landlady", Isabella dropped by to have us re-sign the original contract because apparently the rules here have changed. She told us something along the lines that she now has to pay a registration fee for "renters" who stay less than one month. She said that the additional tax, for her, was 100 euro. Didn't cost us any more but that would sure cut unto her profit margin on a one week rental of 530 euro. She also described the changes she is having made to the small kitchen. Should be much nicer.
Isabella was nice enough to call a taxi for us; it arrived on time and off we went to the Santa Maria Novella train station. We arrived, as planned, way early then looking at the schedule decided to jump on an earlier train to Bologna. Our original booking had us arriving in Bologna at 11:35 with our connecting train to Munich departing 17 minutes later. Normally lots of time for European train connections. The earlier train got us to Bologna with a 50 minute connect time. Just as well. With all the construction going on for the huge expansion of Bologna Centrale, it would have been a very very tight 17 minute connection. Bologna Centrale is now a major passenger rail hub with approximately 800 trains a day going through there. It is close to being on par with Roma Termini as the largest, volume wise, stations in Italy.
Anyway, our train arrived on time and off we went. Unfortunately, just outside of Bologna we hit some sort of delay and sat there for about 15 minutes so were that late at every stop along the way. We shared a compartment with an older German couple, Peter & Gertrude. They were on their way home to Hannover after vacationing in Italy. They have travelled quite a bit throughouyt the US, in particular Texas, where Peter had been involved with arranging student exchange programmes. They are planning a trip through Virginia and the Carolinas next year to see a bit of Civil War history. Had nice chats along the way. We also had a great clear day through the Brenner Pass and souhwest part of the Austrian alps. Lots of snow covered peaks and in some places there were still pockets of snow along the tracks...
Oh, that 15 minute delay... when we got to Muenchen Ost, the last stop before Muenchen HBF, they suddenly announced, in German of couse, that everyone had to leave the train because it was not going to go to the HBF. Lucky that Peter was there to tell us because who knows where we would have ended up! A bit of a bugger but we caught a taxi from there rather than try to wrangle our way onto a crowded S-Bahn metro train. Taxi guy didn't seem to know where Hiltenspergerstrasse was but his "navy" (GPS) came to the rescue. Seems to be one way to help make sure a taxi driver isn't taking you the long way. If you can't trust the "navy" who can you trust?
Bettina was waiting for us and within a few minutes we were all settled and she was off to the theatre. Only obstacle now was the not yet delivered football tickets we had ordered online for the Muenchen 1860 game on Saturday. We received an email yesterday indicating the tickets would be sipped by courier on Tuesday. Now, as an aside, one has to wonder why, in this day and age, they have to ship by courier! E-Tickets anyone? Or maybe Will-Call? Anyway, it is what it is. We had been on a tour of the Allianz Arena a few years ago and now wanted too see a game there. Seeing Bayern Munich would have been way cool but their tickets were in the 500 euro each range, and not easy to get, when we checked.
So, anyway, we have to arrange to contact Bettina's husband Timm by phone to arrange for us to pick up the tickets. We decided it's time to buy a SIM card for Kris' iPhone... 35 euro to activate with 100 minutes. Bettina & Timm live in Schliersee an hour away by train... 55 euro return 2nd class. Hmmm, the price for these tickets is going up. Hope it's a good game! But we still have to wait and hope the tickets arrive.
Monday night we headed off looking for a pub of some kind. Looking at the map it appeared that Eliabethstasse would be a good candidate. Not so much. Nice wide street with a few stores and a few closed restaurants but that was about it. We asked a young guy who directed us further along to Leopoldstrasse where we knew, from our last trip, there was a Karstadt with a grocery floor so headed in that direction. We went aways then stopped two young women and asked how far it was to the Karstadt. They said "not far, but it doesn't matter; it is 8:00 o'clock and they are closing". Crap! Looking across the street we saw another grocery store with it's doors open so hurried over there. We couldn't see any wine so we asked a young fellow working there. He said "it doesn't matter; it is 8:00 o'clock and we are closed". Sound familiar? Then he reconsidered and pointed to a down ramp and said "there, go quick". Well, we don't need to be told twice... down the ramp, found the wine, grabbed a botttle, hustled to the cashier before she could snap everything shut, paid and back up the ramp. Thanked the young man, went out and back across the street to where we had seen a pub, the Bachmaier Hofbrau. Had excellent dinners of schnitzel and sausages along with some wine then walked home the 17 blocks to call it a night with a nice bottle of wine.
Tuesday was shopping day. We started with a stop at a metro station for a 3 day Partner Pass which allows us both unlimited bus, metro and tram rides until midnight Thursday for 25.90 euro. Pretty good value. Then we strolled across Hohenzollernstrasse back over towards Leopoldstrasse where we had seen a Starbucks last night. On the way Kris picked up some nice clothing at Oska. Folks in Calgary are lucky to have one of these stores now. Soon Vancouver apparently. After coffee we caught the U6 line metro to Odeonsplatz from where we had a pleasant walk along very upscale streets to Marienplatz, the centre of the city. We decided to have lunch at the famous Hofbrauhaus. Having an idea where to go we were following a group of young men. When they walked right past a strip joint we were pretty sure they had only one thing on their minds - beer... so we kept following them and sure enough straight into the Hofbrauhaus. Busy place would be an understatement...
... excellent lunches of meatloaf for Brian and fried pork sausage with sauerkraut for Kris. Not to mention the giant pretzel Brian couldn't resist (new rule: never order something bigger than your head)...
After lunch we wandered along the main pedestrian mall, leading from Marienplatz to the Karstadt near the haupbahnoff, looking in a varirty of stores and just taking in the city. We decided to go into the Augustiner beer hall on the pedestrian mall for an early evening respite. We sat at a table next to a German couple from Frankfurt. He was a lawyer who had studied law in Padova, Italy. Had a nice chat about many things Italian and German. After they left a young Japanese couple joined us at our table. We asked them if they spoke English. Very little but still substantially more than our Japanese (which, at this time is zilch). We tried to communicate with little success until the word "baseball" came up. After that it almost became a contest to see who could name another Japanese star in MLB with howls of laughter after each new one. When Kris mentioned Hideki Matsui the both of them almost fell off their chairs jumping for joy. When Brian said he knew of Masahiro Tanaka (new Yankees pitcher) and that he went 24-0 for the Eagles (couldn't remember the city), our new Japanese friend almost went ballistic with cheers. Great fun. However, we were very surprised when they didn't recognize Sadaharu Oh (the Japanese home run king) but we just chalked that up to our pronunciation. This couple are truely on a fast adventure. They leave tomorrow for Venice. All together they are traveling for only one week. Nice evening.
Now... Back to the tickets... Wednesday morning Timm emails Brian that the tickets have arrived, provides his phone # and says give him a call. Armed with the spiffy newly actvated iPhone Brian does just that. Dials the number, gets a recorded message, in German of course, then the line goes dead; call ended. Several more attempts before Brian goes off to a coffee shop down the street where the owner speaks English. She listens to the message and says that it is just a recording telling us we have 3 euro left on our account (more than enough to make numerous calls) but she could not explain why the call then ends. She tries it on her phone ... "Number does not exist"! Oh really!
Back at the apartment Brian goes through older emails from Bettina and finds that Timm has fat fingered the number and was off by one digit. Probably good thing it turned out to be a non-existent number. We can only wonder what the conversation would have been like with Brian asking some totally non-English speaking stranger for his tickets! So Brian tries the 'correct' number and Timm answers... Yeah! We make arrangements for Timm to meet us at the train station in Schliersee Thursday morning to give us the tickets.
After that was all arranged what to do for the rest of Wednesday? We decided to just wander various "shopping" streets listed in our Top 10 Munich guide book. We jumped on the nearby tram #27 which took us to Sendlinger Tor. Sendlingerstrasse is a pretty cool street to wander along and look in store windows and just browse a wide variety of store types. This walk took us toward Marienplatz so we decided to return to the Hofbrauhaus for another lunch. This time we shared a table with a German couple with two very cute and active children who spent a great deal of their time crawling under the table. They are from a place about 275 kms away and were making a bit of a vacation out of a trip to Munich to get a visa for her to travel to the USA. Man, could this guy put away the food, not to mention the beer! While we were there he put away a schnitzel dinner, a roast pig's knuckle dinner and a half roast chicken dinner not to mention helping his wife and the kids finish theirs. Brian barely made it through his one schnitzel dinner! Another nice visit and chat. Always good fun to try to strike up a conversation in these places. After lunch we walked over to the haupbahnhof to get tickets for tomorrow's train out to Schliersee.
Thursday morning we head down to the haupbahnhof to catch our train. Platform 33. Train is already there so we get on with about 20 minutes to spare. Hmmm, but something doesn't seem right. Brian takes our ticket and asks another fellow in the car if this is the correct train (showing him the ticket). Not speaking any English at all this fellow loudly says "Nein, Nein, Nein" and waves his hand frantically indicating we have to go further along the platform... but there's only one train on the platform??? Turns out this one train is actually 3 trains. They leave the station as one but after about 6 stops they all separate and go in different directions. Good thing we asked!
Anyway, what seemed to start out on the wrong foot turned out to be a wonderful day, probably a highlight of the whole trip. The ride out into, as our bar waiter later that night put it, "the real Bavaria" was very nice. We chatted with a young German couple who sat beside us. They were off to the mountains for a weekend of hiking. She apparently was the smart one... she brought snowshoes! They told us we didn't need snowshoes where we were going. Whew! We showed them pictures of the Comox glacier and of many eagles in trees along the estuary. They were blown away! Also on the train were many other people heading to the mountains for hiking, mostly older folks with their hiking sticks. Sort of like heading to Banff on a long weekend.
Timm met us at the station and handed us the tickets. He couldn't stay and chat because he is a musician, plays the organ at churches and this being the day before Good Friday he was prepping for a very busy weekend. So off we wandered into the streets of this very pretty little alpine lakeside town and along the lake side trail a bit...
While we walked Kris noticed a gondola going up one of the mountains. We asked a woman on the street how to find the gondola. She said it was just "a few steps away" and pointed the way. Well, go 2 blocks then turn right and walk up a relatively steep hill for 3 or 4 blocks is what she actually meant to say! The scenery from the gondola and the restaurant patio at the top is just stunning...
We had a very nice lunch on the restaurant patio, overlooking the valley, then wandered around looking at all the things they have up there. Mostly for children but one mechanical animation gizmo they had was quite cute...
... you put in 50 cents and these two "guys" start sawing the log. They get through it in about a minute and your souvenir slice of the log falls into a chute and slides down to where you can pick it up...
Fun stuff! All in all it was a terrific day so we'll just chalk up the price of the SIM card and train tickets to a wonderful day in Bavaria which we probably would not have done otherwise. .
Friday was Good Friday and most things were closed. We decided it was another wandering day so we followed a Munich Top 10 Guide walk around the university area to the Neue Pinakothek museum. Along the way, on Leopoldstrasse, we passed by a cool looking arched gate we had not seen before, the Siegestor...
Very nice walk with a stop on Schellingstrasse for lunch but by the time we got to the museum it was raining quite hard. We paid our entrance fees and headed into the galleries. Our favorites were two galleries featuring Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, and Gauguin pieces...
Fantastic. The rest of the galleries not so interesting. After going back to the apartment for a rest we thought we'd try a new pub we had noticed on our walk down Leopolstrasse, the Wirsthaus Zur Brez'n. Very pleasant!
Saturday was game day. On the way over to Leopoldstrasse, to catch the U-Bahn U6 line to the Allianz Arena, we stopped in at a Vodafone store to ask how it can be that we have only 3 euro left on our phone account. We had bought 15 euro/100 minutes worth of time but have made all of 2 calls lasting maybe 5 minutes in total. The young fellow looked up some info and then explained to us that our account was actually "in the hole" (we paraphrase) by 0.05 euro. So how can this be? He is not sure and tells us we must go back to the store where we bought it. Good grief! So it looks like that 35 euro might be down the drain!
We stopped in at tha Karstadt on Leopoldstrasse for a quick lunch. They have a food fair area where we each had excellent poached salmon with potatoes. Then onto the metro to Allianz Arena. A short ride later we joined the relatively small crowd heading over to the arena...
t is sort of too bad this is a day game because for night games the arena is lit up and is supposed to look really neat, as can be seen in this collage of postcards; red for Bayern Munich games and blue for Munich 1860 games...
Oh well, in we went through security (an actual pat down - separate line for ladies) and found our seats just before opening ceremonies started...
The hardcore Munich fans filled the seats in one end zone and the Arminia contigent was well and safely barricaded in a corner zone at the opposite end. There are more pics from te game on our picasa album. For this match, unfortunately the rest of the stands were, maybe, half full. Typical end of season meaningless game (in the standings) fan support. We were hoping for a really loud capacity crowd as we've witnessed in other games we've been to in Italy and Germany but not this time. Not a stellar game and we concluded that any MLS team would likely be able to beat either of these team, or at least give them a run for their money. Final score 2-1 in favor of the home team Munich 1860.
It was still only mid afternoon by the time we boarded the metro so we decided to go down to the haupbahnhof, where we bought the Vodafone SIM card. There are so many underground plazas in the area it took us a while but we eventually found the store. To make a long story short, the guy explained that we bought the card and it's activation for 20 euro then bought 100 minutes for 15 euro. The card activation comes with a 3 euro "slush fund" (best way we coudl understand it) which we didn't need to use but apparently we did. However that doesn't matter that the slush is negative, he said, because we still have the extra time we bought. To prove that we had time he used our phone to call his own (if we were out of time the call would not go through). He said we likely have most of our 100 minutes left but there is no way to tell. Like really? No way? Well, we could register with the German App Store and download an app which will, obviously, be in German. Ok, so let's just assume we don't have an issue afterall and just try it later.
Saturday evening we went back to the Wirsthaus. Met a young German couple from near Mannheim who are on an easter weekend getaway. Nice evening.
Sunday morning we used Canada Direct to call Scotiabank. We've been having the odd issue with Deutsche Bank ATM withdrawals and thought this would be a good way to check the phone. Well, 40 minutes later we finished talking with the bank and the phone still worked - bonus! So we should have about 50 or so minutes left. Late morning we headed downtown for lunch at the Augustiner Brauhaus and had excellent meals of roast chicken and veal meatballs with mashed potato, veggies and salad. Then we jumped the #16 tram over to the Deutsches Museum. This is a science and technology museum and it has so much stuff it is mind boggling. We spent several hours and did't come close to scratching the surface. A person would need to live here and go weekly for about a year to get full appreciation for ths place!
Later, after doing some preliminary packing (we leave for Berlin tomorrow), we went, for one last time, to the Wirsthaus for some wine and munchies. After several times there we finally had a look at one of their menus from which we chose a very nice cream cheese and pretzel sampler plate and also where we caught our first glimpse of what might be a motto...
The end of the pig is the beginning of the sausage!
That's it for this week... | Back to Week 7 | On to Week 9 |
No comments:
Post a Comment