April 16th; Residence and English Garden in Munich, Germany

Although Monika was up early and using our computer to catch up on our email via a nearby WiFi connection, I slept in a bit and as a result we had a late start on the day. Breakfast was a quick cup of coffee and some rolls while we were on our way to purchase our "Munich Welcome Card" at Hauptbahnhof. It cost 12.50 Euro but allowed use of any mass transit for the two of us for the entire day and gave reductions in the admission rate for many of Munich's 35 museums. (You can obviously spend a lot of time in museums in Munich!) We started off using our card to ride the subway to Marienplatz, from whence we walked north to the "Residenz", the city home of the Bavarian Kings.

The Residenz turned out to be a huge complex of buildings built by the Bavarian Kings from the 16th Century to 1918 when the monarchy was overthrown at the end of World War I. Although almost completely bombed out at the end of WWII, the basic shell of all the buildings and much of the interior of the main buildings had been restored. The first part of our tour was the "Schatzkammer" or royal treasury. Like the crown jewels of England in the Tower of London, the Schatzkammer had the the essential crown, orb, and scepter that symbolized royal power. Those were, predictably, gold encrusted with precious jewels.

But the Schatzkammer had many other treasures, both sacred and secular. The religious objects included crucifixes, reliquaries, and portable shrines, all made of gold, silver, or beautiful wood and usually encrusted with more precious jewels. Most of these objects were, to my modern eyes, at the very least gaudy and at the worst garishly overdone. I did like, however, a statue of St. George slaying the dragon because it seemed almost lifelike despite all the encrusted jewels.

The ornamentation on the secular, everyday objects was typically a lot less than the crown jewels, and I found them to be much more to my taste. Some of the crystal or carved stone vases, drinking cups, and whatnot were really quite pretty. This being a German monarch, they even had examples of the Crown Clocks, but I was disappointed to see that they were not apparently functioning as they did not indicate the correct time.

From the Schatzkammer we looked into a Great Hall that was truly impressive. A vaulted ceiling covered a hall about 50 yards long and 15 yards wide. Murals were painted at the apex of the ceiling and other artwork adorned arches along each side of the room. Each arch came complete with a unique Grecian style statue of some sort. The statues of men were usually naked but the statues of woman were usually clothed in some long, flowing robe, a difference that I found amusing.

The rest of the Residenz that we toured consisted of the private residential rooms of the king and queen plus rooms used for official state functions. The official state rooms included waiting rooms, a throne room that was entirely sheathed in gold, and a hall of mirrors that reminded me halls at Versailles, although on a much smaller scale. The resemblance to Versailles was not, I think, an accident because the historical plaques we were reading along the way recounted how the first official King of Bavaria was a vassal of Napoleon for many years.

The furnishings of the private rooms also reflected a strong influence of the Empire style in France. Most of the furnishings were quite fine and would not look out of place in a modern home, but all the official kingly beds that I saw were unusually high off the ground. I estimated those beds to be about 4 feet high, and I didn't see any royal, jewel encrusted step stools around so I suppose the royals just had to take a royal leap to get into bed every evening. I'm sure that this was a false impression, but nevertheless it made me smile.

Otherwise, the private rooms featured everyday items like piano, a harp, writing tables, a fainting bench and other more or less normal things. The dishes were, however, very much on the style of fancy porcelain heavily decorated with flowers, landscape scenes or portraits of people.

Although I had confidently expected a restaurant to be either in the Residenz or right outside the front door, I was wrong and by the time we finished around 3 p.m. we were pretty hungry. Unable to find more than a garden with a cafe selling coffee and cake in the area, we returned to Hauptbahnhof for a late lunch inside the train station. After ordering I was startled to see a miniature blimp hovering over my head (coincidence? I think not!), but the food was great and energized us to walk around the English Garden section of Munich for the rest of the afternoon.

The English Garten is a park about 1/3 of a mile wide and at least 2-3 miles long on the western bank of the Isar River. We wandered north along the paths inside the park and up a hill to a large gazebo with Greek columns and a domed roof and a great view of the skyline of Munich. Just down the hill we found the Chinese Tower, a curious cross between a Chinese pagoda and a Bavarian ski chalet. That is, the overall shape of the tiers of the building was like a pagoda, but the actual construction of each floor was the solid, dark stained wood beams that one usually associates with the architecture of a ski chalet. An oompah band was playing Bavarian music on the second floor of the tower while the folks enjoyed the beer garden at the base. It would have been a great place to eat, but since we had already had lunch we continued our walk north toward a small, artificial lake.

The lake came complete with big white swans gracefully begging for an afternoon snack and folks churning their way across the lake in paddle boots. A soccer ball was accidentally kicked into the lake and we watched with bated breath as a couple in a paddle boat tried several times to snag the ball out of the water. Unfortunately they failed so the soccer players were faced with either canceling the game or walking around the lake to the boathouse and waiting for the wind to waft the ball back into their arms. We were getting tired by this time, so we left before seeing the denouement to work our way back home.

The day was so fine, however, that we broke down and took a round trip ride on the Munich streetcars just for the fun of it. I know I'm biased, but I think street cars are the best way to see a city. These streetcars, like the ones I found in Dresden during Wanderung 2, had a huge panoramic window at the back of the rearmost car, and that seat was clearly the best in the house. Watching downtown Munich roll by, I was struck by how similar and yet different it was to Hamburg, the only other German city that I really know well (see Wanderung 5, Ausflug 33). Many of the basic businesses like bakeries, food stores, and small businesses were basically the same in both cities. However, during all our wandering around Munich we saw only one bookstore, whereas in the commercial sections of Hamburg I found a bookstore about every third block. Conversely, we found small electronics or computer shops frequently as we traveled through Munich whereas they were quite rare in Hamburg. If these impressions are accurate, the large German cities probably each has a distinct flavor that is reflected at least partly by the mix of retail stores they support.

The rain clouds were gathering when we returned from our streetcar odyssey, but we beat the storm back to our pension. I perched Baby, our laptop computer, on the windowsill as I typed the events of the day while watching folks duck into doorways out of the rain. After the rain stopped, we were surprised to see the nightclub directly across the street from our room open for business. Since pretty much every store and most restaurants had closed for Easter Sunday, we thought the "Red Piano" might give their showgirls a night off, but apparently not. For those who may wish to also visit Munich, I will mention that we seemed to be in a hotel, theater, and nightclub district just south of Hauptbahnhof. Now there were a lot of businesses besides the nightclubs, so I wouldn't exactly call it a "red light" district, but may a "yellow light" district would be an appropriate description. We didn't have any problems from any of the foreign looking folks loitering in the area and never felt unsafe for a moment, but there was certainly loud voices and high spirits (or maybe too much spirits!) out in the streets until well past midnight.