Day 8: On to Munich

Today is Wednesday the 19^th of September, and we're leaving Bacharach and heading for Munich, where we'll catch a night train to Budapest.

We both slept really, really well and woke up around 7:00 AM. We got up, showered, and then went down to town to call Hosanna before breakfast (about 11:00 PM her time). This time we got through and were both able to talk to her for a few minutes.

By 8:30 we were back at the hotel for the largest breakfast we've had yet. When we first went down to call Hosanna, the dining room was completely full with the tour group members; when we came back, we were the only ones left, so we had the entire dining room to ourselves. Breakfast was coffee, rolls, cold-cuts, cheese, yogurt, scrambled eggs and some watermelon from Spain.

After breakfast I walked down to the TI (Tourist Information) office to check my email and the train schedules using the coin-operated Internet terminal. Kathy met me there around 9:00 and we stopped by the bakery and the supermarket to buy picnic fixings for lunch. The next train to Mainz was at 10:30 so we collected our bags, settled our bill (62E) and walked to the station to wait. The train to Mainz showed up a few minutes late and we walked right on. Again, we were the only ones in the entire first-class compartment.

When we got to Mainz we went to the Travel Information and Reservation area and asked about the next train to Munich. The helpful lady there printed out a schedule but we weren't able to make a same-day reservation. She told us that we could just try to get on, though, and see what happens. (This was for an InterCity Express or ICE train). The schedule she prepared for us involved a short trip to Frankfurt, a ten-minute walk to another area of the train station, and then the ICE train to Munich.



When we got to the platform, we waited a few minutes and then a different ICE train showed up, headed for Nurnberg, rather than Frankfurt or Munich. We decided just to hop on that one instead to see what would happen.

The car we boarded had only about a half-dozen passengers, but the seats all had different messages, like "Flug-Frankfort" or "Nurnberg-Passau" displayed in little LED panels below the luggage rack. We picked out a couple of empty seats and waited for the conductor. When she came through, she explained that these were the reserved seats (looking through the room, I could then see that the random seating pattern was because all of the other people were sitting at seats without reservation signs.) She also told us, though, that we could sit in a reserved seat if it wasn't reserved for that particular portion of the journey. Since we were getting off in Nurnberg, we sat down at a nice table that was reserved from Nurnberg to Passau, pulled out our groceries, and had a nice lunch of salami and cheese sandwiches and a couple of apples.

The ICE train to Nurnberg started out 15 minutes late (which is why it showed up kind of unexpectedly at our station) and was 35 minutes late by the time we got to Nurnberg. I guess that once the trains get "off-schedule" then the tracks are no longer synchronized, so the train has to spend more time waiting for other trains to pass, and gets further and further behind.

In Nurnberg we didn't even have time to leave the station. We had originally brought guidebooks for Nurnberg and Wurzberg and thought that we might get off and walk for a couple of hours before going on to Munich. Instead, we hopped on the ICE train to Munich (kind of an hourly commuter train with no reservations) and got there around 16:00 (4:00 PM). We checked our bags in a large locker and then headed out to explore the city before our train left at 23:45 (11:45 PM).

We used our guidebook to locate and walk down the crowded pedestrian mall to the central square, the Marianplatz. We waited around for a bit (with all the other tourists) to see the animated glockenspiel figures in the city hall clock tower at 5:00 PM. The town hall itself is being repaired and is covered with scaffolding, but you could see the glockenspiel through a little opening.

After that, we set off in search of the English Garden, the largest city park on the continent. Munich is really an affluent city. We kept walking past an endless series of "designer label" stores, one after another.

When we found the gardens, we went looking for a lakeside restaurant from our guidebook; instead, we found surfers! At once entrance to the garden, a large stream (or small river, I guess), enters the park under a stone bridge. The water comes through the bridge very swiftly, falls a little and then creates a two-to-three-foot standing wave about 30 feet in front of the bridge.



On either side of the river about a dozen wet-suited surfers with short twin-fin boards lined up to take turns riding the waves. (There was no board/wet-suit rental concession, so I wasn't able to try it out myself. Kathy says I'm just lucky.) The surfers would get started by laying their boards flat on the river, pointing up stream, held in place lightly with their feet as they sat on the stone river bank. Then, instead of paddling, they would simply push off the bank and glide right into the wave, kind of like a skim-boarder at the Wedge.

Some of the surfers (all guys) were better than others, but there were no real beginners. (So, I guess Kathy's right; I'm lucky that there wasn't a board-rental concession.) Each rider would cut back and forth between the banks until they made a mistake and got washed downstream. Watching this gives you a really strange sensation; instead of wiping out and going forward over the falls, surfers who fall off get sucked back through the wave. It gives you the sensation of watching a surfing movie in reverse.

The very best guy could go for more than five minutes, doing all of the tricks: floaters, aerials, even some 360s. They were pretty impressive. After the surfers, we looked a little longer for the restaurant, but couldn't find it, so we headed back into the center of town. Munich is full of monumental museums, monuments and opera building. It's really impressive for someone from Southern California.

Still looking for dinner we walked back through the Marienplatz and looked at the stalls in the government subsidized Viktualienmarkt, Munich's "small town" open-air market. (The link is a neat 360-degree panorama of the market.) We didn't find anything there, so we finally went to the Stadt Cafe on the north side of the Munich City Museum.

This had a really nice informal European modern coffee-house atmosphere. Kathy and I shared a ham and cheese sandwich (which tasted much better than it sounds) and we each had a bowl of hot apple carrot soup which was delicious.

By the time we finished dinner it was dark. I wanted to locate the Hofbrau Haus so we could peek in and see Germans (or more likely American and Japanese tourists) lifting beer steins, dancing on the table, and listening to oom-pa-pa music: in other words, the stereotypical German beer-hall experience. I couldn't quite decipher the map though, so we just headed back to the train station about 9:30 PM.

At the train station we made a phone call to Judah at work, got some ice cream for desert (so much for my diet, I guess) and went and retrieved our bags from storage. Then, because we still had two hours before our train left, we went looking for a place to sit and read.

The Munich train station doesn't seem to have a regular waiting room (or maybe we just couldn't find it). There are seats along each track (out in the cold) but if you want to sit in the station you have to go to a restaurant. We went over to Burger King and got some fries, and, then a little later, a "Long Chicken" value meal, just so we could have a place to sit.

At 23:00 (11:00 PM) we walked out and sat by the tracks to wait for our train.