034 - sat 03/06/2006 - munich

we found ourselves on a walking tour of munich this morning, with our guide mike the american dude, and 4 others. there were churches, and the usual good stories that you come to expect from these kind of things. our tour guide seemed to be an unlikely person to have ended up in munich, but things made sense when he mentioned he had a german girlfriend.

the tour ended back at the glockenspiel at noon, where we were treated to the admittedly uninspiring show for a second time. afterwards we sought out coffee and hot chocolate - something we do at least once everyday, surely - and actually i had the best ice coffee of the trip at a place that i now don't recall the name of. but if we're ever in munich together, i can probably remember how to get there, and we'll go. it'll be rad.

we walked down a street called 'tal' to a place called 'isartorplatz' and then took in ludwig's bridge. there may or may not be photos to accompany these random names of random landmarks. the river that runs through munich is a weird bright green, like an algae kind of color, which we didn't expect. a lot of the rivers in bavaria and western austria had this kind of alpine algae-green color.

we found a pretty fashionable area on our travels which may or may not have been called gartnerplatz. lots of interesting clothes, design stores that sell unlikely or confusing calendars, coffee places with names like 'san franciscan blend'. that kind of area. then our travels continued into the viktualmarkt (sp?) where we bought lunch bits that we took to the englischer garten in nearby maxvonplatz. are you getting all of this down? there will be an exam.

we ate bean salad on the grass. there were horses about.

then we took a long walk through the university district and down into schwabing. i bought long overdue new jeans from a very grumpy and confusing old man - " 'just looking'? 'just looking'! no no, no 'just looking'! " - and we found a second-hand english book store where we bought up on some new reads. lolita, memoirs of a geisha, and a german book called 'the tin drum.'

we eventually found ourselves back at the hostel with pasta and sauce ready to cook. we dodged the potentially crippling fact that the hostel had no kitchen, by taking over the bar temporarily to use their microwave. after dinner and wine we headed back into central munich, suzanne determined to find apple strudle on our last night in bavaria. i think we had almost succeeded in finding it when we accidentally came upon a haagen-daas store and had to have ice cream instead.

click here to see photos of this day