I landed in Munich yesterday. Despite my colleagues' advice to take a taxi to my hotel, I opted to take the subway in the hope that I may remember some portion of the city I had once visited about 8 years ago. The subway did work out great ( I was told that the taxi would have taken about twice the time because it was peak commute time) and it costed 1/6 of what the taxi would have costed me. However it did not serve the original purpose. I stared and stared at the subway map and no station looked or sounded familiar.
Munich is a beautiful town, no doubt, and has all the warmth, quaintness and history that I have learnt to take for granted in any European city now. What I really love about these cities is ofcourse their dependency ( or the lack there of) on cars. Everyone walks, rides the subway or their bike to work. The guy at work here was saying about how the office buildings only budget car space for about less than one-third of all employees. The number of bikers on the road is truly amazing (Not something I remember from my trip before). I was just walking back from dinner at 8pm and even with a glance I could count out about 10+ people biking in different directions on the road. Interestingly, the bikers here share their lane with the side walk and not with the road and a newbie like me can constantly annoy the bikers, zipping by, by straying off to the bike lane (In my defense the demarcation is really subtle).
Another thing I noticed is the awareness and availability of vegetarian food. In the past trip p and I literally found no vege food and had to constantly resort to MAC'D. We eventually got so desperate that we went seraching and travelling for Indian food. Germany was so off my radar as a travel destination just for that one reason. Absolutely not the case anymore...All places big or small (from the office cafeteria to a fancy brewery our hosts took us to) had a very good choice of vege dishes. The boiled veges were so tastefully flavored that I found myself gobbling up about 6 of the button mushrooms before I realized that I am supposed to hate mushrooms. Food was just not an issue at all...
No report on any European city ( okay may be not Oslo) would be complete without mentioning coffee. coffee ( just good ol' coffee) was so good. It is not just the restaurant coffee but even the kaffe' at work was just as good. Probably had a few too many cups today which explains why I am up like this...
Anyway back home tomm. Didn't do any sight seeing at all but I am glad this trip helped me change my opinion on Germany and put it back on my list of possible travel destinations. Guess "Never say never again..."
PS : To all the beer drinkers out there : Really sorry I didn't report on that. Even in Munich, that is just not my thing...
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we(m) and I on the other hand had no probs in G from our 7 year old trip with regard to food. Of course we only stayed for 2 days or so and not in big towns but in smaller places...but were lucky to get some yummy s/wiches and the not to mention out of the world ice creams. From my memory the thing that has stuck in my mind is their infrastructure - rails, roads, their tech savvy shops etc.
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