Munich
After my last test on Friday, I hopped the slow train to the airport, and from there got onto a flight to Amsterdam. This wasn't my final destination, but I spent an awful long time there. The three-hour layover was delayed into a five-hour layover, and finally the KLM desk let on that heavy snows on the ground in Munich were to blame. Lufthansa had already cancelled their flights into Munich, and I figured if they weren't going there, it was unlikely that anyone else was either. And if I wasn't going to land in Munich that night, I wanted to know about it soon, so I could at least see something of Amsterdam before it got too late to go into town. But, I couldn't be too grouchy, since snow on the ground in Munich implied fresh powder in Garmisch, and that is after all the point of this journey.
But it turned out that by the time they delayed my flight, the snow had let up and they were just clearing out the tangle of circling planes that had gathered during the passing storm, trying to get the long-distance flights on the ground before they let a whole new raft of planes come in from the rest of Europe. I landed just before midnight, and waited nearly another half hour for my luggage to make it to the carousel; I wrestled a ticket out of a machine that offered less help in English than I understood in German, and hopped the next train to the city center. It was past one in the morning when I finally made it to the hostel, wondering if my bed at the hostel was still open. It was, and I knocked on the door to wake my temporary roommates to let me in; the two were friends, apparently Chinese, but I wouldn't know because they spoke only a few words of English and no German that I could discern. And the room was hotter than many tropical countries in the summer, so I had to play charades to get them to turn the radiator down a notch.
I was up early the next morning and out before the other two girls were awake. Breakfast at the hostel was one of those uniquely German meals, an all-you-can-eat buffet of
breads and cheeses and meats that hostels in no other country would bother to lavish on their guests. I started the ten-minute walk into the city center and the Marienplatz, the town square fronted by an ornate town hall building with its famous marionette figures that stand still up high in the towers and come out to dance at turn of the hour. The snow began to fall again, blanketing the city into the quiet of a windless blizzard. Munich has always possessed a fairyland quality for me, like the technicolor figures inside a snowglobe. It had been years since I had seen the city under snow - just over twenty-one years, since the winter I turned 10 years old.
Despite the snow, the weather still felt warmer than my weekend at Folkestone not more than a few days ago, confirming my suspicion that even a blizzard in Bavaria harbors less of
a chill than an average winter day in Britain. But the charm of strolling in a snowstorm eventually wears off, so I ducked into the Deutsches Museum to spend some time out of the weather. I wandered through the exhibits, some which were obviously newer than since the last time I had visited there and some of which I vaguely remembered from previous visits - medieval musical instruments, half-functional biochemistry experiments behind glass whose purpose I could only estimate through my far-less-than-fluent German. I was getting ready to step back out into the weather when I saw a sign pointing down a staircase into a mock mine in the basement, so I thought I'd check that out before donning hat and gloves for the snow again. Beneath the museum they have managed to carve out a set of winding tunnels so extensive that it takes most of half-hour to navigate through them; along the sides are mock-ups of miners in shafts and equipment running on tracks and horses who pulled trolleys along until the days of electrification. Even in the safety of a mock-up, this is an occupation that I cannot imagine - so far underground, such cramped conditions, with so little holding up the mountain of earth above the small tunnel of air. I walked through quickly; I was not interested in staying long.
By the afternoon the skies were clearing and the snow was starting to melt off. I covered the center of the city several times over, in overlapping circles, trying to see every corner I remembered from my former days here, even those I didn't know I would remember. I visited several churches too, reminded of another axiom of European climatology: the place that is reliably colder than Britain in the winter is the inside of German religious edifices. My parents used to joke about sending my little brother to one of these places if he did not behave - places where the air inside bears a chill that even a winter night can't match, and any heat introduced promptly floats into the arched ceilings dozens of feet above.
Toward the late afternoon I had reached that stage of travel where I have to make myself sit down and rest, when I wonder why I'm feeling tired and cranky until I realize that I've been on my feet for seven or eight hours without rest. I've long had a habit of eating while walking, and my recent travels have compounded this: I grab a sandwich and keep moving, forgetting hours later why my feet are achy and sore. I think I'll invent a fad diet: you can only eat while you're walking. I'll call it the Shin Splints diet, for that splitting feeling you get in your lower legs when you walk on concrete for too long. I finally stopped for a snack and a hot chocolate before heading back toward the hostel with the setting sun.
After grabbing a dinner at an Italian restaurant (strangely, these seem to proliferate in German, though Italy isn't all that close by), I walked back toward the Marienplatz, quiet again now at night. Along the alleyways into the center, shop windows are backlit to reveal the that particular Bavarian aesthetic of immaculate kitsch, of so many figurines and knick-knacks and thimbles painted with the blue-and-white-checkers of the Bavarian flag that you wonder how they all fit on one shelf - but at the same time so tidy that not a mote of dust can be found between them. Like the way that some Latin American countries can get away with butting a salmon pink wall up against a tangerine orange ceiling and trim the whole thing in sea green, it's an aesthetic that only works in its own context, but in its context, it invokes a visual magic, a tangle of detail that sorts itself out into an order only it can follow.
I arrived back at the hostel just before my roommates came back for the evening; I packed some things for my departure in the morning, and put in ear plugs to sleep amidst their chatter.
But it turned out that by the time they delayed my flight, the snow had let up and they were just clearing out the tangle of circling planes that had gathered during the passing storm, trying to get the long-distance flights on the ground before they let a whole new raft of planes come in from the rest of Europe. I landed just before midnight, and waited nearly another half hour for my luggage to make it to the carousel; I wrestled a ticket out of a machine that offered less help in English than I understood in German, and hopped the next train to the city center. It was past one in the morning when I finally made it to the hostel, wondering if my bed at the hostel was still open. It was, and I knocked on the door to wake my temporary roommates to let me in; the two were friends, apparently Chinese, but I wouldn't know because they spoke only a few words of English and no German that I could discern. And the room was hotter than many tropical countries in the summer, so I had to play charades to get them to turn the radiator down a notch.
I was up early the next morning and out before the other two girls were awake. Breakfast at the hostel was one of those uniquely German meals, an all-you-can-eat buffet of
breads and cheeses and meats that hostels in no other country would bother to lavish on their guests. I started the ten-minute walk into the city center and the Marienplatz, the town square fronted by an ornate town hall building with its famous marionette figures that stand still up high in the towers and come out to dance at turn of the hour. The snow began to fall again, blanketing the city into the quiet of a windless blizzard. Munich has always possessed a fairyland quality for me, like the technicolor figures inside a snowglobe. It had been years since I had seen the city under snow - just over twenty-one years, since the winter I turned 10 years old. Despite the snow, the weather still felt warmer than my weekend at Folkestone not more than a few days ago, confirming my suspicion that even a blizzard in Bavaria harbors less of
a chill than an average winter day in Britain. But the charm of strolling in a snowstorm eventually wears off, so I ducked into the Deutsches Museum to spend some time out of the weather. I wandered through the exhibits, some which were obviously newer than since the last time I had visited there and some of which I vaguely remembered from previous visits - medieval musical instruments, half-functional biochemistry experiments behind glass whose purpose I could only estimate through my far-less-than-fluent German. I was getting ready to step back out into the weather when I saw a sign pointing down a staircase into a mock mine in the basement, so I thought I'd check that out before donning hat and gloves for the snow again. Beneath the museum they have managed to carve out a set of winding tunnels so extensive that it takes most of half-hour to navigate through them; along the sides are mock-ups of miners in shafts and equipment running on tracks and horses who pulled trolleys along until the days of electrification. Even in the safety of a mock-up, this is an occupation that I cannot imagine - so far underground, such cramped conditions, with so little holding up the mountain of earth above the small tunnel of air. I walked through quickly; I was not interested in staying long. 
By the afternoon the skies were clearing and the snow was starting to melt off. I covered the center of the city several times over, in overlapping circles, trying to see every corner I remembered from my former days here, even those I didn't know I would remember. I visited several churches too, reminded of another axiom of European climatology: the place that is reliably colder than Britain in the winter is the inside of German religious edifices. My parents used to joke about sending my little brother to one of these places if he did not behave - places where the air inside bears a chill that even a winter night can't match, and any heat introduced promptly floats into the arched ceilings dozens of feet above.
Toward the late afternoon I had reached that stage of travel where I have to make myself sit down and rest, when I wonder why I'm feeling tired and cranky until I realize that I've been on my feet for seven or eight hours without rest. I've long had a habit of eating while walking, and my recent travels have compounded this: I grab a sandwich and keep moving, forgetting hours later why my feet are achy and sore. I think I'll invent a fad diet: you can only eat while you're walking. I'll call it the Shin Splints diet, for that splitting feeling you get in your lower legs when you walk on concrete for too long. I finally stopped for a snack and a hot chocolate before heading back toward the hostel with the setting sun.
After grabbing a dinner at an Italian restaurant (strangely, these seem to proliferate in German, though Italy isn't all that close by), I walked back toward the Marienplatz, quiet again now at night. Along the alleyways into the center, shop windows are backlit to reveal the that particular Bavarian aesthetic of immaculate kitsch, of so many figurines and knick-knacks and thimbles painted with the blue-and-white-checkers of the Bavarian flag that you wonder how they all fit on one shelf - but at the same time so tidy that not a mote of dust can be found between them. Like the way that some Latin American countries can get away with butting a salmon pink wall up against a tangerine orange ceiling and trim the whole thing in sea green, it's an aesthetic that only works in its own context, but in its context, it invokes a visual magic, a tangle of detail that sorts itself out into an order only it can follow.
I arrived back at the hostel just before my roommates came back for the evening; I packed some things for my departure in the morning, and put in ear plugs to sleep amidst their chatter.
posted by skylanda at 3:30 PM
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