Return to München

Had a really good time with Mark in Munich this weekend. I like the city a lot.

Mark got in on Friday morning and our first move was a trip to the Vierortsbad, Karlsruhe's sauna baths. The ideal way to relax ahead of a good holiday weekend. It was very quiet being still during working hours. We ate a fine lunch at the Italian deli afterwards.

We got into Munich at half eleven Friday night, after a very smooth and comfortable train ride and appropriate anthropological research in the buffet car. They actually have beer on tap and real glasses in a German train, not half-warm cans of Heineken for ridiculous prices.

On Saturday we went to the Deutsches Museum. It's absolutely huge. There's no way you could really go round it in a day. Lots of people brought pack lunches and flasks of coffee to consume as they went round. We saw the Zuse Z3 which I thought was cool, the world's first programmable computer. It was made with relays instead of valves, for reliability. There were also lots of other huge old computers with mercury delay lines and other crazy technology in.

Other cool things in the museum were the aeroplanes, including a Wright brothers flyer, a replica of Baron von Richthofen's Fokker triplane, and a rocket-powered Messerschmidt plane that was used towards the end of WW2. They also had the Magdeburg Hemispheres, the apparatus used by Roentgen to discover X-rays, and an Enigma encryption machine.

Never mind that, what about the beer?

After the museum, we started in the Bratwurstherzl. This is a sausage and beer hall in the old town. You can order anything from 6 (beginner) to 12 (professional) Nürnberger sausages, which you then get on a heart-shaped plate with your choice of potato salad or sauerkraut. We both ordered 8. Meanwhile, the Bavarians on the next table were engaged in entertaining banter with the waiter about who was eating the most sausages. Really excellent food, goes down especially well with a light and refreshing Weissbier.

Following this, we came across a very friendly pub close to the Frauenkirche (the big cathedral with the distinctive twin clocktowers). It was packed out inside, and people were standing on the porch where they had tables, stools and heaters to keep the determined-to-drink-outside Bavarians happy. The Weissbeer here was cloister-brewed to a recipe from 1426 or something, and was first-rate. If you could start selling this in Britain, without the ridiculous price tag it attracts in the poncy London and Edinburgh bars which do sell it, you could make a fortune. I'd never drink Deuchar's IPA again.

Our next stop was Dürnbräu, in a small street just on the edge of old town called, helpfully, Dürnbräugasse. This is a small, initmate beer hall with a large, sociable centre table. We arrived just in time to get the last seats, they were turning people away afterwards. This is often a sign that you've stumbled into the right place. This proved to be the case as we were served with some excellent Schnapps for aperitif, followed by some of the very best beer of the weekend. And that's some damn fine beer. The Dunkel (dark beer) even came in a glass with a pewter flip-top lid. We ate dinner here too, high quality Wiener Schnitzel. A really good place.

On Sunday, we started by going to mass in the incredible rococo Asamkirche. The priest was on good form. His sermon was about the passage where Jesus tells the crowd that people who are poor now will be be rich in heaven, and people who cry now will laugh in heaven, and vice-versa. He said; "does this mean we shouldn't laugh here on earth? That we shouldn't laugh in church? No! In fact, I don't think we laugh here enough! Here's one about the time I was in the seminary: this famous cardinal was coming to visit, you see, it was just before lent, and.." then he proceeded to tell a long gag about one of the other trainee priests not recognising the cardinal, thinking he was also a trainee priest, and saying something along the lines of 'so I've heard this big-time charlie cardinal that's coming really thinks he's God' - the cardinal didn't take it too well. The 70 year old Asamkirche priest was clearly still laughing about it. He was a good guy.

After mass we were just in time to get to the Augustiner Grossgaststätten for Weisswurst before the theoretical midday deadline. It was really good. It reminded me (and Mark) a little of extremely good quality haggis.

You're standing on the art

We went to the Pinakothek after that for some modern art. It's free on Sundays which is nice as, in addition to personal financial savings, it leads to a much friendlier crowd inside in my opinion. One mishap was that one newly acquired piece involved a lot of frisbees, one of which was on the floor. People kept treading on it and setting off an alarm, all day. As well as junk there was a lot of good stuff, some rooms full of strangely placed pieces of wool which I liked and a good collection of Picasso, Klee, Magritte, Braque - all the usual suspects. There's a design section too, but that wasn't all that great. There were a few excellent pieces, but some sub-Ikea furniture as well which was a bit dull to look at. It was another huge museum, and we were again knackered by the time we had looked around.

After coffee we looked in several of the grand old churches in Munich before returning to the stand-outside-under-heatlamp pub near the Frauenkirche for a few Weissbeers for the journey home. Having retrieved our gear from the left luggage lockers, we made the train home with about 0 seconds to spare, the guard was actually yelling at us (and several other people) to get a move on. When they say 18:43 train in this country, they really do mean 18:43. We made it though and the journey was again very relaxed and easy. A really nice weekend. And a good city.