Days 1&2 - the flights and Munich
Trip Start
Dec 26, 2008
1
28
Trip End
Jan 26, 2009
Munich,
Bavaria,
Germany
Saturday, December 27, 2008
The first leg of the trip was almost completely painless. The in flight entertainment was the best ever, and the food was pretty impressive too. We're looking at joining the Qantas fan club, if such a thing exists - no doubt it does on facebook.
Darren and a Messerschmitt in the German Museum
We arrived in Hong Kong and after picking up our boarding passes for the rest of the trip we began our trip into town. This wasn't as easy as it might sound, what with ATMs that wouldn't accept Mastercard, ticket machines that wouldn't accept $500 HK notes, and long queues for immigration and at the ticket counter. But we were eventually on our way on the efficient Airport Express train to Hong Kong station. Penny had a few notes from TripAdvisor on getting to the Peak but hadn't done the usual extensive research because we weren't sure if we were going, and this turned out to be a problem in the end... To summarise, Hong Kong station and Central station aren't the same thing, the maps in them aren't helpful (or weren't to us), taxis are a wonderful invention that it took us a while to recall, and the queue for the Peak Tram was so long that after standing in it for a while we decided it was all too risky and called the enterprise off. A very scary but mercifully short taxi ride and another ride on the Airport Express, and we were back at the airport, where the resting lounge allowed Darren to have a little kip and Penny to do some reading and internetting until it was time to board.
The Swissair flights from Hong Kong to Zurich and then Zurich to Munich weren't too bad either and we both managed to get a few hours' sleep on the long flight, but we were pretty glad when we were finally on the tram to Munich station with our luggage safely in our possession (not bad after only 1 hour's transit time in Zurich)
Darren in the queue for the Peak Tram
.We found the Hotel Uhland without any trouble and were able to check in straight away, for which we were very grateful. After a shower and a little light laundry, we set off to walk in town via the Sendlinger Tor, one of Munich's three remaining city gates that were part of the wall built in the 14th century. Sendlinger Strasse, which leads from the gate to the Marienplatz, is a nice shopping street, but due to the appalling value of the dollar and our dislike of shopping we just walked along it, admiring but not going into the pretty church on the way - a mistake, according to the Lonely Planet, so we'll have to do that tomorrow.
We arrived at the Marienplatz just in time to join the hordes of tourists (including a couple of huge tour groups - envy - not!) there to watch the characters on the tower of the Rathaus do their thing - quite cool, really. The Christmas market that had obviously been centred on the Marienplatz was being dismantled. We had a look around the courtyard of the Rathaus and then wandered over towards the Viktualienmarkt. When we went into the Peterskirche, there was a service going on, which was lovely. Though we did feel a little like imposters, at least we were behaving more respectfully than some of the other tourists there
Darren pretending to be a spaceman
. We stayed a little while listening to the Christmas carols in German then headed back out into the cold.After this it was time for some further planning of our day in a nice warm comfortable spot, so we headed to the Hofbraeuhaus, where we enjoyed the traditional Bavarian breakfast (ours was more like lunch) of Weissbier, Weisswurst and Brezeln, preceded by yummy potato soup. Darren declared it the best lunch he'd ever eaten.
Although tempted to stay and listen to the oompah band a bit longer (and perhaps indulge in a little more beer), we then walked down the Kaufinger Strasse, another lovely shopping street, to the Frauenkirche, which was disappointing from the outside, being half covered in scaffolding, but spectacular from the inside, particularly as there was a small group of singers giving a performance there. A church guide, or guard, had obviously decided that of the many crimes the tourists were committing, he was going to clamp down on hat-wearing today, and could tell the men to remove their hats in an impressive number of languages. Poor bloke, talk about the work of Sisyphus.
Following the Lonely Planet walking tour, we checked out the Michaelskirche and the Karlstor, another mediaeval gate, before taking the underground to the German Museum
Hotel Uhland
. It is a great science museum, with very complicated explanations of everything, and was really a bit beyond us at that point. Penny's favourite bit was all the chemical reactions, which Darren already knew all about. Darren's favourite bit was probably his attempt to revive himself with a sugar rush delivered by a hot chocolate, a bottle of Mezzo Mix (the German specialty of cola and orange soft drink) and a slice of beesting-type cake.By this stage we were really dragging ourselves around, so admitted defeat and headed back to the nice warm hotel to read, watch TV, surf the internet, and finally fall into bed at about 5.45pm, to sleep until about 7.30am!
