Last day on tour with the famous world walking duo, Corrie and Will on their final lap today. I haven’t talked about food much because it’s nothing special but I must tell you about the last few days. We love croissants, and if you love them as much as we do, don’t come to Germany for them, well what I mean is choose your croissant places in Germany. We found two of them, one was in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and the other in Munich. The latter get their croissants from France. I think they are a chain and they are called Muller, not to be confused with Muller cosmetics, certainly not when you are having breakfast. They are as good as any we’ve tried.
After breakfast I did some more videoing for my friend because the first was too long to send. While I was doing this Corrie went shopping in a place off Marienplatz, but there was one problem – no summer sales, damn it. The Platz was very busy so we circled two of them and found St Peters Church, the oldest in Munich. I’m not a church goer, but it’s mainly the painted ceilings, they are delicious, and this church equalled yesterday’s Assam in this area.
St Peter’s (probably because of its age), leans on the famous Viktualienmarkt which a friend of ours recommended because of the fabulous food. We weren’t there at the right time so we had to forgo this even though the long lines pointed to good food. We continued over the Isar river which we have been companions with off and on for some time. Three days is not long in a big city to get used to its character and its people.
We found them as we did throughout Germany, especially under 65 (a guess as you are aware of), to be very helpful and would come outside their shop to provide accurate direction. They appeared to us to want to get it right so when we asked if they spoke English, they would say ‘a little bit’ and then spoke fluently. They were gentle and easy to talk to and quick to like you or not. One hotel owner offered to take us up a mountain and to show us around her town; while another couple have invited us to stay before we fly home.
And Germany has invited large numbers of refugees into their home. It hasn’t been all easy, but it’s the thought behind it that I think is a good thing. We see the gentle people of Africa quietly asking visitors to follow safety precautions instead of speaking in an aggressive manner; we see Romanians and Ukrainians quietly but efficiently doing work well below their qualifications as they clean our rooms; and Afghanis whose restaurants are closing because of local issues; the Turks, most of whom we see feeding the masses with their well balanced meals affordable even to the homeless; while the highly unemployed Syrians are on benefits, most refugee doctors are Syrian born. In addition to all of these people, there are a host of asylum seekers that I haven’t mentioned.
But there is a peculiarity that we’ve noticed here in Munich alone. We might have it wrong because we’ve only spent a weekend here and Monday may also be a holiday. Our observations show the following. There are infrastructure works all over Munich but we did not see one worker working on the street changes. The roadworks in progress or as we saw it ‘not’, are in very important tourist areas such as the roads and footpaths in the area around St Peters and the Viktualienmarkt, and the barriers around Marienplatz.
Outside our home on Augustenstrasse there is unfinished work; massive works are found near the Isar River and across two bridges, one nearly fully closed; many works areas creep on up the other side of the Isar where Afghani restaurants have shut down, I imagine because it is no more an attractive part of town; for 100 metres you can’t park or cross the road; roadwork barriers are an eye sore round the station, and all over Munich. But no-one can tell us why.
The usually, I imagine, well designed and copious bike paths are forced to suddenly share the footpaths with pedestrians; the lines drawn to show where the demarcation lines are would be a handful for the locals; the wrong tiles at times make it a mish mash and squares of bitumen are often a lazy substitute for tiles and stones in the huge cobbled area in front of The National Theatre.
I really don’t get it, because the gentle people of Munich work so hard to make even the crabbiest tourist satisfied. And that just happened. Deutsche Bahn notified us by email two hours before to confirm our details and platform changes from Munich to Aschaffenburg and from Aschaffenburg to Altheim. Shortly en route, they emailed a seven minute delay and that there was still time to change train – which very soon was revised to a two minute delay. We have never had notifications like this before.
On the photo, very ordinary but it shows three parts of this post. This is the start of the market; St Peter’s church and an earthworks sign right in the middle.
Tomorrow is the last day
We hope you’ve enjoyed the adventure and hope life is as good for you as it is for us
Thanks for coming
Will and Corrie
