The whole airport deal took longer than I anticipated, so instead of going to my hostel first, I got off at the stop for the free walking tour. I had to kill about 45 minutes. But lo and behold, when I walked off the S-Bahn stop, there was the world's greatest looking pastry shop. I got a huge pretzel (something I'll probably do everyday) and one covered in cheese (maybe butter too, who knows, it was good).
I walked around the Old Town area and found an amazing number of sights I wanted to see. Munich is incredibly close together, like the tourist dream. You really don't have to go far to see everything.
The tour started at 1, and right about that time it started to pour. Luckily I had my umbrella handy or else I would have been rather unhappy. The tour was good, it helped to see everything right off the bat so that. We went into the one big famous church here, which wasn't that impressive from the inside or outside, but it had the 'devil's footprint' which was really from the architect. Not that good of a story.
We looked at a couple other important places, like the most famous beer hall in the world (Hitler even painted it), the Rezidene, a market, a Starbucks (our guide called it the American Embassy, which I found really funny), the New Town Hall (which has a glockenspiel that goes off at 11 and 12 everyday, somehow I saw it go off at 5, it was boring), and probably the most interesting part was the place where Hitler tried the Beer Hall Pounch and a fight broke out, with 20 dead. Hitler installed a plaque that was gaurded by the SS and you had to heil Hitler whenever you walked past it. Some people would take a backway so that they wouldn't have to salute it, which is marked in gold now. Today the plaque isn't visible, only the holes where the screws were, and half were covered by portapotties. We ended on the steps of a building where Hitler gave a speech.
I then went to the hostel, which is super nice, like a modernish hotel nice. The rooms are solid, nothing special, but it's so much cleaner than any hostel I've been in. And I get a locker to put my stuff in for free, a nice touch. Plus free wifi, and this is on of the cheaper places I've stayed.
I went back to Old Town (about a 15 minute walk and straightforward) and got an awesome pastry with strawberries and cream on top of it.
I then paid a Euro to climb 380 steps to the top of a church tower overlooking the city. If there's one thing I love, it's paying to climb steps. The view was great though, right in the middle of the city, and the rain had completely stopped, the sun even coming out and it wasn't cold either. It was amazing when I was up there looking down on the city, which is one of those old pretty looking European cities, that 80% of it was destroyed in the war. I tried to picture bombers flying over the place, it just seemed so foreign to it now. The city was rebuilt so fast, and in the way that made it look how it did before, combined with the general lack of memorials for Nazi or Jewish causes, it's almost like it didn't happen. Strange.
I was super thirsty so I went and bought a carbonated apple juice. It was ok. A German guy, who looked well off (and basically admitted as much) asked me for the bottle in German (when I had about a third of it left). He wanted to collected the 15 cent deposit and spent about five minutes telling me about how the kids just throw away the bottles here. Crazy. I didn't give it to him, first because I wasn't done, and second because I was going to fill it up with water and drink from it all week. Sorry guy.
Then I went over to the National Theater to try to get tickets to the ballet. Wagner used to premiere a lot of his work there, and the theater is very imposing. They were out of tickets so I was told to come back at 6:30 and maybe they'd have some. All they had was standing room, but it was 5 Euros, so I did it. I was in my jeans, dirty Primark shoes, very out of place. I felt sort of relieved to get standing room.
The theater was impressive, I was on the 5th out of 6 levels, not that far back though, but way up in the air. As far as I can tell, the play was about fancy dressed girls dancing around on their toes and guys in very tight pants dancing with them. There was something about this guy that looked like Tom Cruise but he kept falling asleep and I had no idea what was going on. There was probably a story there somewhere.
It was impressive to watch them dance, and the costumes were amazing. I enjoyed it (when I snuck into a seat I dozed off a little for the third act though) but I'm not clamoring to go to another one. I would have rather seen a Wagner opera.
I was pretty tired, so I came back to the hostel and went down to the lounge and typed this up. Tomorrow I'm taking the Third Reich tour at 10:45, after I'll probably go in a couple places I wanted to here. And eat pastries
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