Munich

Wow! It's been a super crazy couple weeks, and I'm just now getting some photos off my camera in order to blog.  Two weeks ago I met my dear friends Ryan and Teresa in Munich after they had spent several days in Paris, and then we traveled together from there to Salzburg and then to Vienna for the remainder of their trip.  I'm going to do my best to make these entries as complete as possible while still breaking them up into reasonable size posts, so I'll begin now with our time in Munich and then go on to the rest of things, including Thanksgiving!

I took the train from Vienna to Munich Friday morning, and they took the train from Paris, and thankfully we met up in the train station just fine, even without cell phones.  We made our way to our hotel and dropped off our bags before setting out to explore the city a bit.

The Rathaus

We wandered around for a long time looking for somewhere to have dinner.  All of us were pretty tired, and we seemed to keep making the wrong "left/right" decisions while wandering, and not really finding somewhere in our price range that looked good without being too touristy.  Finally about the time we were ready to give up and just eat anywhere with food, Teresa spotted a cute little restaurant and we had a super delicious German dinner.  I really wish I had pictures of it, but I think by that point I was just too excited about the cozy restaurant and warm food to mess with my camera.  After dinner we took back to wandering a bit before heading back to the hotel.  

Munich was in the process of setting up their Christmas markets, so none of the lights in the streets were on quite yet, although many businesses had their decorations up.

The next morning we were sure to have finished our breakfast in time to see the big clock on the Rathaus do its thing...very cool figures doing all sorts of things at a medieval dinner (including the jousting in this picture)

we were not the only ones with this idea... 

Again...giant Christmas tree...but sadly no lights being turned on quite yet

The inside courtyard of the Rathaus

Ryan found the plaque that says Cincinnati is one of Munich's sister cities, so he was super excited.

That afternoon we decided to head out towards the BMW plant and museum and the Olympic Park that is very close to it.  The three of us pretty much love all things Olympics, and we can now add Munich to our list of Olympics cities visited. 

Inside the BMW world...all sorts of fun cars

including this tiiiiiny little one, the door is the entire front.

From there we decided to go up in the Olympic Tower and get a good view over the area 

Looking down on Olympic Park

Looking down towards the BMW factory

The inside of the Olympic swimming facility

The old ticket windows...looking very 1970s

From the Olympic Park we headed back into town and went to the Residenz, which is the former palace in Munich.  It is gigantic, and the tour allows you to wander through just over 100 rooms, which after a while seem to blend together a bit, but we had a great time going through the palace, listening to our fun little audio guides along the way.

Teresa and I are very fancy in palaces

This is one of the chapels inside the palace, and it was significantly damaged during World War 2.  When they rebuilt it after the war, they were careful to preserve as much of the old bricks as possible, so you can see the line where the old materials end and the new materials that were required begin.

A serious table setting

The family tree in portrait form on the walls

After our extensive trip through the palace, we were hungry and ready for the Hofbrauhaus, which was a must see for us especially since we've all been to the one in Cincinnati together several times.  The original surely did not disappoint.

ridiculously large mugs of beer

yum yum

After dinner we took one more stroll through downtown stopping to pick up some dessert to go at a bakery before heading back to our hotel and packing to leave for Salzburg the next morning!

Gans!

Yesterday was Martinstag (St. Martin's Day), which is celebrated in certain parts of the world, including Austria.  I'm still trying to fully understand all the backstory and customs surrounding this holiday, and what I have so far is a mixture of information from talking to friends and reading some things online and trying to take that collection and make sense of it.  For the purposes of this blog entry...it has to do with food...and the sort of "Austrian Thanksgiving" element of it.  Basically though, Martin was hesitant about becoming a Bishop, so he hid in a cave or something, but there were geese nearby who started making all sorts of noise and he was found and then ordained.  That's the way oversimplified version anyway.  What it translates to though, is all sorts of restaurants serving this "Martingans" (Martin - goose) dinner during the weeks surrounding Martinstag.  So some Austrian friends invited me to join them for this goose dinner last week at a local restaurant in Grinzing.  

Definitely not the most attractive picture by any means, but we were each served these large portions of goose, with bread dumplings, sort of a baked apple with cranberries on top, and spiced red cabbage in a little dish on the side.  It was super delicious, but there is no real civilized way to get meat off this giant section of goose!  Thankfully we were all in the same situation I guess, so nobody seemed to mind much as we're all pulling these things apart.  

I'm definitely thankful to have wonderful friends here who invite me to share in these traditions, and answer my endless ridiculous questions as I try to understand what exactly is going on.  

Martinstag also a component where children walk around with lanterns and sing little songs...but I still have no real idea why...I'm working on figuring that out and will update this when I do :)

  

Wine Society: Kattus

This semester I decided to join the wine society at school, in order to learn even more about wine while living in this wonderful grape growing and wine producing city.  Our first excursion was on Halloween, which added perhaps a bit of mystery to wandering around in cavernous wine cellars.  I feel like I should put a disclaimer on this one though, this excursion came directly after a long day trip to work on a project for school, so by this point in the evening my brain was getting a little fried from trying to not only process new information, but process that information in German.  So...on this first outing to Kattus to see how they make their sparkling wines, while I did learn some, I was also mostly taking in the cool and unusual architecture.  

This is actually across the street from my regular grocery store, but I'd never really paid attention to it sitting there behind its gates.

very cool event spaces down there as well

This is part of the wine making process, the bottles are turned this way so the yeast will settle at the neck of the bottle and can be easily removed.  They do also have big shiny holders that can hold many more bottles, and rotate them automatically, but some are still done this way by hand.  We did also get to see the sets of machines that actually bottle and cork and label the wines, but sadly none of those pictures came out very well.  I'll try again on our next excursion!

Giant containers of wine.

This is the entrance room upstairs, and where we got to taste some of their products.

Some lovely sparkling wine at the end of this long day.

Our wine society is actually going on our November excursion next week, to Klosterneuburg, which I am really excited about.  It's basically just over the other side of Kahlenberg, so I've seen bits of it from above, but have never actually gone down over there.