Hello again everybody,
It's so nice to know that so many of you are enjoying these posts
- not least because travelling alone in a country where you don't speak the
language can get a little lonely and it's cheering at times like that to think
I'm carrying you all in my back pocket, so to speak.
Part of the Munich Residence, the former royal palace of the Bavarian monarchs. The place was so vast it was difficult to fit enough of it into a single photo to give you an idea of what it looked like!
Hofgarten, with Bayerische Staatskanzlei building in the background.
You might like to check out this video I took of a busker in the Hofgarten. :)
German war memorial. This one was built after WWI and there's a marked change of tone between the memorial text for each of the wars - the text for the WWI memorial, on the wall behind where I stood to take this photo, refers to the 13,000 "hero-sons" of Munich who died - the text for WWII, which you can just see at the top centre of this pic, mentions only the 116,600 people of Munich who died in the war, including a number of civilians killed in air raids.
Today didn't turn out quite as planned but it was still very
interesting. I wandered into town to have a look at the big English Garden and
was rather bemused to see large numbers of young people dressed up in some
weird and wonderful costumes. Some I recognised - Maleficent and Spiderman, for
example - others looked rather like characters from Japanese anime. I stopped
beside a beautiful river to look curiously at the growing crowd of costumed
persons and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said something in
German.
"Sorry, I don't speak German," I replied, as now usual
at times like this.
"That's OK," replied the tapper, in English. Turns out
said tapper was a young Austrian bloke. When I asked him what brought him to
Munich, he told me, "Positive vibrations.”
Right.
Never one to let an opportunity for getting information go by, I
gestured to the festivities on the other side of the river, which had now grown
to include a karate demonstration and an oompah band.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“It’s weird, that’s what it is.”
Spoken by one who should know.
After asking me to promise that I would visit a region in Austria
that he mentioned, and if he could give me a hug (thank you, no), I pointed him
in the direction of some more of the festival weirdness and headed in the
opposite direction.
The English Garden is huge, lush, and very pretty. It features a
series of rivers, neatly contained in stone-lined banks, weeping willows, and
other soft green trees. I spent a while just pottering through it, soaking it
all in, lingering on the little bridges to watch the water ripple past as the
sunlight danced on its surface.
After a while, I heard some excitement and headed in its general
direction. Imagine my surprise when, where the river I was walking up gushed
out under a bridge over which traffic was driving, a large wave had been formed
and people were taking turns surfing on it. They would have had to be very
skilful and very strong, as the wave was not very wide, and the river was
moving fast. I had my heart in my mouth a few times when one or other of the
surfers got a little too close to the bank, but there were no accidents –
they’d simply plunge into the water and be carried downstream until they were
able to climb out onto the bank and walk back. In the meantime, someone else
would have thrown their board into the water and jumped on.
Surfing on a river in Munich - a sport that requires strength and no small amount of skill.
After wandering through the previously identified weirdness, which
turned out to be a festival of Japanese culture called Haiku, and where I got
to admire some ikebana and drumming and other things which felt especially
weird given that I was in Germany, I headed to the Museum of the History of
National Socialism, which I'll cover in my next post.