I love Bavaria. Love it. Yet again, after a spare two days, I am on my way out.
Bavaria, and its capital Munich, are home to what you might call the usual German stereotypes: lederhosen, pretzels, and of course the world renowned Oktoberfest and all the beer that comes with it. What I loved most about the state though were the fairytale castles. I did run into some problems where those are concerned, but we’ll get to that later. For now, let’s start at the beginning.
As previously mentioned, I’d taken a later train to allow my EU visit, so my time in Munich didn’t really start until the following morning. It was a wet, grey day, as I’d expected, but I wasn’t about to let that get me down. As in Belgium, there was something fitting about the rain on the bricks. Rainy cities are just built for rainy weather I guess. It was strange to my Texan sensibilities to need a jacket in late July though.
Breakfast at the hostel was exciting, mostly because it included pretzels. And fruit. But lots of good breakfasts included fruit, and this was the first time anyone threw in the pretzels. There were also plenty of things to steal for lunch, which I always appreciate. For once, however, I felt like the exception surreptitiously stuffing bread rolls into my bag.
The combination hostel/hotel I was staying in seemed to be hosting an American summer exchange program, and from what I overheard of nearby conversations, most of the breakfast hall seemed to be filled with students who didn’t need to steal their lunch. It was strange to be surrounded by undergrads taking classes again, and to be thoroughly depressed by their complaints about the pointlessness of school when they could be on a beach in Spain. I’m not going to get into the decline of respect for education among American youth because that I could go on for ages and it’s not exactly relevant to this post, but suffice it to say I was glad when the last of them scurried off to class, quite vocally proud of the fact they would be late.
I left myself not long after, taking the long way into the old town so I could pass a couple architecturally interesting churches and gates. I think my meandering path must have been providence, because I found a store along the way having a spectacular sale on purse-like backpacks.
I don’t remember if I mentioned being in the market for a new bag, but the purse I left the states with was well and truly done. The outside was all scuffed and peeling from where I had scraped it in tiny stone passages or on winding tower stairs, I was forever losing things through the holes in the lining, and I’d spilled enough things in it that it had developed a distinctive and not entirely pleasant smell. Worst of all, the unequal distribution of the great weight it usually contained, centered on one shoulder or the other, was forever unbalancing me and contributing to the back stiffness born of night after night in subpar beds. After six months of faithful service then, I had decided it was time for a change. And this backpack was cheap.
I didn’t want to move all the dirty things from my purse to the backpack, so I ended up carrying it around empty all day. On my way back to the hostel that night though, I did manage to find a drug store selling disinfecting cloths in packs of forty. Yay cleanliness! My dormmates thought I was a bit strange, sitting there polishing everything I own and then tearing the lining out of my decrepit purse to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, but at least it was a conversation starter, and they all turned out to be perfectly lovely people, from Austria, Italy, and Alaska respectively.
Anyway, backpack secured with my budget in tact, I made my way to the walking tour meeting point where I was met by an English archaeologist who, for all his energy, had a terrible sense of humor. He summed it up himself near the end when he quoted an old English joke. “Where would we be without our sense of humor? In Germany.” He was an okay tour guide - not as knowledgeable as I would have expected an archaeologist to be, or perhaps just not very good at communicating it. Nevertheless, I knew little enough about Bavaria that I learned a good deal. It was also perfect timing for seeing the World War II sights as I had just started the Munich chapter of Mein Kampf that morning.
We also got to see the glockenspiel play; the second biggest letdown in Europe, beaten only by the Astronomical Clock in Prague.
Following the walking tour, I figured I had time for one good museum, and had narrowed my options down to the Munich City Museum or the Residence Museum in the old Royal Palace. The palace was more expensive, but I am also a sucker for a good monarchy, and the Wittelsbach family that had owned the palace had ruled Bavaria for more than seven hundred years. So I dashed through the rain to the Residence Museum only to be severely disappointed.
It was certainly a pretty palace, don’t get me wrong, but where I was expecting fascinating insights into the lives of the royals, like those I’d received in the Habsburg palaces, I instead found a lot of more or less empty rooms. And I mean a looooooot of rooms.
Though the palace was mostly destroyed during World War II, it has since been reconstructed, and the current complex includes something like 150 rooms open to visitors. Due to restoration works, only 90 of those were open when I went, but that’s still ninety rooms. Not just that, but ninety empty rooms.
Empty might be a bit of an exaggeration. There were a few pieces of furniture here and there, almost none of it original, and a number of paintings, tapestries, and reproduced frescoes on the ceilings. They were also pretty, but ninety rooms of that with no information was not my cup of tea. Or rather, I shouldn’t say no information, just not the kind of information I wanted.
You see, entrance to the museum came with a free audio guide, which was where I expected the information to be. Rooms, even empty ones, are brought to life if you can fill them with your own pictures of the people who lived there before. As I keyed in number after number however, I kept getting more and more of the same.
“Welcome to the Red Chamber, named for the red wall decorations embroidered in gold. On the ceiling you can see an empty medallion where the central fresco used to be. On the left is a painting of a cherub sitting in a cloud. On the right is a woman holding a Bible. Her dress is red and her hair falls about her shoulders.”
Sometimes they would give dates or the names of painters, but 90% of the audio guide was little more than literal descriptions of the things I could quite plainly see for myself. So maybe it was the information a blind person would want, but I can't imagine it's use to anyone else. If they’d just described the symbolism at least that would have been something, but about an hour into what turned out to be a three hour tour I was so done. I wanted to know about the Wittelsbachs! Where were the stories? The history!?
The Treasury visit that followed (because I’d bought a combination ticket to the museum, treasury, and theatre before the complex had disappointed me so) was a little bit better. The audioguide there gave some information on why the different treasures were precious when they were acquired. Besides the crown jewels there were relics, porcelain, stone work, all manner of pretty things really. It wa at least a bit more impressive, but not exactly worth the entrance fee.
The last stop was the theatre, which wasn’t meant to be a huge thing to begin with. It was more or less an additional room to the palace. I don’t know who built it, or when, or why - and trust me, I looked for all of that information. It was also pretty though? In case you can’t tell, pretty has stopped being quite enough for me. There are a lot of pretty things in the world.
Anyway, after the museum I managed to make it back to the hostel without getting wet any further up than the ankles. Thank goodness for umbrellas and foresight. The next morning, however, I ran into a number of unfortunate problems.
I intended to wake up early and make my way out to Neuschwanstein Castle, the fairytale castle on which Disney based his, built by King Ludwig II in the Bavarian mountain forests he had loved as a boy. I intended to, but then I overslept. You see, my full scale cleaning the night before had included replacing my earplugs, and new earplugs always work better than old. In this case, they worked too well it seems. I didn’t hear my alarm at all, but I can only imagine it went off and woke the rest of the dorm, for which I felt quite guilty and chagrined.
I was still up before anyone else in the room though, and only an hour later than I had planned. That hour makes a big difference though when it comes to beating the hordes of tourists. I was one of the first people on the train, but by the time we left the station it was standing room only. Of course, that didn’t bode well for crowds at the castle itself.
Before I could get to problems at the castle though, I had what was probably the most horrible fright of my trip on the train. I don’t remember the train of thought that led to the realization, but at one point of staring out the window at the lovely Bavarian countryside, thoughts of my passport floated through my head; my passport that I kept nice and secure in a secret pocket of my purse so it was always accessible but also out of reach of thieves. Thieves and hasty cleaning, it would seem, because that pocket was in the same purse I had thrown out the night before, and I had not remembered to empty it.
My heart stopped. I could picture my passport, in the pocket in the purse in the trash bin, just waiting to be emptied and carried off to the dump where it would sit forevermore, mocking me as I started running around, calling embassies and trying to get a new one. It was still early though, about the time I imagined housekeeping started to make its rounds, and I have never been so thankful for my international cell phone.
I called the hostel, or rather I called the customer service hotline for the hostel and they called the hostel. Why we’re not allowed to call direct I’m not entirely sure, but either way, the woman I talked to was very helpful. She said they were checking and she’d call me back when they had news. It was maybe ten minutes of tense waiting on the train before the call arrived, but it was good news. They’d found my purse and were holding it, passport and all, at reception for when I returned. So that was a bullet dodged, but certainly also a good lesson learned.
From the train, we (because it was now me and about two hundred other tourists) had to transfer to the village at the foot of Neuschwanstein Castle by bus. Again I was on the bus early, or one of the three buses I should say, but again it was standing room only before we managed to depart. When we got to the village I could barely walk for the crowds; and the umbrellas, because of course it was still raining, didn’t help matters at all. At least we got our first views of the castle, rising majestically out of the mists.
I bypassed the information center to jump on the massive line for tickets. I’d been waiting in the rain with my umbrella for maybe half an hour when an employee in a poncho came by to warn us that the earliest entry time left for the castle was 5pm. But you see, the last train back to Munich that got me in before midnight left at 6pm, and I still had to catch the bus back to the station. That wasn’t going to work.
So my heart dropped again. I could still have waited another two hours for a ticket into Hohenschwangau Castle at 2pm, the much smaller castle built built by Leopold’s father Maximilian II in the shadow of Neuschwanstein, but it didn’t have the fairytale interiors I’d been so looking forward to, and it cost just as much as the big castle, and the tour wasn’t any longer. I debated with myself for another ten minutes, not wanting to give in to the inevitable, before finally bowing out and heading back to the information center for a map of the area.
Entering the castle, I reminded myself, was still only half of what I had been so looking forward to. The hike up the mountain to Neuschwanstein was forty minutes through the forest. They had buses and horse drawn carriages that would take you, but really, where was the fun in that? So I armed myself with my map and set on up the path. It probably only took me twenty five minutes or so, certainly no more than thirty, but a nice walk through the trees was just what I needed to begin calming my dangerously frayed nerves. There were enough tourists on the path that the trees weren’t much more than a neutralizing effect, but at least neutralizing was enough to keep me sane, thank goodness.
At the top, the views were spectacular. The entire region is mostly a lower area of the Alps, and this time I was actually hiking them. I wandered the castle grounds for a while, then bought a glass of mulled wine and a cookie from the stand out front because they were running a fantastic deal where they let me keep the mug. It’s going to be a pain to add to my ever growing bag of tricks, but at tourist trap prices it was basically free. Who was I to argue?
I walked with my wine to Marienbrucke, a bridge over one of the many mountain waterfalls with a spectacular view of the castle. I expect under different circumstance I could have stood and stared off of it forever, but considering it took twenty minutes to get on, twenty minutes to get off, and you couldn’t move while on it because of the crowds, I had to limit my time to enough for a single picture.
I was so done with other people at that point, so on my way back down the mountain I decided it was time to have an adventure and took the unpaved hiking path, or at least what I thought was a hiking path. In my defense, there was a sign that said the path led back to the base of the mountain, but when the path became more of a narrow trail, I started to have my doubts. When it dissolved entirely into a mountain stream, those doubts turned into very real disillusionment. But I’d been hiking for probably forty minutes at that point. I wasn’t about to turn back. And so I consolidated everything into my backpack, acquired just in time it would seem, and tried my best to wind my way around the edges of the stream - managing it too. I only slipped and stepped into a giant puddle of mud once, at any rate, though you wouldn’t know it from the deplorable state of my shoes.
The hiking was spectacular. I haven’t felt that calm and peaceful in months. I could go at my own pace, stop and smell the flowers. I even watched an entire beehive devouring a grove of what looked like Queen Anne’s lace. I didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother me, but the patterns they moved in were fascinating. When I did eventually reach the bottom, I was a bit wistful to leave the mountain, but I figured I should take a look at Hohenschwangau too. That was a much shorter hike - maybe ten minutes - and really more of a flight of stairs than a hike. It was pretty, but not near as majestic as its successor. Being further out from the forest though, it did have a pretty garden surrounding it.
After Hohenschwangau, I had a few hours before the last train back. I could have taken an earlier one, but in an effort to get the most out of my visit I decided to stop by the Museum of Bavarian Kings. I was a little skeptical of Bavarian museums after the disaster the was the Residence Museum the day before, but if the museum was outwardly proclaiming to be about the people, I thought perhaps it was worth a shot. I am happy to report that taking the chance paid off, and not just because the views from the museum terrace were spectacular.
The Museum of Bavarian Kings was exactly what I had been looking for: a detailed history of the Wittelsbach dynasty from inception as Dukes of Bavaria under Frederick I Barbarossa until its dissolution after World War I, serving in between as electors and emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, and being raised to Kings by Napoleon himself. The exhibition that was supposed to take between half an hour and an hour took me three, and even then I only left because I had to catch that last train I had mentioned.
I made it back to Munich just as everything was beginning to close. In hindsight, this was probably a good thing because I had realized the night before that we’ll be going to Oktoberfest weekend at the Renaissance Festival this year and I was quite tempted to buy a traditional Bavarian costume to wear. Would have, I’m sure, if any of the outlets had been open. But they weren’t, so I spent my last evening wandering around the Oktoberfest fair grounds.
It’s only July, but they’ve already started construction. I wasn’t actually allowed into the construction zone, but I did get to stop by the Bavarian Hall of Fame, a stone temple like structure in a park bordering the grounds. Seeing as the sun was almost down by then though, I decided to call it a night, returning to the hostel to give Munich its only fitting send off with a local Augustiner beer.
There are only two days left in my trip now, which I will be spending in the Black Forest. Then its off to France for most of August. There will be a new blog for that, which I will announce in a summary post I’m planning here. Keep an eye out, and in the meantime much love to you all!
