münchen, teil 1...

The color of Munich is red.

Okay, so I know the city’s colors are black and gold and the Bavarian colors are white and blue, but my experience thus far has been red, both in the sense that you see red when you’re beyond angry and in that mouthwatering red that promises a juicy sweetness as soon as your teeth pierce the skin.  Let me start from the beginning…

 I arrived at the Wombat Hostel around 6:30pm, with enough daylight to settle into my room without having my awkward crashing around waking anyone at odd hours (well, it would have been an odd hour if they were asleep anyway!), and with enough time to complete what is fast becoming my favorite hostel ritual: Lidl shopping.  I know what I like in Germany: Brötchen (translates to rolls, but they’re so much better than plain ol’ dinner rolls), Fol Epi cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, pasta, and Knoppers.  (If Augustiner gets to be the golden liquid of the gods, I would classify Knoppers and Kinder chocolate as the chocolaty delight of the gods…)  I have begun to take for granted that hostels will provide me with a place to store/cook these goods.

The Wombat Hostel has its perks.  It’s colorful, friendly, loud in the common areas, quiet in the rooms, free (crappy) wLAN, but it does not provide a guest kitchen.  Suddenly, the 8,72 I’d spent on food for the four days I was here quit looking like a good way to save money.  For dinner I ate raw macaroni from a Tupperware like a dog without a spoon.  By the time I woke up my cheese was kicking it and the frozen veggies I’d bought as a treat were soggy and smelled of cardboard.  Well, shit.  Color me pissed off.

(And I was pissed off, but let’s not get into that.)

Which brings me to yesterday.  I ate what I could salvage of and tossed the rest of my spoiled food, ate a piece of bread and an apple, and decided for a new start.  I can afford 8,72 for a learning experience.  The day began with a free tour run by the tour-for-tips philosophy.  You pay what you think the tour deserves instead of a rate upfront.  Like many of its kind, it’s a good philosophy…until it’s put into practice.  As a German minor and not-so-closeted hater of any large group of tourists, I probably shouldn’t have been on this tour.  I can’t say I appreciated being talked to so loud in English, nor did I appreciate the almost condescending repetition of dates and questions even a five-year-old could answer.  Plus, he talked about what caused the U.S. recession during the entire Glockenspiel.  Good thing I wasn’t paying attention.  Let me give you his tour in a nutshell:

He mentioned a lot of 9-11s without specifying he was speaking of November 11th until some American mentioned how weird it was that that date kept coming up in history, and then he condescended to her and the rest of us the entire trip.  He kept saying that his goal was to make us "local" (whatever the hell that means) by getting us to think like real Bavarians.  Okay, so the book on the evils of "authentic" tourism spoiled me for that experience.  I know I'm not Bavarian, and I'm not going to pretend to be, so please stop pandering for tips!  He made a lot of religious generalisations that I also didn't appreciate, such that the biggest difference between a Catholic and a Protestant is the Pope.  Um, hello?  Transubstantiation vs. Consubstantiation much?  And finally, probably my biggest pet peeve, he spoke like Berlin and Munich were the only two cities in Germany.  Berlin is ___; Munich is ___.  Like, nevermind the fact that there are other beautiful places/regions in Germany off the beaten track that you could be recommending.  Hessen!  Saschen!  Hello!!!

one cool thing he did teach us is that the bayern flags on the ceiling of the hofbräu haus used to be swastikas... basically this was, like, the nazi hq 

Needless to say, I didn’t pay him.  In retrospect, karma is going to kick my ass, but, honestly, I spent the whole time feeling awkward and wanting to let every single German that suppressed an eye-roll in our general direction that I’m not like that!  I speak German!  I’ve been to Munich before!  I was just lost and needed an easy way to get to the Marienplatz!  Honestly!  I’m not one of them!

 theatinerkirche: these people are cheering for the environment... no, really... "k-l-i-m-a, klima!!!"

(Which, I realize, is incredibly unfair to my fellow countrymen and travelers abroad.  Regardless of how they are doing it, they are trying to experience a culture just as much as I am.  Whether or not they speak the language or know anything about the country doesn’t make them dumb, annoying, bitchy, ditzy, bros, spoiled, or any other adjective I may/may not have used in my angry thoughts yesterday.  Everyone starts somewhere, whether it’s an annoying [there I go again] tour or a three day homestay in Tannheim with no German skills and only an undying love for chocolate cake and farmlands [yes, cake and cows are the real reason I’m so in love with Germany]…)

Okay, so, ranting and raving aside (or maybe not—dun dun dunnn!), after I departed from the tour, I was a little disappointed in myself for not having met anyone, but considering I lied and said I was from Ireland, maybe it’s a good thing I was only able to initiate a ten-minute conversation in which I described the game of hurling and gushed about Galway in a sufficient-but-otherwise insufficient false-voice… Anyway, I was a little sad to be on my own after the tour, but I was also really, really glad to be set free.  My lonely itinerary was as follows:

1) Theatinerkirche where I encountered/touched a rather chilling saintly relic

2) Back to Marienplatz to read a while in the Hugenbudel (supposedly the largest bookstore in Germany)

3) Getting lost while trying to find, and then turning around and actually finding the Viktualienmarkt, where I had a conversation with a lovely lady selling strawberries and learned a new useful word: Schale (means a carton or a box of ___ [i.e. strawberries, blueberries]).  I did have some issues with her dialect, but I was proud of myself for understanding when she told me I could taste one before I purchased a box, that she would check to make sure they were all pretty, that I could have the ones she picked out as “bad” for free and that they weren’t actually bad, just a little squished, and that I didn’t have to wash the fruit because they were organic.  Phew, I understood a lot!  Hooray for me!

abschaffen!  abschaffen!  abschaffen!

4) Then I went to Alter Peter and as I was exiting the church, I bumped into and joined a student protest.  They were protesting “high” university fees (which I just have to scoff at as someone who’s tuition costs $50,000/year), which I agree are ridiculous!  Since I could understand what they were saying and protesting, I decided to grab some red protest stickers (“Wissen. Macht. Reich.” and “Arme Uni”) and a balloon and join in the chanting!  My favorite protester was a guy dressed up as a Spartan with a red cape and a sign that read “MADNESS?!?!  THIS…IS…BAVARIA!!!” 

 

And then I came back to the hostel only to discover that there is a guest fridge!  So I went back to Lidl and bought—wait for it!  Two pots of strawberry yogurt, strawberry and johannesberry jam, and the red version of Babybel cheese.  So between being so frustrated I practically saw red, having nothing to eat but apples, cold macaroni slathered in tomato sauce and the cherry tomatoes I’d bought to make sandwiches, going on a dumb tour that (I will admit) did teach me a few things (like that Cincinatti, Ohio is Munich’s sister-city and that the Bavarian flags on the ceiling of the Hofbräuhaus are covering up swastikas), eating half a carton of strawberries from the Bodensee, and buying my second round of food, I have come to the conclusion that the color of Munich is red.  

Which, in the end, is really more sweet than sour.  :)