Munich - A Full Day

(Vee reporting) 4/22/06 - Muenchen und PROST!
The day started with lots of excitement for the day that was beginning. First impressions of Munich were extremely positive by the end of last night, so we were looking forward to experiencing more of the southern-german culture. The weather was once again fantastic (65+ degrees). But first we had to take care of some well overdue business: E-mails, reservations for our next destinations and hopefully paying some bills; so this is how our hunt for an Internet-cafe began.
Our travel-book had listed three somewhat close places where we would hopefully enjoy a tasty breakfast while connecting to the Internet. No such luck, the 2 first places apparently ran out of business. Two hours had gone by with an unsuccesfull search, elevating my (Vee's) stress-level a bit, since we had only this one day to get as much as we could out of Munich. Soon enough we finally found a place, and did as much as we could over the 1 hour we were given. Next, we headed towards the train-station hoping that we could catch a train to Dachau (a key WWII location), but learned that it would take all of our afternoon, and there was much more we wanted to see. We headed back to downtown. It was Saturday and the streets were packed with people of all ages eating, drinking, window shopping, laughing. It was a lot of fun to people-watch. I'm sure Cliff will agree with me in that southern-german people are in general very nice-looking folks, very tall (I was barely average, and Cliff even though above average wouldn't be considered "tall" by any means). There is definitly a health-conscience in the culture, people of all ages seem fit and very aware of their looks. Munchen I'm sure holds a large number of middle-upper class and/or high society people. Most of them wore only brand-named clothes and 90% of the cars were either new BMW, Mercedes, Audis, Mini-coopers, Porshe and a few Volkswagen. It was around 1pm when we decided to go to the "Munchen StadtMuesum" (museum of the city of Munich). Cliff had heard that it included an exhibition of the brewery-culture in this part of the country. Once in, we learned that there was no such section, but instead found very intersting exhibitions about the city and the planning that went into making it what it is today since the 18th century. We were very impressed with the long-term planning that went into everything! Always thinking about the future and how they want their civilization to grow. Pedestrian-only streets, bike-parking, top quality constructions, environmentaly conscius lighting and waste processing are part of their local goverment policy. It shows now in the culture. We also saw an international music-instruments exhibition and a toys and puppets one.
After we were done, it was early enough to go to the "Englisch Garten" (english garden). This is the biggest city-park in Europe and is known not only for its size, greenery and rivers, but for the "river-surfers" that manage to surf the waves of one of the rivers going through the park. We catch a glimpse of this and it was fascinating! We obviously took some pictures (already available) and video. We continued walking into the park and encountered the best part of our stay in Munich: The "ChineseTurm Biergarten" of Munich. The most important and largest biergarten of the country, where people gather daily to drink huge mugs of beer, eat wurst, huge pretzels, and anything else one could want, and sing/laugh gathered on very long tables attached to each other, while a municher-band plays some happy music. This alone made our trip a fantastic experience worth to remember for years to come. Cliff was in heaven of course. We got our beers, wursts, pretzels, salads and joined to crowed. It was so much fun!
By 8pm we were full, exhausted and very happy, but also ready to go back to our temporary home. What a day!