I've been staying in a youth hostel in Munich. Not in a dorm; this one rents out single rooms, as well, and it seemed like an interesting way to save about €400. It's in a neighbourhood of tiny "casinos", middle-eastern groceries, call centres, and money-transfer shops. Seedy in an unthreatening, European way. It's possible that I should have researched the place itself more. My room card has a drawing of a busty, pigtailed waitress carrying a tray of giant beers. On the ground floor is a bar where 20-year-olds play cards and yell and chug €2 beers, pretty much exactly as advertised in the background of my room card. There are strict no-smoking signs everywhere, but it's sometimes hard to make them out through the smoke.
The walls are thin. The first night was loud, but I was so tired that all the drunk German teenagers in the world couldn't have kept me up; and the room next door couldn't have had more than 30 or 40% of them. There's a shared shower, which I used in the afternoons, when it had just been cleaned. I take no joy in it, but it's a question of who's going to get whose foot diseases; and if there's going to be a flow of pathogens, I might as well be upstream. I'd crow a lot more about having outsmarted the German teenagers, but most of them had the intelligence to bring flip-flops, which I forgot, so it might be fairer to call it a draw.
On the third day, the Germans were gone and there were Italians instead. The Italians hung out in the hallway a fair bit, and I was never sure whether they were fighting out some furious argument or just having a spirited chat. They'd laugh, they'd yell, they'd shush each other, they'd hammer on doors, they'd sing sarcastically, and then they'd go quiet again. I never knew until I went out again whether they'd gone down to the bar or all stabbed each other at exactly the same time.
Munich's a lovely city. Parts of it have a bit of a patchwork look, as gaps left by WWII bombing raids have been filled in with reconstructions or modern buildings. In the cathedral (the Frauenkirche), I bought a postcard of how it looked in 1945: Bombs had stoved in the roof, and the interior was a rubble field. Most have been repaired, but a few public buildings still show signs of damage; one or two are covered in first-sized divots.
The city centre is pedestrianized, mostly. Generally, the streets are full of people, but every now and then a truck will come barreling through. It's a good system. Quieter, cleaner, more pleasant, and you can actually wipe out just as many tourists, because they get complacent.
It was raining the first night I walked through it, and I stopped whenever it got too heavy and sheltered in the arcades. Every time it happened, I seemed to be outside a shoe store. What is it about the economics of shoe stores that's caused Munich's grand city centre to become clogged up with them? They're like some kind of economic zebra mussel. Can anything be done about it? Maybe nothing should. Outside, where saints and gargoyles looked down on medieval streets through cages of wire pigeon netting, a talented violinist played for change, and the setting sun bathed the whole business in soft orange light, couples stood around indifferently. I went into one of the shoe stores, and people were making out on the escalator like it was a gondola in Venice: Swept away by the romance of it all.
The plan for yesterday morning was to go to the Glyptothek, a museum of classical sculpture in Maxvorstadt, a student area. To kill time until the museum opened, I stopped at a coin-and-stamp store and asked about the Weimar banknotes displayed in the window. The owner gave me a heavy album full of the €1 stuff for tourists: Weimar notes arranged chronologically from small amounts to one hundred million and more. After the First World War, Germany printed money to buy the foreign currency it needed to pay reparations, and things got slightly out of hand. I sat down at a table to flip through the album, and the other partner -- who looked exactly like the first in every way (white beard, glasses), but was smaller and more agitated -- came out through a curtain and sat directly across from me. He leaned forward and stared. Not in a hostile way, or even in a way that implied I needed to be watched around the merchandise. I think he may have just really wanted to chat about stamps. I couldn't help him, but I bought two notes, one for 2,000,000 marks, one for 100,000,000.
In Maxvorstadt, professors in tweeds whiz around on bicycles, glancing at their watches as they go by, and students sit around and smoke on the steps of grand neoclassical buildings. The Glyptothek, one of those buildings, held crowds of busts, with the occasional sarcophagus or headless torso. It was managed by about thirty senior citizens in blue uniforms. It was hard to believe they were all needed, but it seemed a decent sort of quiet semi-retirement, watching over rooms of noseless marble heads and selling the occasional postcard.
Germans seem to have a lot of possibilities as they age. Mostly, people are conservatively dressed and conventional, but there's nothing unusual in a grandmother with bright blue hair. And if you're a man, you don't need to stop acting like an obnoxious teenager just because you're fifty. There were a couple of gray-haired gentlemen on my train from Mannheim blaring music through earbuds while they lounged insouciantly with their backpacks on the seats beside them. And there are subcultures for the middle aged, like there are for teenagers elsewhere. Not all of them seem like winners to me -- I'm not sure dressing like an Australian from a Monty Python sketch and hanging around the train station, for example, is all that great -- but the point is that there are choices. Lifestyle options are still opening up when you're middle-aged.
There was some work going on outside the Glyptothek, and I had to dodge a backhoe. Trucks and heavy machinery don't have backing-up alarms here, and barriers are unusual. The backhoes go pretty much where they like. In North America, I think, liability and tort law produce excessive caution. In Germany, you and the backhoe are sort of left to make the best of it. If you don't notice the backhoe bearing down on you then you're probably not long for this world anyway, so why inconvenience the backhoe?
Part of yesterday was set aside for laptop shopping. The one I lost was the cheapest netbook in the world at the time, and I bought its successor to that title. It has a German keyboard, and the Windows language pack needed to be changed to English -- which is a tricky problem when you can't understand anything the machine is telling you, and Google insists on directing your searches to German web sites. It did happen in the end, though the machine still greets you with a hearty Willkommen! when you turn it on. It was all kind of interesting, really. Using a German version proved, for example, that it actually is possible for Windows 8 to get more useless and frustrating.
Left this morning on a train to Budapest. First class. No more pretending to be a backpacker.
The walls are thin. The first night was loud, but I was so tired that all the drunk German teenagers in the world couldn't have kept me up; and the room next door couldn't have had more than 30 or 40% of them. There's a shared shower, which I used in the afternoons, when it had just been cleaned. I take no joy in it, but it's a question of who's going to get whose foot diseases; and if there's going to be a flow of pathogens, I might as well be upstream. I'd crow a lot more about having outsmarted the German teenagers, but most of them had the intelligence to bring flip-flops, which I forgot, so it might be fairer to call it a draw.
On the third day, the Germans were gone and there were Italians instead. The Italians hung out in the hallway a fair bit, and I was never sure whether they were fighting out some furious argument or just having a spirited chat. They'd laugh, they'd yell, they'd shush each other, they'd hammer on doors, they'd sing sarcastically, and then they'd go quiet again. I never knew until I went out again whether they'd gone down to the bar or all stabbed each other at exactly the same time.
Munich's a lovely city. Parts of it have a bit of a patchwork look, as gaps left by WWII bombing raids have been filled in with reconstructions or modern buildings. In the cathedral (the Frauenkirche), I bought a postcard of how it looked in 1945: Bombs had stoved in the roof, and the interior was a rubble field. Most have been repaired, but a few public buildings still show signs of damage; one or two are covered in first-sized divots.
The city centre is pedestrianized, mostly. Generally, the streets are full of people, but every now and then a truck will come barreling through. It's a good system. Quieter, cleaner, more pleasant, and you can actually wipe out just as many tourists, because they get complacent.
It was raining the first night I walked through it, and I stopped whenever it got too heavy and sheltered in the arcades. Every time it happened, I seemed to be outside a shoe store. What is it about the economics of shoe stores that's caused Munich's grand city centre to become clogged up with them? They're like some kind of economic zebra mussel. Can anything be done about it? Maybe nothing should. Outside, where saints and gargoyles looked down on medieval streets through cages of wire pigeon netting, a talented violinist played for change, and the setting sun bathed the whole business in soft orange light, couples stood around indifferently. I went into one of the shoe stores, and people were making out on the escalator like it was a gondola in Venice: Swept away by the romance of it all.
The plan for yesterday morning was to go to the Glyptothek, a museum of classical sculpture in Maxvorstadt, a student area. To kill time until the museum opened, I stopped at a coin-and-stamp store and asked about the Weimar banknotes displayed in the window. The owner gave me a heavy album full of the €1 stuff for tourists: Weimar notes arranged chronologically from small amounts to one hundred million and more. After the First World War, Germany printed money to buy the foreign currency it needed to pay reparations, and things got slightly out of hand. I sat down at a table to flip through the album, and the other partner -- who looked exactly like the first in every way (white beard, glasses), but was smaller and more agitated -- came out through a curtain and sat directly across from me. He leaned forward and stared. Not in a hostile way, or even in a way that implied I needed to be watched around the merchandise. I think he may have just really wanted to chat about stamps. I couldn't help him, but I bought two notes, one for 2,000,000 marks, one for 100,000,000.
In Maxvorstadt, professors in tweeds whiz around on bicycles, glancing at their watches as they go by, and students sit around and smoke on the steps of grand neoclassical buildings. The Glyptothek, one of those buildings, held crowds of busts, with the occasional sarcophagus or headless torso. It was managed by about thirty senior citizens in blue uniforms. It was hard to believe they were all needed, but it seemed a decent sort of quiet semi-retirement, watching over rooms of noseless marble heads and selling the occasional postcard.
Germans seem to have a lot of possibilities as they age. Mostly, people are conservatively dressed and conventional, but there's nothing unusual in a grandmother with bright blue hair. And if you're a man, you don't need to stop acting like an obnoxious teenager just because you're fifty. There were a couple of gray-haired gentlemen on my train from Mannheim blaring music through earbuds while they lounged insouciantly with their backpacks on the seats beside them. And there are subcultures for the middle aged, like there are for teenagers elsewhere. Not all of them seem like winners to me -- I'm not sure dressing like an Australian from a Monty Python sketch and hanging around the train station, for example, is all that great -- but the point is that there are choices. Lifestyle options are still opening up when you're middle-aged.
There was some work going on outside the Glyptothek, and I had to dodge a backhoe. Trucks and heavy machinery don't have backing-up alarms here, and barriers are unusual. The backhoes go pretty much where they like. In North America, I think, liability and tort law produce excessive caution. In Germany, you and the backhoe are sort of left to make the best of it. If you don't notice the backhoe bearing down on you then you're probably not long for this world anyway, so why inconvenience the backhoe?
Part of yesterday was set aside for laptop shopping. The one I lost was the cheapest netbook in the world at the time, and I bought its successor to that title. It has a German keyboard, and the Windows language pack needed to be changed to English -- which is a tricky problem when you can't understand anything the machine is telling you, and Google insists on directing your searches to German web sites. It did happen in the end, though the machine still greets you with a hearty Willkommen! when you turn it on. It was all kind of interesting, really. Using a German version proved, for example, that it actually is possible for Windows 8 to get more useless and frustrating.
Left this morning on a train to Budapest. First class. No more pretending to be a backpacker.
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| "I'll be paying in Weimar Reichsmarks. I trust that won't be a problem?" |
