Munich Snow Day

Eleven hours of comfortable train travel brought me to a beautiful German city. The plan for the weekend is simple: enjoy some delicious Bavarian food, stroll the Marianplatzs, be there at noon for the glockenspiel jousts, eat at Viktualienmarkt,visit the Hofbrauhaus (already done), take in the Alte Pinakothek and Neue Pinakothek art museums, tour the  BMW-Welt building, find a souvenir for Luke & Sophie, and take the tram out to a neighborhood for a good look.

The trip began in Martin, Slovakia at 8:00 am this morning where I caught the train to Zilina, then into Bratislava, the capitol of Slovakia, then to Vienna and into Munich via Salzburg, Austria. I enjoyed a breakfast of ham and eggs and coffee on the train, sitting in the club car, and then settled into a comfortable Austrian rocket train that swooshed along at 200 kilometers an hour--that's 125 miles per hour.  My coffee didn't even jiggle. The cabins are pressurized and quiet and clean. Did I say CLEAN?  Squeaky clean and with a nifty euro design.

After dinner this evening I enjoyed a beer and pretzel at the Hofbrauhaus with a stately German grandpa who had on the most beautiful green, hand knit sweater with polished George Washington quarters as buttons.  I commented that it was beautiful.  He started to move his hands like a knitter and indicated that he had made the entire sweater himself.  We were sitting near the polka band and someone at our table spoke to him in German, discovering that he was 86 years old, and in fact knitted the sweater 20 years ago the first year he retired. It was a wearable work of art and he beamed with satisfaction that we would admire it.  Together we lifted our beers and clinked our glasses. Probst!