München, Bayern, Deutschland

Last Friday I left Sevilla bound for the capital of German Bavaria (Bayern) to meet my college roommate and very good friend Rodrigo. It seemed not so long ago that we drove up the California coastline along Highway One to meet his (as it so happened German) grad school buddies in San Francisco. In Europe on business, Rodrigo had finished a long list of investor meetings and site visits in and around Franks due in no small part to the fact that we were in afurt that week and was looking forward to a break from his frenetic pace. Having traveled out of Seville earlier that week to visit archives in Carmona and Écija, I too was looking forward to a change of pace. In this respect, perhaps we both failed. Of course, this wan awesome city with more beer gardens that we had meals to eat and enough museums to make even my head spin.

I left Seville midday and after a layover in Madrid made it into Munich at around 7pm. That evening we went to the Augustiner Brauhaus for sausages, spatzl, and a healthy half liter of beer. Like many of the Munich breweries, the Augustiner Brauwerie has been in the business for quite some time, since 1328 to be exact. If only historians were given expense accounts, I would have tried to pass this off as drinking history. From there we made our way to the Hofbräuhaus for a few maßkrüge (1 liter glasses) of Russ’n – beer mixed with lemonade (too sweet!) - and Hofbräu Original. The locals were in festive form dressed in feathered hats and lederhosen for a regular night out on the town complete with a live brass band. Older patrons passed by us to retrieve their personal beer steins kept under lock and key in the “members only” corner. Whether or not our stomachs could have stood more, the bar closed for the evening and we had to be off.

I started the next morning with a cup of kaffee and a berliner, a kind of jelly donut made famous by JFK whose limited command of the language left some Germans a bit perplexed when he declared “Ich bin ein berliner,” that is, “I am a jelly donut.” (In any event it seems the Soviets knew what he meant.) We spent much of the morning in the Glyptothek, a museum of Greek and Roman history, where Rodrigo, who studied abroad in Greece, kept rounding corners with the exclamation “that was in one of my books.” From there we went to the Residenz, the urban residence of the Hohenzollern kings. An interesting mix of architectural styles from various periods of construction, much of the building was damaged during the Second World War and painstakingly rebuilt. For lunch, we crossed into the Englischer Garten, Munich’s immense park space, to the Chinesischer Turm for brats ‘n brew. Though at arrival I was a bit perplexed why a Chinese pagoda served as the focal point of one of the city’s most famous beer gardens, several drinks later the consternation wore off. It took a long walk back to the city center to recuperate. Along the way we made it to Marienplatz and ducked into a few churches, including the cathedral, now fully sober.

For dinner we went to Donisl Wildmoser for crackling pig, dumplings and several glasses of Hacker-Pschorr. Out of view, another brass band could be heard playing upstairs. Afterwards, we headed north of the museum district to have drinks – Löwenbräu Dunkel in this instance – at Alter Simpl. More than a century old, this bar once played host to writers Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann. Supposedly, the name of the place derives from a literary magazine published by bar’s patrons in the 1920s and 1930s before succumbing to Nazi censorship.

Sunday morning we went to the Deutsches Museum of science and technology. As it turns out, this Museum served as the inspiration for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which both Rodrigo and I

knew well from our time in Chicago. Determined to visit another beer garden before I had to go to the airport, we boarded the Unterbahn for a ride by subway away from the city center. Though we managed to get a little lost by the Nymphenburg Palace, we did find the Königlicher Hirschgarten, Munich’s largest beer garden equipped with a red deer enclosure. Sadly, by this point the rain caught up with us and we had to dine indoors. A civilized helping of venison and two or three Augustiner Hefeweisen later, the idea of managing three airports to get home became a little less of a monstrosity.