Yesterday I left Prague to come to Munich. This required a 6 hour ride on a Czech train. I would suggest you avoid ever having to do this. This is because the cars on Czech trains appear to date from the era when the place was still Communist Czechoslovakia, and are rather short on creature comforts. The cars all use the old style of passenger compartments with six seats facing each other. On newer trains, seats in this arrangement have a table in between. These don't. Newer trains also have power outlets at every seat, climate control systems powerful enough to work in the mild European summer, and reading lights that are more effective than a candle. Czechoslovakian railcar designers clearly felt that these were decadent Western things. What they have instead are places to sit that fold out of the wall of the aisle, that some people are required to use once all the good seats are taken. My good seat was taken with an hour to go, and let me tell you that these are both extremely uncomfortable, and super annoying, since you have to get up every time somebody wants to pee, or if they had wanted to go to the nonexistent dining car (although I know Czech rail has them, but this train didn't get one). The train to Munich is called the Jan Hus, after a famous Czech preacher who defied the church and was burned at the stake in Germany. By the time I had arrived in Munich, I wanted to do the same thing to the guy responsible for the cars.
Fortunately, Munich knows how to cheer me up again. All you need is to serve me a liter of beer, and make up for the fact that I've had nothing to eat but a bag of chips in the past 8 hours. The place for this is the Hofbrauhaus, the famous German beerhall. It's half the size of ballpark village, and full of every German cliche come to life (lederhosen, dirndls, sausages, pretzels, oompah bands, and of course the massive beers). It is a little more expensive than most other German beerhalls, but €8/liter isn't bad for a 6/10 at the flagship establishment it was brewed for. After that, I went back to my hostel and went to sleep.
Today I got to go out and tour Mun... no I went to the art museums of course. I started with the Impressionists at the Neue Pinakothek, then went to the Pinakothek Moderne to see their collection. For a gallery that goes from Postimpressionism to today, the collection is refreshingly low on the kind of bullshit that takes little skill to execute and relies on the viewer to overlook that in favor of... other stuff I guess, I can't see it. The Pinakothek Moderne also has a gallery of design, with displays of Saarinen and Eames chairs, and other mass produced objects deemed to have aesthetic value. In order to do this, I bought a day pass for €12, which saves you money over paying individual €7 admission at each museum. As such, I decided to visit the Museum Brandhorst, which is nearby in a small building with a striped, rainbow exterior. This museum houses the collection of a couple (the Brandhorsts), who liked postwar art. They've got a fair amount of Andy Warhol, but the top floor is entirely devoted to Cy Twombly, who is exactly the kind of artist I was referring to above when I was complaining about modern art. It's only worth seeing the Warhols if you plan to go to two other museums to make it essentially free.
After the museums, I went to the massive Englischer Garten. This is Munich's main urban park, and has a system of canals called the Eisbach, that are fed from the waters of the nearby Isar River through underground passages. At the head of the Eisbach, the canal is shaped in such a way that the fast moving water creates a breaker. People come here and surf it, but this is dangerous for anybody who isn't already a skilled surfer. Those of us who are less adept surfers can go to the Chinesescher Turm, or Chinese Tower. This is a pagoda around which a massive outdoor beer garden has been built. The band plays on the second level while the people look up at them and drink their liters. After giving my liver another swift kick, I went back to the hostel for a catnap. It was dinnertime when I awoke, so I went out and had Weiner schnitzel. This is a sort of breaded and fried pork steak, but the breading is more like that on trout than on fried chicken. It was good, but the portion was Texas sized.
Tomorrow I'm going to Dachau. Do not expect a long post about the place. I imagine it will drive me to drink.
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