Yesterday the weather here was beautiful so when we woke to a chilly morning we thought it would just warm up and dressed accordingly. Big mistake. There was a slight drizzle so we just took our rain coats and caught the hop on hop off bus.
Not quite in the time zone yet we had risen early, were first at the bus stop and got the front seat on the top deck. Great views but the best was when we were in the old part of Munich heading down an impossibly narrow two way street to the Marienplatz. The street was made even narrower by a delivery van parked in our lane so we swung onto the other side to get around it and encountered a BMW coming straight at us . We could look right down into the car’s cabin and if you have ever seen Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream you will get the look on the driver’s face. All this happened at walking pace of course.
We had to do a U turn to get out of that street . Two things we have learnt about Munich so far. First they love digging up roads, foot paths and parks. Every street corner seems to have some work in progress and every park seems to have sections enclosed by portable chainwire fence panels. Secondly they have a very different view of aesthetics. One jarring example was a strange sculpture made out of an old caravan plonked right in front of their oldest city gate.
Anyway after a very interesting and sometimes exciting (due to traffic) view of the city, we returned to our start point and caught a different bus out to the former summer residence of the Kings of Bavaria, Nymphenburg Palace. This was originally a country hunting lodge but even in its palace days the city had expanded to its edges.
The first hint you get of this place is you start driving along a broad man-made canal running in a straight line then you come to the palace . A quick summary would be to say it reminds one of the Peterhof Palace but without as much gold leaf. It’s huge. You can’t get back far enough to get the whole building in the one photo. Behind it are vast formal parkland and woodlands stretching as far as the eye can see.
Inside is your typical palace with a couple of interesting variations. One of the Kings had a fondness for the ladies and had his French court painter paint this gallery of portraits of the most beautiful women he could find. Beauty, not rank, was the criteria and the subjects, both married and unmarried, came from all classes of society. So today we have this room filled with these portraits all beautifully framed with their name on each.
The other thing that fascinated me was the coach house. It had dozens and dozens of the most amazing coaches and sleds you have ever seen. And when you get to King Ludwig the Second’s coach, you can stand next to and still have difficulty believing it could exist. It seems to have stepped straight out of a fairy tale.
For the grandchildren, how would you like to have this. It is reported to have been pulled by a sheep, a pony, a large dog and on one occasion even a goat.
The temperature had continued to drop as the day progressed and the wind was blowing an icy drizzle. When enquiring what time the bus returned Jeanette was told “hourly every thirty minutes” which we interpreted as every 30 minutes and we were on the bus stop which was out in the middle of a huge lawned area with no shelter at 5 minutes to 2. The bus showed up 35minutes later at 2:30.
We were literally frozen to the bone by then and got back to the hotel around 3:30pm for a much needed coffee and a very late lunch. By then it was raining heavily so we called it a day. We headed to our favourite Bavarian restaurant for dinner around 8pm
Hardys’ Travels 