(Tuesday, Sept. 16) The Glockenspiel in the Munich Town Hall is famous and when it runs its animated diorama of knights jousting and dancers dancing, it draws big crowds to Marienplatz. It plays at 11 am, noon, and 5 pm, but on Sunday and Monday, we always were in Marienplatz just a few minutes too late to catch the show. So today we made Marienplatz and the Glockenspiel Stop # 1 on our day’s touring of Munich, and enjoyed the ten minute or so mechanized entertainment along with a few hundred or more locals and tourists.
But Stop #2 was the highlight of the day. Prague’s Toy Museum was closed so we missed out on seeing its Barbie Doll collection. But the guy who started it moved to Munich several years ago and opened a Toy Museum there in a tower at the end of the main square, Marienplatz. Not only were there nearly 50 Barbies (clad in all sorts of attire), two Kens, and a slew of teddy bears, mechanical toys (one of my favorites is a woman that swats at a rat with a broom), and even Cowboys and Indians fighting it out in a 19th century Way-Out-West-in-The-U.S. cavalry fort. Both of us saw toys we had been given as kids. (I wanted to smash the glass cases and swipe some to take home and play with).
After spending the better part of an hour in this swell museum, we walked back to the Viktualienmarkt and grabbed a quick lunch in the biergarten. Since it was a sunny day, we decided to go three kilometers outside of the city center to the Nymphenburg Palace and give the Wittlebachs another chance to convince us that touring one of their “monster homes” was worth our time and money.
To get to the palace, we had to use the public transportation system which is slick, but at a tourist’s first glance, not quite as easy to navigate as the Paris Metro or London Tube. Lucky for us, we found a friendly guy working at the information booth who had a daughter living in El Paso and who had traveled to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas and San Francisco, and who understood the problems associated with travelling in a place where the locals don’t speak your native tongue. He gave us the most direction route and the cheapest tickets to get to the palace, and we hopped on the U6 subway train, then transferred to Tram #17 and got to the Nymphenburg stop in twenty minutes.
Nyphenburg’s buildings seem to stretch as far to the left and right of the main entry as the eye can see, but only sixteen rooms are open to the public. We skipped the audio guide tour, took a quick run through this section of the palace (more paintings, sculptures, old furniture, tapestries, etc.) and spend the rest of our time wandering about the huge park in which the main palace and several other “mini-palaces” sit. The long green meadows lined with trees made the area look like a big golf course with unmown grass sprinkled with purple crocus-like wildflowers.
By the time we got back to our hotel, we were frazzled. On our first night we’d noticed a steakhouse located on the ground floor of the building housing the hotel, but we only saw a few diners, and figured it was there simply to vacuum Euros out of the pockets of business travelers arriving in mid to late evening. But since we were facing a fairly early start and a long train ride to Munich the next day, we threw caution to the window and decided to walk five minutes to dinner even if the food turned out to be crappy.
Much to our surprise, tables at the Asado Steakhouse were nearly full, and we learned that it had been in business for thirty five years serving Argentine-bred beef steaks. We shared a good ol’ ‘Merican dinner of steak, corn on the cob (harvested last summer somewhere far from Germany), and baked potatoes, washed down with a reasonable decent Argentine red wine. Overall, the meal was pretty good, and we were happy that we could just wander on off to bed immediately after paying the bill.
