Court Garden Temple Detail
Chineese Tower in the English Garden
Another Surf Spot
Court Garden (Michl, Silvia, and Antje)
Mark and I got up earlier than the other two and took off without breakfast for the subway. We had a bite to eat and some coffee/tea in the train station and then went to pick up Michl and Silvia at their hotel. Since they had only gotten a minimal glimpse of the city the night before and since Silvia had never visited downtown Munich, we retraced some of our steps from the last few days, going again through the Court Garden with its funny 17th-century pavilion / “temple” in the middle, featuring little ornamental designs made with real shells in lieu of statues. We showed them the river surfers (including a couple of talented kids that couldn’t have been more than 10 years old); the creek looked fuller than before, and at a second surfing spot, it looked rather dangerous. We then found ourselves some coffee (and beer, in Michl’s case) out in the open, at the beer garden near the famous Chinese tower (a wooden pagoda) in the middle of the park, just to sit and talk (mostly in German, so that left Mark out of the loop a bit!). Imke and Kai joined us there around noon, and we sat for a bit longer, since the SUN had actually come out and stayed out for quite a bit. The way we all reacted (not just us, everyone in the busy and touristy beer garden) you would have thought that we just discovered a new star in the solar system. We’ve been lucky so far about not getting soaked, but it’s been cloudy with chances of rain and thunderstorms ever since we got here, and elsewhere in Germany, including in Bavaria, it’s been flooding, and an open-air festival had such bad weather they had to put it on hold after a number of people got injured during a thunderstorm.
After that, our mission was to get back downtown (by subway) and to find a shoe store to replace Kai’s completely broken Converses, now practically sole-less (hah! We’ve been collecting puns, so there’s one for the taking. Our favorite English one so far came with a small store that sold exclusively felt, in all colors of the rainbow, which went by the name “Deeply Felt.”). By Michl and Silvia’s recommendation, we went to a shoe store named Tretter, and Kai and I figured out which Converse to replace it with, while the others went over to the Viktualienmarkt to check it out. We were going to have a quick lunch together, but we ran out of time. We have to make more tie to hang out with our Austrian friends next time! Michl and Silvia took at taxi to the hotel at just about 2 pm and went on from there to the bus station after their mini visit, while Kai, Imke, Mark and I went to another traditional Bavarian inn for lunch, and had a variety of simple Bavarian dishes–different types of sausages and roasts, a dumpling with liver in it, and some Kaesespaetzle. Very yummy! By this time, it was raining again, and we just ran a couple of errands downtown and then left to go home, do a little grocery shopping, and deal with the laundry. We had our usual bread, cheese, and cold cuts for dinner, and although we left open whether we would go back out, but eventually all decided to stay home, because thunderstorms and showers kept rolling through. Hopefully the weather will be less “inconstant” (German “unbestaendig”) in the next few days!