The Lenbachhaus and its lavish park
A brass face from the expressionist era
Franz Marc’s “Blue Horse”
A detail from one of the oriental vases in the furnished part of the Lenbachhaus
The fountain in the Lenbachhaus Garden
Ironwork on the fence at the Lenbachhaus Garden
The beer garden at the Hirschgarten I
The beer garden II
The “Masskruege” (1-liter beer glasses) at the beer garden
Beate, Imke, Dorothee, Antje and Kai
Our pretzel, with onions and “Obatzter,” the best cheese dip ever invented
The truck that picked up the empties
A beautiful spider web
And a beautiful palace–Nymphenburg, the summer residence of the Bavarian rulers since the 1700s.
Trains on the way back home
A very busy day with gorgeous weather. Mark and I woke up very early to blue skies, so we just stole the public transportation pass that we are all sharing and took the subway and the bus back to a part of town we hadn’t had a chance to explore earlier in the week. It’s called Schwabing and used to be the bohemian district where all the artists lived in the late 19th and early 20th century–impressionist and later expressionist painters, many writers, musicians, actors, etc. There are a lot of beautiful late 19th century and art deco town houses and the area was fun to explore on foot. We did have coffee/tea and rolls at a bakery, but it wasn’t as cozy as I would have liked it. We had promised to be back by 10 to meet up with the others, and once everyone was actually ready, we took off for our art museum of the day–the Gallery at the Lenbach-Haus, a 19th century villa built in an Italianate style by a painter named Franz von Lenbach, which has long been a small but famous art museum that features, most famously, the German expressionists that lived in Munich and formed a painting school called “Der Blaue Reiter.” Some of their most famous works are exhibited here, including Franz Marc’s “Blue Horse” and Kandinsky paintings from 2 decades, which were fascinating to track from almost pointillist impressionism to extremely abstract color paintings. The museum also features some other favorites of mine, Paul Klee, Gabriele Muenter, and, in the garden, three very cute statues by Max Ernst.
Afterwards, we took the subway back to Schwabing, because Imke and Dorothee wanted to take us to a very nice restaurant with a great outside seating area, the Kaisergarten. It was toward the end of the lunch hour (almost 3 pm) where we had the famous Weisswuerste (boiled white sausages), a Munich specialty which turned out to be totally boring, and some other lunch food that was quite a bit better–a sort of fried bologna (Leberkaese) and a thin-crust vegetarian pizza (Flammkuchen). Then, Imke and Dorothee and Kai wanted to check out a shoe store, and Mark and I took a quick round through a corner of the English Garden, which abuts on the Schwabing neighborhood.
The next goal was to make our way across town to the S-Bahn station Laim, where my friend Beate and her daughter Kari picked us up to take us to a nearby beer garden in a public park, the Hirschgarten (“deer garden”–and yes, there is a fenced-in area with deer in the middle of the park). Beate is a friend from my student days in Hamburg from the late 1980s, and has lived in Munich for many years, working as a social worker/therapist (Sozialpaedagoge). I had last seen her many years ago–probably when Kai and Kari were 2 or 4, when my mom and I spent some time with the kids in Munich. We had a really fun evening with her, although we couldn’t get the kids to say one word to each other (they are the same age) and Kai eventually got really frustrated because we spent so much time just sitting around in the beer garden and talking. It was the perfect weather for it, and gave me real appreciation for this very Bavarian institution–especially the variant of the beer garden as a huge outdoor bar in a public park. The cool part is that in the huge self-service part of the pub, you’re expected to buy your beverages, but you can either buy food or bring your own, and many guests do. We ended up having a giant pretzel with this amazing cheese dip that is unique to Bavaria called “Obatzter” (cream cheese, butter, spices, and bits of camembert–a wicked calorie bomb that tastes like heaven). But many of the hundreds of people around the simple wooden tables under the park trees brough elaborate picnics, including table cloths or dish cloths to eat from! So much fun, and so sociable! We talked and talked and eventually went for a little walk from the park to the palace of Nymphenburg, the former summer residence of the Bavarian kings. We didn’t have enough time or energy to go there, but we took a peek from the outside in the beautiful evening sun, before we took a bus back to the S-Bahn, the S-Bahn back to the subway, and the subway home to the apartment around 9 pm. I was exhausted enough that I was fast asleep by shortly after 10, and slept all the way until almost 8 without ever doing my blog!