Céline met Jesse on a train to Vienna, and they spent an evening and a night in the city together, before both had to catch different trains to different destinations in their very separate lives. A train ride, the start of one of the most intriguing movie screen love stories of all time. In my opinion. Before sunrise, followed by Before sundown, set in Paris – and apparently there’s a new one now, Before midnight, older, children and fighting in Greece. I read an interview with Julie Delpy, who plays Céline, in a magazine while waiting for the food to arrive in a pub in Stromness, Orkney. I have to see it when I get back home.

There’s no potential handsome young American in this train carrige. And I am not an artistic, beautiful Frenchwoman. I won’t be able to reenact Before sunrise. Probably for the best, though. Sleeping in a bed in a Couchsurfing host’s guest room feels so much more like what I need after the weekend I’ve had in Munich, than having sex on the ground in a dark Vienna park. Just sayin’.

Sitting on the train from Munich to Vienna, I see the picturesque peaks of the Alps pass by outside the windows. Long gone are the flat grassy meadows of Belgium and the Netherlands.

As you probably already know, I like to plan things. I have this detailed schedule that I drew, with dates and destinations and accomodation solutions for my entire trip. Well, the beautiful thing with traveling with an Interrail ticket is that you can be as spontaneous as you want. With Couchsurfing, being spontaneous can be tricky, but most things can be fixed.

So, I’ve just had my first change of plans on this trip. I was supposed to leave Munich yesterday – but I simply didn’t feel done. Since Max had been working and stuff, he still had things he wanted to show me, and I had not had time to meet Julius yet. So I e-mailed my Couchsurfing host in Vienna, re-scheduled my arrival and stayed in Munich for another day. And what a day! The sun finally came out, and I spent the day in the lovely parks of Munich.

But, unfortunately, I don’t have unlimited time to travel around Europe. This spur of the moment prolongation of my Munich stay means that I’ll have to do some super efficient touristing in Vienna and Budapest if I am to make it to Sarajevo before I need to start heading north again. No more spontanaety!

A note on the phone:

Sitting by the river in the evening sun, watching the water swiftly flowing by. Having Annika Norlin singing ”I wonder who is like this one” in my ears. Another perfect moment in time.

Max had to work at the Street Life Festival in the afternoon, so after finishing off the tour in the English Garden, climbing up to the Monopteros monument to enjoy the view and kindly taking a photo of me, he had to leave.

(One of the few decent photos taken of me on this trip since Scotland. It is amazing how bad pictures with an SLR camera can become if taken by a random person on the street who doesn’t know how to use it!)

I stayed on in the park, listening to the three men playing guitar and singing Bob Dylan, Eagel-Eye Cherry and other guitar friendly stuff at the Monopteros for a while, and then I continued down to the sundrenched lawn.

I laid down on the grass next to a group playing Kubb, one of the few traditionally Swedish activites that young people in Sweden still actually enjoy doing. Last year, I saw them selling Kubb in Seattle, marketed as the great Swedish BBQ game, and now it’s found its way to Germany too. A nice thing to export, in my opinion.

I spent my afternoon read the guidebook about Vienna and Budapest, then moving down to the river watching the water flow past. Later, Julius came by with some beers. Julius is a guy I met at a club in Stockholm in this past spring, and through the magic of Facebook we were able to meet up again and he could show me how a proper Sunday afternoon is to be spent in Munich: relaxing in the sun on the grass by the Eisbach, drinking beer and watching the ducks float by.

Sunday, my extra day in Munich. The plan had originally been to continue to Vienna on Sunday morning, but I just didn’t feel done. So I decided to stay one more day. After the incredible obligatory breakfast, Max took me on a Sunday biking tour of Munich.

Some railway romanticism – they do have an impressive railway system in Germany.

The tour took us to the Olympic Park, where the Olympic games so fatally failed to show Germany from its good, post-WWII side in 1972. Instead, a group of Israeli atheletes were taken hostage by a group of Palestinian terrorists and the whole thing just spinned out of control, leading to 17 people being killed.

Now, the X Games were held here, an international competition for extreme sports. The area was crowded and mostly closed off for the competitions, so the only things I got to see of the actual Olympic Park was a corner of the old stadium and the top of this tower.

Just by the X Games, there was another event going on, one which didn’t require a ticket. It was called the Tollwood Festival and was originally an event organized to promote organic and non-GMO food. Now, though, it’s held every year and there are other things being sold there too, like handmade jewlery and other trinkets. I bought a pair of earrings, a Greek salad and bread thing and a crêpe – non of the food really turning out to be what I expected because I thought I knew better German than I actually do. But it was OK. Food is always food: meant to be enjoyed.

It was really cool, though, this festival, with all the different food, almost all of it organic, and to see how big the interest for it was in Munich. The festival area was completely packed with people and I think an event like this is a great way to open people’s eyes to different and better ways of producing and consuming food. I wish we could have things like this happening in Sweden!

Max also took me through Schwabing, an area that could just as well have been Vasastan in Stockholm.

Pretty house. Many pretty houses. All in all, a very nice bicycling tour with Max.

Mr. P having a real, Bavarian beer. He quite enjoyed it.

Ludwig-strasse is a long, wide boulevard that runs north east from Odeons-platz, past the state library and the university and beyond. On the weekend that I spent in Munich, a festival was held on this street, with the traffic closed off and the boardwalks lined with booths selling food, booze, crafts and ideas. These wide boulevards of Munich can sometimes feel rather deserted, and are a remnant of the monarchy days when the kings wanted to show off their grand capital. However, they are perfect for festivals and other events. This particular one was called Street Life Festival and was organized by the organization that Max is interning for. So, I had someone on the inside showing me around, and we had a great time, despite the rain.

Me, having a vegan döner (called kebab in Sweden, which apparently is wrong, according to the Indian man selling the döners) in front of the state library. It was something completely new to me, this concept o f a vegan döner – but it tasted great. I had several during my stay in Munich. It’s such a neat thing, stuffing a lot of good stuff into a hollow bead and then eating it. And it being meat free, well, that’s just awesome.

Ludwig-strasse, festive and wet. Despite the rain, there were quite a few people at the festival, and there were a lot of things to see. Eventually, we sat down in a beer tent and I had some real Bavarian beer. It was good. This trip has made me realize that beer actually can be good, and that the BESK stuff that you get on tap in general Swedish bar just the cheap thing you drink to get drunk. Well, turns out, at 25 I learn that I actually can enjoy beer.

The rain came in showers and the roof of the beer tent didn’t help against the water that blew in from the sides. In this constant dripping, a man with a bottle of Jägermeaster came by and offered us one shot each. Free of charge. It’s a German thing too, but this I cannot feign to like. Liquorice is one of my least favorite tastes, to be sure.

And even later, after discussing nationalistic tendencies in politics in Germany versus Sweden, veganism and the architecture of Munich, another random man approached me with a drink glass and just gave it to me, saying I deserved it. It was a mojito, and I like mojitos, so I finished it and after all that alcohol, I’m pretty tipsy and I suddenly got worried that maybe I was embarrasing myself in front of Max with all my jokes and talk of crazy club nights in San Francisco. But he just laughed and the rain had finally stopped falling and then we went back to his place.

I fell asleep on the couch around one in the morning, after a perfect day of the high and the low of Munich.

Walking to and from the museums through the rainy streets of downtown Munich, I saw some really odd pieces of architecture. They were really into the classical stuff, the former kings of Bavaria. As for me, I like wall paintings and models of the Earth of all kinds.

 

The three Munich Pinakotheks (art museums) are situated right next to each other, displaying art from different periods. I wanted to go to the Pinakothek der Moderne, the modern art museum, but it is being renovated and won’t open until the fall. So, instead, I chose to go to Neue Pinakothek, where the collection of 19^th and early 20^th century art is housed. It is a conveniently small museum (and cheap, especially for a student as myself), with pieces by many big names (that even I recognized) and some really amazing landscape paintings.

For example this room, filled with dreamy landscapes by Carl Rottman.

And I find something very sympathetic with the turn painting took during the 19^th century, when artists left the royal palaces and the biblical stories, and went out into the world to paint orinary people and real life moments. Like this, painted by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller in 1840. How the children look out through the window, with the sun and excitement on their faces, curious on the world, while the woman (their mother?) calmly looks on in the shadow. I love the composition, and the it is double framed.

Or these two moments in time, the stormy walk home by Fritz von Unde and the TRILSK goat by Max Liebermann, both painted in 1890.

For some reason, paintings of cows seem to speak to me lately. They had a couple of them in the Rijksmuseum too. I think it must be the so very cultural and abstract thing of oil paintings, contrasted with the very tangible, earthly, often smelly thing with a cow. And this beatuiful thing, painted by Willem Maris sometime between 1890 to 1900, had so much feeling all among the blurry patches of color. I loved it. Loved it!

My favorite in the entire museum, though, was the ironing woman painted by Edgar Degas in 1869. Such beauty captured in such a mundane task. The colors and the warmth. I couldn’t get enough of it.

There were statues too, this beautiful horse ridden by the Amazon, sculpted by Louis Tuaillon in 1895 being my favorite. Horses are always a hit with me.

The only place in the museum where people actually gathered, where I couldn’t free sight of a painting right away, was here, in front of the wall holding the collection’s three Vincent van Gogh paintings. The sunflowers, so typically Gogh, made for a really intriguing stare.

Otherwise it was a really quiet and nice museum, large enough to make it worth my while going there, but small enough to not create that feeling of getting overstuffed with art. I think they’re on to something there, in Munich, separating the art collections. The Rijksmuseum is a monster. And incredible, massive, amazing monster. The Neue Pinakothek was a lot easier to handle.

My second day in Munich was rainy, so I decided to spend it going to some of Munich’s many museums. First stop: the Residenz.

The Residenz is where the Wittelsbach clan, the Bavarian royal family, lived between 1508 until 1918. Now, it’s the biggest tourist attraction in Munich. Big parts of the palace was unfortunately destroyed or damaged during WWII, but it’s been meticulously reconstructed and everything looks so luxurious and extravagant that I can’t tell the difference between the original and the reconstruction.

The most impressive part of the palace is actually the first thing that you see, just after the ticket office and entrance hall: the Antiquarium. It is so breathtaking that it even deserves another picture, taken from the other end.

Otherwise, it was the personal chambers of the different kings and queens and princesses that impressed me the most. Imgaine living in that, sleeping on that silk. It looks both heavenly and horrific at the same time. With all that gold, how will your brain be able to relax? The green is at least calming. And I wouldn’t mind having a mirror like that in my hallway.

That is what I call a decorated ceiling. Why don’t they make ceilings like that anymore? I’ll have to paint my own ceiling fresco. It’ll be my next project!

Last on the tour lies the Ahnengallery, where all the important Wittelsbachs’ portraits hang in chronological order.

It is impressive, this extravagance and the extreme detail put into every single part of the palace – but it also puzzles me, how there could have existed families that were so rich that they could afford this. Because, of course this was only meant to be seen by a small group of privileged people. It makes me uneasy, thinking of all the ordinary people that had to pay for it with their labour, and never getting a chance to see all the beauty. With an extravagantly decorated Catholic church, people are at least allowed in to see it. Here, it was only meant for royal eyes. Despite my weakness for beautiful things, ceiling decorations and detail, I can’t forget the unequality of the society that could afford building these kinds of palaces.