In the early morning, I heard my roommates pack up to leave. I rolled over and slept a bit longer. When I finally got up (at like 8am), I took advantage of having a room to myself and drank my coffee at the little desk in the dorm room (a surprising number of dorms have a little table or desk with chairs). I could also connect my phone to the internet, briefly and in certain locations in the room, so it was a nice Sunday morning of getting stuff done. Of course, I needed to clean up a bit because there was quite the collection of empty beer bottles and food packages that were left behind.
Around 10ish, I decided I needed to get out of the hostel and I made a beeline for the museum district. By chance, I had learned that the Pinakothek had reduced admission on Sundays. In fact, five museums charged just 1 euro on Sundays (as opposed to the typical 7 or 8 euros). That is a better deal than one could even get on a day ticket museum pass, so I intended to get my culture on.
I stopped briefly at a bakery/cafe on the way there to top up my caffeine and enjoy a lunch substitute. The “cakes” in these bakeries are so weird. It’s almost always a somewhat bready base topped with fruit in a sort of jelly. I’m sure they are loaded with sugar but they don’t taste like it.
The Alte Pinakothek was amazing. Because the Neues (19th century art) is under renovation, a sampling of the works have been relocated to a temporary exhibition wing, and the upper floor just has painting after painting after painting covering everything from the middle ages up to the Baroque. There were so many Rubens paintings something finally clicked. I’ve been to more museums than I can count over the last couple of months and everyone tends to have a representative sampling of all the major names (at least for the eras it covers), but it had been bothering me by how seldom I came across any Rubens paintings. Well, this explains it. Munich is hogging all of them. Seriously, two entire rooms of just Rubens, and not just any old paintings, but giant ones, meters tall and meters wide. And when I saw one (crocodile and hippo hunt) that was very familiar, it occurred to me that I have probably been in this museum before.
I headed over to the Modern Pinakothek next, which has a design oriented gallery in the lower level, several temporary collections (photography and medievel woodblock prints) on the ground floor, more temporary exhibits and a collection spanning late 19th century to post war era on the upper floor. The museum was only opened in 2002, so I could deduce that I had never visited it before. It was quite a good collection.
I wanted an ice cream break before I hit the third and final museum of my culture day. I tracked down one shop which had more than 7000 reviews according to the google maps, but decided that it was way overpriced. Stupid people in Munich, willing to pay 1.7-1.8 euros per (tiny) scoop of ice cream! I found a smaller and less crowded shop with the bargain price of 1.6 euros (d’oh!). Actually, it was really good and the portion was enormous. I tried a couple flavors I had no idea what they were (having not spent enough time learning Italian), one of which turned out to be rum raisin (“malaga”). Okay.
The third museum was also along the museum mall. It was celebrating its tenth year anniversary and was stictly focused on what is better described as modern art, only tracing as far back as the 1960s. There were a handful of Andy Warhols, which I’m starting to realize are literally everywhere as the man and his workshop mass produced that shit. One of the video rooms was showing footage from a gospel concert. I felt a connection to my Americanness for a moment until more and more people trickled into the room and I became aware of my and every other person’s whiteness. On my way out of the museum, I got corralled into filling out a questionnaire, which presented its own moment of awkwardness. How does one politely say: I only came here because it was basically free?
Finished with the museums, I was resolved to go to the Hofbrauhaus come hell or high water, which almost happened. After looping around twice trying to find a table that felt right, before I could even put in an order, a waiter suggested I relocate inside from the beer garden because it might rain. It’s daunting to pick a table when they are huge and the German way is to share, but there is still plenty of space and even empty tables, but I don’t want to take a 20 person table…
I picked well, though, right next to the bandstand, where two older guys were finishing up their dinner. They were replaced by an older Japanese couple. I said hello to them and cheersed once. An older–I want to say Spanish–couple sat opposite them. Finally, two older Japanese men sat opposite me. I introduced the two sets of Japanese people to each other and chatted a bit with the guys across me in English. I really kind of miss Japan although in this one evening I spent longer talking to Japanese people than I did in 6 weeks of travel in the country.
The band started promptly at 6pm and was swarmed by hordes of tourists taking photos and videos. I can’t even imagine how insane Munich would be during Oktoberfest with all the tourists. I did recognize the drinking song the band shifted to every 20 minutes or so when they were about to take a short break, but I had to look up the lyrics (that I had never sufficiently learned before).
After finishing an entire pork shoulder and two whole glasses of beer (so I could try the original and the dunkel varieties), I figured it was a good time to call it quits. It was a fine walk back to the hostel, where I saw I still had the entire dorm room to myself. I drank some water, watched a movie, and crashed pretty early.
| Coffee + cake | 5.6 |
| Museums | 3 |
| Ice cream | 4.8 |
| Hofbrauhaus (inkl. tip) | 37.5 |
| Total: | 50.9 EUR (397 RMB) (USD 55.45) |
Running Total: 29689.8 RMB (USD 4146.97)
Daily Average: 366.5 RMB (USD 51.20)