All roads lead to Munich...

An enthusiastic companion

Welcome to the easy part of the trip - Western Europe. Many Germans have a basic command of English, but I felt like making a stab at German, since there'll be plenty of other opportunities to bark pigeon English at foreigners in the next few months. After a few days in Munich I had gotten my head around some essential German phrases, chief among them zwei helles bitte (two lagers please.) Now don't write off me and my brother as a pair of lager louts - drinking beer in Bavaria is pretty much the standard tourist experience. And what beer!


There's no such thing as bad beer in Munich. Even if you go to a tiny newsagents in a metro station at midnight, the cheapest beer you can buy will have won about five world beer awards. They usually cost around €1.50, so the equivalent in England would be a can of Strongbow (not that you'd be allowed to drink it on the train anyway, unlike Munich.)

We went out a couple of times with our cousin Rob's mates from the Max Planck institute, where he's doing his PhD. One of them was a Portuguese guy who spoke English in a thick Scottish accent. He explained that his Grandma had been Scottish and he got it off her. Unfortunately no one except for Me, Mike and Rob could understand what he was saying. Poor guy.

In terms of public omnipresence, this man appears to have replaced the swastika

All German trains are run by the government-owned Deutsche Bahn company, and represents a considerably better customer experience than having to choose between Arriva Trains Wales or London Midland, depending on how late I want to be. We took the BOB (Bayern Oberland Bahn) train to Tegernsee in rural Bavaria, near the Austrian border. The town itself was lifeless, but the views around the lake were beautiful. We were so bored in the town that we decided to walk up and down the hill, which was inadvertently a good idea.


Back to Munich - here they design their public spaces for its minimum purpose and nothing more. Nothing is superfluous or wasted. On the U-Bahn (underground), none of the doors will slam open at every stop like London - each one has to be manually pressed by a passenger. The Germans can't get their heads around the purpose of a door which opens only for no one to walk through it. And to be honest, they have a point. Nor are there are any St. Pancras-style lovers' embrace sculptures here - what's the point of that in a train station?! Maybe if it was a solar powered sculpture which fed electricity to the train lines, then it might be condidered.

"YEAH, I'M IN MUNICH......... NAH, IT'S RUBBISH"

Unlike London, every U-Bahn will, arrive in exact 5/10/15 minute intervals, depending on the line. They are never early and most certainly never late. This means that your typical Bavarian can be sat at his breakfast table each morning before his daily commute and know the exact second in which leave the house, the exact pace at which to walk to the station, and the exact moment he will arrive on the platform as the train glides up. The downside to this is that if your timing is shoddy you will have a to wait much longer by London standards for the next one. But, says our imaginary German friend as he rides away, if you miss the train then that's your fault. Bye!

The Rathaus

Sometimes, though, certain aspects of Munich's drive for efficiency backfire on the average person. For instance, if you want to take an elevator to a different floor, you have only a 50:50 chance of going in the direction you want. There is only ever one lift and one lift shaft, so you are effectively competing with people on a different floor. You press the button and an arrow will illuminate, either Up or Down. You have no choice - it's entirely down to which direction the lift is currently headed. This results in a system that, in both the short and long-term, is unsatisfactory for pretty much everyone. I say it's a 50:50 chance - I swear it never goes the way you want it to. I must have tried about ten times in our hostel and only two or three times did I get where I wanted.

So the Germans have devised a system which, for an individual to achieve his short term aim, another person is screwed over. It's pretty similar when queuing - Rob says that he has queued up in a bank, only for the person behind him to form a "second queue" and leapfrog him. I suppose this is the same in most countries outside of Britain, where we bloody love a good queue. There are some traits which are just plain rude though - at an Art Brut gig in Munich on Friday night, I was pushed almost off my feet by a German woman. I'm not exactly a powerhouse myself, but I've yet to be physically debased by a female like that. Up yours Frau!

Munich is altogether the cleanest, safest large city that I've ever been to. The flip side to this is that it's not as 'cool' as Berlin, or London, or Prague etc. The kids here dress kind of the same, and there's not so much expression of individualism. Berliners, for instance, are much more adventurous with their fashion 'statements'. Bavarians are aware of this cultural rivalry, so much so that one nightclub event here is called 'So Not Berlin.' This is a pretty trendy name for an event, until you imagine a German person saying it.

At Haptbahnhof, and it's goodbye to clean, orderly Western Europe

Budapest & Transylvania up next. I forgot to pack a crucifix....