A Week in Germany: Thursday

26. 01. 2012

The trip has taken a unfortunate turn in the excellent city of Munich which I have visited several times before and have in mind a list of places for a bit of shopping. However, more on that later because the day began bright and sunny.

I love the tabletop Christmas tree

Breakfast in a marquis café in the Viktuallen Market with homemade Apple Cake with Whipped Cream. Then Bob went off to a meeting while I went to the Radspieler a design and textile shop Megan and I discovered when we were here in 2005 for the Christmas Market. In business since 1841, and someday I will go back and buy meters and meters of furnishing fabric and dirndl fabric. But it is the kind of shop that has so many beautiful things, I am hard pressed to decide what I can’t live without, then decide I can’t decide, and leave with the smallest item in hand. So a money saver in the end.

Met up with Bob at the nearby Assam Church which is so gold encrusted that it is headache inducing.

Followed by an excellent lunch of Potato Soup and Liverwurst with raw onions and pickles, accompanied by the winter brewed “starkbier” or strong beer because in the winter a nourishing beer was needed as an antidote to the cold.


Bob had a free afternoon so we headed to the Munich City Museum to learn more about the city from a special permanent exhibit done a few years ago to celebrate the city’s 800th anniversary. An excellent little booklet in English was on hand to explain the history and the artefacts on display. I find Germany so confusing since it was divided into autonomous states well into the 19th century, everywhere you travel, the guidebooks are discussing new sets of princes and kings, electors and dukes. There are paintings of endless royals who were patrons of the highest arts, but there is no way to fit them into a coherent framework.

The section on poster art of the early 20th century was most interesting. We knew our favourite poster artist E. McKnight Kauffer had studied in Germany before coming to London in 1914 when war was declared, and here we could see the work that influenced him.

We had reached maximum absorption capability when we discovered the museum also housed a huge and fascinating collection on the history of puppets, really marionettes, and amusement parks.

The beast . . .

. . . and the beauty

The city history exhibit pulls no punches in the difficult mid-20th century history stating clearly that Munich is responsible for Hitler’s rise to power, but the exhibition itself seemed a bit disjointed unlike the displays in earlier galleries. As we were leaving the museum, we realized the Nazi era display had been given a special exhibition space with a separate entrance, but we were just too tired to face any more information.

When we arrived back at the hotel, I discovered I was perhaps tired because the lower leg, foot, and ankle attached to the knee I had injured last Sunday, and which seemed to be healing, was very swollen and had turned a not very healthy colour of bright purple. So we learned the location of the nearest hospital from the hotel and took a cab to investigate the German health system.

The hospital seemed to be some sort of huge university complex. The emergency room I went to, as directed by the very helpful cab driver, had only one other patient in the three hours I was there. I was attended by a cast of movie star handsome doctor, medical student (who had spent a year doing research in Boston), and radiologist, and that was just the men. Between their English and my occasional brain flashes of high school German returning in puffs of memory, we were able to convey our information back and forth.

Fortunately they found nothing to be wrong in the way of blood clots, thrombosis, arterial damage, and whatever else they looked for in the sonogram and blood tests and EKG. Eventually they wrapped my leg in a compression bandage and told me to keep my foot elevated and not to walk around for a day to see if the swelling would go down.

So now I am to look forward to a day in a hotel room. Thankfully this hotel offers free internet, and The Pickwick Papers on my Kindle will last through the next few months, and I am way behind on the cushion cover that I am knitting for the Olympic athlete donation scheme.