Our third week in Grassau started with a day trip to Munich. Holger works there so he drove us in on Wednesday. We set off at 6.15am to beat the traffic and were in Munich city centre by 7.30am. Given the early hour we started our day with a walk through the English Garden (yes we've come all the way to Germany to see an English Garden). We grabbed a cup of tea and a hot chocolate and sat on a bench by the river with a chocolate swirl. I don't know what it is about the water here but it's really light blue everywhere we've been! On our walk we discovered the Munich surfers who turn up and surf on the river Eisbach- even at 8am! The English Garden is huge- apparently one of the largest urban parks in the world. We walked through the Garden for 2 hours, and only got to about halfway through it. And Craig had met his daily step goal before 9am, a new record!
Our tactic for visiting cities has been to walk, walk and walk some more. This gives us a good feel for a place, and with a little bit of prior googling we find some standard tourist spots as well as leaving opportunity for discovering the unexpected (like surfers in the middle of Munich or the views over the mountains in Salzburg). So we set off in the direction of the city centre to see what we could find. We arrived in Marienplatz, Munich's central square, just in time for the daily glockenspiel show at the Rathaus (Town Hall). The glockenspiel chimes and figurines on the Rathaus rotate and dance around. Marienplatz was packed with tourists watching (and filming) this and although it's nice to see it wasn't exactly a highlight of the day. From here we found Peterskirche (St Peters Church) where we paid €3 to climb ~300 stairs to the top for some views over Munich.
For lunch we headed to the Viktualienmarkt: a big open air food market. We wandered around the vegetable stalls, butchers, delicatessens, soup stands, and the many hot food stalls before deciding on a selection of german food from Schlemmermeyer's: bratwurst (german sausage) in a bun, krustenbraten (roast pork with crackling in a bun- yummy!), kartoffelpuffer (potato cakes), and krautsalat (cabbage salad- like coleslaw). In the afternoon we wandered to the palaeontology museum (chosen because it was free and had animal skeletons) and found ourselves passing through Königsplatz on the way. Königsplatz was used during the Third Reich as a place where Hitler gave speeches at rallies.
We factored in plenty of time for beer into our trip to Munich, so mid afternoon we headed to another Augustiner Brau beer hall (the same as in Salzburg) slightly out of the city centre. We chose this one as we had read the beer was cheap and it's not as filled with tourists as the ones in the centre. We had a couple of steins and a pretzel before walking back to meet Holger at 6pm and heading home.
In total we walked about 24km around Munich- I wore holes in both my socks!!
We spent the weekend visiting lakes again. On Friday we spent the morning getting our jobs done: cleaning the horses, walking the dog etc. It almost doesn't feel like work when the sun is shining, and the view from the stables is pretty nice! After we finished we cycled to Übersee and shared a banana split at the ice cream shop, and then grabbed some beers and sat by Chiemsee lake.
On Saturday we worked with Holger on part of the horse stable at home, and in the evening we sat out in the sun and had a (mostly) vegetarian BBQ. We prepared veggie sausages, veggie burgers, grilled halloumi slices, veggie skewers, corn on the cob, millet salad, green salad, coleslaw and potato salad and some beef burgers and chicken skewers for us. The neighbours also brought lamb and whole trout. I BBQ'ed the food after Craig got the coals going. This was my first time BBQing and I was so pleased with how it turned out!
On Sunday we cycled to another lake in Grassau, Reifinger see. This one is smaller than Chiemsee and Tütensee but closer cycle to. It was beautiful! We sat and read our books, had a swim, had more ice cream, and then cycled home and had another BBQ in the evening. That's the life!
Vegetarian food we cooked this week included a veggie curry (cooked from scratch), asparagus and pea risotto, the BBQ, and some others I can't remember.
And happily no medical mishaps to report this week!
Total money spent between 2 (including travel to next host): €738
No comments:
Post a Comment