Yesterday morning, I woke up to a cloudy and drizzly Munich. Given the weather, I decided to do a tour of Munich's three main art museums: the Alte Pinakothek, the Neue Pinakothek, and the Pinakothek der Moderne. My first stop, the Alte museum, focused on painting from the Middle Ages to the end of the Rococo period. The collection of Rubens paintings were well worth the trip to the museum. After a little over an hour of touring the mostly Biblically-focused works, I moved on to the later-periods museum, the Neue Pinakothek. The museum was much smaller in size, but had three important paintings by Van Gogh (my favorite). Finally, I swung by the modern art museum, which was fun, but had some works that left me asking "is that really art? Or a pile of kindle wood?" The museum had an interesting design section, but since all the descriptions were in German, I wasn't always certain why objects were featured: for example, and entire display of Adidas sneakers, and another display of IBM laptops from the late 90s.
It was even colder and rainier when I left the museums, so I went back to the hostel to take care of laundry and some trip planning. For dinner, I decided to find a place to watch the USA women's world cup game. Based on the hostel's recommendation, I went to a nearby German restaurant, where the main hall was completely packed, and a side hall with the game projected on a large screen was nearly empty. Clearly, the Munich locals had no interest in the USA versus Japan game, even though it was being played in Frankfurt. I ordered a beer, and after staring at a menu entirely in German, settled on the item that had both "original" and "sauerkraut" in its description. I figured the item probably was some sort of meat dish and...I don't know, original? If it's original and still on the menu it can't be terrible. I considered the choice low risk.
As there were only 3 of us in the room watching the game, the guy at the table across from me asked where I was from. As our conversation continued, I learned that his name was Ben, and he was a Canadian Ph.D student of geology who was spending a week in Munich for a course. He also spoke no German, and when our food arrived we discovered that we had ordered the exact same thing for exactly the same reasons. The restaurant should just put and arrow to the item with a note, "tourists, look here." The meal turned out to be kind of like layered sausage strudel with lots of excellent sauerkraut. I convinced Ben to root for the US, and we spent the evening tensely watching the game while trying out various German beers. As the American team lost in a shootout after overtime, we had a lot of time to make our way through the beer list. After the USA lost, I got back to my hostel where I ran into some other Americans lamenting our loss. I briefly joined their commiserations before heading to bed.
The weather for the next few days doesn't look great, but hopefully I'll get a chance to enjoy at least one outdoor biergarten.
Pictures from the Pinakothek der Moderne:
No comments:
Post a Comment