Guten tag familie und freunde
This dispatch to you comes after we have arrived back from a month long journey in celebration of our 40 years of love, marriage and companionship. It still has elements of our normal adventuresome spirits, but is set in a more “civil and romantic” background, Europe, specifically Munich, Tyrolean Austria and several Italian locations. This 1st of several dispatches shares our experiences in both Munich and the Stubai Valley of southern Austria, over a 10 day period. It does not endlessly describe the great works of art and architecture we experienced but contains humorous occurrences, hiccups, physical trekking and discoveries. I hope we don’t disappoint, this being a bit different than past reports of travels in Vietnam, Cambodia, Borneo and Indonesia. A major difference is that we rented a car for all but 3 days and had some interesting exposure to the Autobahn car culture and roundabouts (‘rotaries’ according to our GPS navigation system, which was nicknamed Nellie), with signs not quite pointing in the direction that you were supposed to go, or, Nellie’s numbering system on which exit to take of the 4 or 5 available at a particular rotary!
We touched down in Munich on September 3 to join up with Pam, a friend of almost 40 years who was traveling with her German childhood friend, Uli. From the airport, we took the Schnellbahnnetz train to the central station, Hauptbahnof, where we had expected to see hordes of the reported flow of Syrian refugees spilling into Germany, but never bore witness to that happening. We spent 3 days here (with Pam being our unpaid guide, as she had lived and studied here years ago, and speaks German) and then 7 days in Southern Austria’s Stubai Valley, a sacred place for Pam, countless travels there with her parents, depositing her father’s ashes there in 2012. We usually travel on our own or with other couples, so this arrangement was to be a new experience for us and certainly did provide a unique perspective.
We were introduced to the best that these two meat, dairy and dessert-based cultures have to offer, spending our afternoons and evenings dining in places frequented by the locals like Zum Spockmeier in Marienplatz. We dined on entities such as wurzige gulaschuppe (goulash soup), sauerkraut, potato dumplings, cabbage salads, roasted chanterelles with bacon bits, beef shank, topped off with desserts like apple fritters baked in beer dough, covered with cinnamon-sugar and served with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream! Luckily we never saw a scale until our last day on this journey in our Rome accommodation, by which time we had been able to mitigate the dining of our first 10 days.
One standout for us in Munich, aside from the Bavarian-styled restaurants, were the activities going on everywhere, in preparation for the upcoming Oktoberfest (which we would miss)…revelers in restaurants and beer gardens under large flowering trees, shading them from the sun we enjoyed, hoisting their mugs and steins, yelling “PROST” in toast after toast, engaging in boisterous conversations, laughing heartily and loudly, red-nosed, hundreds congregated at a time in the larger gardens. In one such location, some of the locals were standing at a fountain, leaning on the lip of the 6 foot diameter, 4 foot tall basin which was sporting a small statue of a woman (in whose hand someone had placed a red rose), cooling their unopened beers in the cool waters flowing into the basin, socializing and enjoying the afternoon. In other location, the Englischer Garten (larger than NYC’s Central Park), we were serenaded by 3 lederhosen-attired Blas (‘Blow) musicians playing brass horns and a tuba), on the 2nd story of a 5 story wooden structure (Chinesischer Turm), playing what they call ‘Blas’ or Blow music.
One constant in both these countries were the competing cacophony of simultaneous church bells clanging madly on the hour. It was by far a more pleasant background than the drone of the Muslim call to prayers that we experienced in Indonesia last year, which tended to be more than ‘a call’ and could go on for up to 2 hours! The one structure I will point out is the Town Hall in Marienplatz, the gothic Neues Rathaus , which sports the Glockenspiel, an impressive tourist trap (free) for which scores of people have stood around for over a 100 years, twice a day, to witness this mechanical engineering display of 2 medieval Munich tales using 32 life-size figurines rotating midway up the 85 meter high edifice, replete with 43 ringing bells. After the 10 minute show, and appealing to our taking the “road-less-traveled’ in our adventures, we visited the nearby Spielzeugmuseum, a toy museum, 4 stories up a narrow spiral staircase, housing an amazing array of antique toys, e.g., trains, tin soldiers, Barbie dolls, 19th century mechanical dolls. This wasn’t on anybody’s list, just something we stumbled on while walking to the Glockenspiel!
While in Munich we made a several hour visit to Konzentrationslager Dachau which we were compelled to not ignore, especially with the atrocities rampant at this moment in our global history. The tone was set upon entering the grounds, passing through the main gate which had embedded in it the words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work Makes You Free), a patently false expectation knowing what had occurred here. Next came the physical punch of the starkness of this empty 5 acre expanse, with some structures still standing, grey and grim small pebbled gravel, a 200 yard long poplar tree-lined road splitting the acreage, several 2 story high old guard stations on each side of the complex, bleakness at its best. Old barracks still stood whose reconstructed cells reflected the dehumanization the prisoners experienced, in close quarters, sharing bunk styled ‘shelves’ with no individual barriers, open toilets a few inches from each other. ‘Man’s inhumanity to Man’ rattled through my brain. After an hour we had trod back up the 200 yards and were exiting this memorial when we realized that we had missed the Krematorium. We went back and forth on that one and thought we would kick ourselves in the butt if we didn’t retrace our steps and pay our respects to those that had suffered so greatly.
We won’t describe what we saw and learned in the rooms of the Krematorium, but can say it was hard to swallow the contrast between this villainous icon of antiseptic, soulless and processing efficiency (room-by-room) with the surrounding beautiful, bucolic forested area, its clean, easy flowing stream and a well-groomed walking trail.
We bid farewell to Munich, picked up our Volvo SUV from Hertz (versus the Mercedes we had ordered) and headed on to Telfes, Austria, a village embedded in the Stubai Valley. Pam was driving as she has driven these roads and the Autobahn for many years and we had our first bump-in-the-road (literally), being pulled over because we did not have a vignette sticker for Autobahn access. Shame on Hertz for not mentioning this ‘minor’ requirement. It only costs 8.5 Euros (roughly $10 USD). We encountered the most unreasonable, surly, belittling and belligerent “traffic cop” ever. After Pam came back from his vehicle, smoke streaming out of her ears, her fists clenched, she told us she had just paid 120 Euros (roughly $140 USD) for the fine. After telling Pam we would pay for half of this, we had fun planning our revenge on Hertz! Stay tuned for the next episode: AUSTRIA.
Your trusted travelers, Stan & Maggie