Beer halls, beer gardens, and pub crawls: life in Munich

Having said our goodbyes to Prague and eastern Europe for the time being, Justin and I then set our sights on the world-infamous capital of Oktober and all that is fest: Munchen, Deutschland (or Munich, for my non-German-speaking readers). We were sure to be early for our train this time, and after a beautiful, albeit uneventful, 5-hour train ride, we arrived in Munich. We settled into the hostel, met up with the girls (some friends from Biola), and commenced our exploration and adventuring.

While Munich isn’t exactly a city you’d describe as “scenic” or “breathtaking” in the same manner as you would Prague, it definitely has its charms, and I enjoyed our three and a half days there immensely. A lot of this had to do with the culture…and, I’m not afraid to admit it, the beer. See, Germans had this great idea long ago, when they sat around lunch one day drinking and contemplating the meaning of life, as German so often do, to designate certain places around their city as “beer gardens”, so that they would always have sanctuaries within which to knock a few back on lunch break. Brilliant!

Thus, throughout the city, you’ll see these giant open spaces with hundreds of seats, often surrounded by food stands or shops of different sorts, and often filled with talking, laughing, drinking, and sometimes singing Germans. All. Day. Long. I’m not sure if there’s no such thing as work, or there are just so many different break times that the beer gardens are always full…well whatever it is, it keeps the barmaids busy.

Our first day there consisted of a free walking tour that started right from our hostel and went through the city center and most of the main attractions there. Greatest of these, was, yes, drumroll please…the famed Glockenspiel. Now, I don’t know how it’s gained it’s fame over the years, but the Glockenspiel, located atop Munich’s old City Hall or Rathaus, has apparently become inexorably linked to the city and it’s reputation.

What is the Glockenspiel, you might ask? Well, it’s basically this little merry-go-round that tells two different stories from the city’s history, three times a day, every day. And about a thousand people stand there for 10 minutes craning their necks watching it, while Munich’s finest artful dodgers clean out their wallets. After watching it, trust me, you’ll only want to see it once. It’s overrated, highly overrated. The kind of overrated that makes you want your money back. But since you didn’t spend any money, you get mad, because you can’t get your ten minutes back.

But thankfully, not everything in Munich is overrated. Actually, the Glockenspiel was the only thing. The city is clean, the people friendly, there are several worthwhile galleries and museums to go to, and as I already mentioned, there are beer gardens. Lots of them.

Another cultural experience we chose to partake in (more generally European than specifically German in it’s nature) was a “pub crawl”. Now, the idea behind the pub crawl is simple: take a big group of young folks out for a night of touring the city’s pubs, get them trashed enough to fork over the exorbitant prices the pubs you take them to charge, get kickbacks from the pubs, get them all back in one piece, wake up the next morning, and repeat the process the following night.

And the way to get these nightly tours off to a good start is also simple: Power Hour. For the first hour of the pub crawl, they bring you loads of cheap alcohol, for absolutely free. My advice: drink it. Because unless you want to fork over 6.5 euro for a beer later on, (that’s about $9 American), it’s the last stuff you’ll see all night without a hefty price tag. More advice: don’t pass out. We had a hapless lad named Scott on ours, who almost made it two hours before going limp as a dishrag for the rest of the night. There are absolutely no good reasons to pass out on a pub crawl, and lots of good ones not to. For example, you would miss the history: Munich has great pubs, and each one has a story. This one was owned by Karl Marx’s second cousin once removed, that one sold Hitler his first beer at five years old, you know: pertinent stuff.

So after three and a half days of navigating our way through the strasses, platzes, and burgs of Munich, I found myself in the flughafen, oops I mean airport, contemplating my return to London, and reflecting on my time in Germany. It’s a great place, it really is. I think I enjoyed it so much because it showed me something about where I come from. I now know, for example, why I see a beer-bellied Cheesehead in lederhosen walking down Main Street carrying a six pack at noon (non-Midwestern readers: this actually happens in Wisconsin…okay, maybe not the lederhosen). Dude’s German blood is just trying to get him to the next beer garden.