Munich

Summer is winding down and I've got a huge amount of pictures backlogged from my not-so recent adventures.

When we were staying in Zurich, I took a 4-hour train ride to Munich to visit some friends. I've been to Munich before years ago, but now I had a couple of tour guides to show me what I had previously missed.





I couldn't really understand a word of what Hugo was telling me, but he kept doing this adorable thing where he would kick and squirm and ball up his blanket so it would eventually end up piled on his head. All you could hear was a muffled cooing noise where he used to be lounging. Good baby.

After posting pictures of babies, I always like to follow up with pictures of beer, lest you think I'm getting soft on you.



Within 10 minutes of picking me up at the train station, we started a long, lazy beer garden crawl. It was the perfect way to see Munich- cultural highlights, beer, impressive architecture, beer, historical site, beer. It felt somehow very natural to be seeing the best beergardens mixed in there as well.




Marienplatz plaza- the New town hall smack dab in the center of Munich. This is where some hard-core christens were gathering and proclaiming over a bullhorn (in perfect American English) that "Jesus wants Germany to win the World Cup, and he's on our side".



There's a canal that goes through the English Gardens. Where it hits a dam, people jump in and surf the perpetual wave.









This amused me to no end, along with the fact that one of the beergardens was a Chinese pagoda.




Baby Hugo likes frequent breaks from being a tour guide, which is just fine by me.

Lady Bavaria looks over the site of Oktoberfest.


This time of year, it's a huge empty lot that the locals call "The Desert of Munich".

Later at night, when the entire city was glued to the world cup, we hopped in a vintage Porsche convertible and took a rather awesome tour of the city again. It was really amazing how there was absolutely no one out and about- the streets were empty of cars and people. Every once in a while, a great roar swelled up from the masses that let us know that Germany was winning.



It was great to see my friends (who have been to New York a dozen times over the past 6 year and they were tired of sleeping on my floor I'm sure) and their new addition behaved like a gentleman the entire time I was there. Also, there was cheese there:



and that always makes me happy.