Our Day in Munich

There were three objectives for our day today:

1--get enough groceries to last us through the three-day holiday when all stores would be closed.

2--pick up Debbie at the airport--which would finally bring our group up to full strength (13).

3--spend some time in Munich

For the grocery hunting team (Shirley, Donovan, Jess, Chloe and me), it was an early start with a goal of getting to a supermarket in nearby Dingolfing when it opened at 7:00 am.  Armed with three shopping carts and two German speakers, we scoured the store and purchased most everything on our list in about two hours. 

We returned to our home-away-from-home and swapped grocery bags for the rest of our troupe and headed southwest to Munich, about 75 minutes away.

We weaved our way through the narrow streets of Munich to the Marianplatz, where the Munich Christmas market was set up.  We dropped off nine passengers and one van and then a few of us headed to the airport to meet up with our last arrival.

Debbie's plan landed on time and we found her in good spirits and wide awake despite not sleeping at all on her two Icelandair flights.  

We then drove back to the Marianplatz, but it was so crowded, we could not find a place to park our van.  By this time, it was around 2 pm and we had reservations at Donovan's favorite restaurant at 3 pm.  He had booked the reservations on line, but had yet to receive a confirmation, so we picked up a couple of the Christmas market shoppers and headed over to ensure our reservations were good.

Yummy!

Our dining location was the Augustiner Braustuben, a beer hall located at the Augustiner brewery.  Augustiner is the only large brewery in Germany still family-owned (by descendants of the composer Richard Wagner).  The brewery opened in 1378.  This place simply defines a Bavarian Beer Hall in my book.  It is located in an industrial district and is a local hang-out, not a tourist spot.  Donovan indicated that he thought we were the only non-Germans in the whole place.

Wooden keg being tapped

The food was fantastic, the beer tasty and plentiful, and the atmosphere just what you would expect from a Bavarian Beer Hall.  We were sitting at a table located between the exposed kitchen and a bar made out of a giant copper kettle.  The beer for the bar was delivered on a hand-crank elevator from storage below.  The beer came upstairs in wooden kegs and we could watch the bartending take a mallet to tap the keg.  The process looked exactly is it probably did several hundred years ago.