We’re very, very sorry that we only have two days in Munich, as we’ve totally fallen in love with this clean, spacious city with fabulous food and beautiful architecture.

I forgot to write in the last post about our magic Munich moment. We recovered from our shopping and tour by heading to the Victualienmarket (literally ‘victuals market’) in the middle of the city. The weather was shining, the place was humming with people and we found a couple of seats at the beer garden. Luke bought a stein, I got a roast pork roll and a glass of wine and we sat there just soaking up the wonderful atmosphere. It isn’t often that I think ‘I could live here’ about anywhere other than Melbourne but Munich makes a great impression. Also, the pork rolls were superb (actually I bought 2). They had a giant strip of crackling in each, for god’s sake. Who could resist that?

Luke in front of the Alte Pinakothek.

Today we’ve been arting it up at two galleries here. The collections are pretty good – lots of big name works and good sized collections. To be completely honest, I find galleries the size of the Louvre pretty overwhelming but the old and modern pinakothek are good for a bit over an hour each (I walk around pretty quickly), have lots of seats and are one euro each on Sundays. The only thing they don’t have, unfortunately, is any kind of English signage. So you’re pretty much stuck with the name of the artist and maybe the name of the painting if you can read a bit of German (which I’m finding I can – three years of high school German are paying off!). There weren’t even descriptions of the paintings in German – I suppose they make their money from the audio tours.  We had to make up our own interpretations.

“You idiot! This is nowhere near as good a read as Here Comes The Planet!”

But it wasn’t art that we were really looking forward to today, it was lunch. Luke had been to Oktoberfest in Munich 10 years ago and recalled his first taste of the German dish of roast pork knuckle with great fondness so we were on the hunt for the same dish again. We stopped at a beer hall in the city and ordered. Pork knuckle isn’t actually the knee of the pig or anything like that. There’s a small bone in the middle of what is essentially and individual sized pork roast and the whole thing is wrapped in crackling then served with a dumpling and lashings of gravy.

We both enjoyed it a lot, although it didn’t quite live up to Luke’s recollections. Which simply means we’ll have to come back and look for a better one.

Nothing else to report for today except that Luke ended up climbing over 25 flights of stairs by himself because I wanted to get a picture from the church tower in the middle of town so we bought tickets then looked up the stairs and it was so narrow I had a bit of a freak out and Luke took my camera and went up by himself. What a champ! Here’s one of his photos. Totally worth it if you ask me ;).