We started off at Nyphenburg Palace. It happened to be only a couple blocks from out hotel, so an easy way to start the day.
They are not joking around about the whole palace thing; the place is immense with giant gardens. Once upon a time, it was connected to all of Munich with a series of canals. Now the water is purely decretive. With lots of swans of course.
Inside was also rather magnificent.
The Braviarian rules were not much for subtlety, that's for sure. Also Ludwig was kind of a sketchy dude and would try to find the most beautiful women in the country. His pick up line was something along the lines of, "hey, I am the king and I want to hang your portrait in my gallery of beauties." Since he was the king this seemed to work for him.
He was an equal opportunity creeper and did not care if someone was common or noble as long as they were brunette. Finally, he ended up making some bad life choices with an Irish dancer named Lola and was forced to abdicate his throne.
Next we headed off to the English garden. It is the largest park in all of Europe. We wanted to check out the beer garden by the Chinese pavilion. Ellie had heard of this thing called kinderbier and wanted to check it out. Plus I wanted some sausages. We both succeeded in our missions.
The weather was a bit on and off. It would rain, then be very sunny, then rain again. In one of the moments of clarity we stopped at a playground to burn off that kinderbier.
Next we proceeded to the Residenz. It made Nyphenburg look subtle. It took us a bit of wandering in circles to find our way in, but once we did we checked out the Royal jewels and the palace.
I love this angry fish.
And the simple dining hall.
Plus the tasteful rooms.
There are over 100 rooms that folks can visit and many more that are closed. As we were walking along someone commented "what would they do when friends came over, tell them to wait 30 minutes till someone finally found the door?" In context this seemed like a believable scenario. Every ruler decided to build his own wing that was one step gaudier than the last one. We played a lot of "would you want this as your bedroom/dining room/living room" and the answer was generally that I could fit my whole house in most of the rooms.
Next we decided to wander over to Hofbrauhaus for some food. Ellie also had some sparkling apple drink that was great. I had a beer and forgot to order the small.
Yes, the beer was the size of my head.
When we got done it was raining like mad. We considered walking around for a bit more in the old town to get dessert but it was getting late and we did not have a gondola to navigate the reemerging canals in the streets of Munich. Instead we opted to go back to the hotel and get warm and dry.
So goodbye Munich and goodbye Germany. Tomorrow morning we are off to Venice!
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