Greetings from München…

or Munich as it’s known Stateside. I put B and the kids on a plane to Brazil last Wednesday so am taking advantage of the my temporary bachelor status to get to know this famous German city, which I had previously only visited once for less than a day. I’ll head to Rio a couple of weeks and stay there about a month. Germans definitely deserve a special place in history for their vacation policy alone.

I booked a room online at the Eden Hotel Wolff for about 100 € a night. That seems to be the going rate for reasonable accommodations in the parts of Europe we’ve traveled to. Like most decent hotels in downtown Munich, it’s close to the main train station, about a 10 minute walk from the old part of the city. It’s a nice hotel with public parking right behind it, a better than average breakfast buffet and a U-Bahn station almost in front of it. I highly recommend this place. The dragon on the side of the New Town Hall above is just plain tough.As you can see by the pictures, the city is beautiful, drawing tourists from all over the world. It should come as no shock that beautiful August weather suits it much better than the rain that greeted us last time.I arrived Friday night and hit the city fairly early Saturday morning (after wondering around and imbibing a few beers upon hitting the beach). I caught the site seeing bus at around 10 and did the hop-on, hop-off thing until early afternoon. As has become a custom, I’ll shut up and let the pictures do the talking. This afternoon I climbed the tower below. The view was worth the 14 flights of narrow stairs I scaled (but just barely). Can you see the folks that made a similar climb in the other steeple? I decided two “climbs” in one day was more than my aging carcass could handle.