The Wittelsbachs

So this post is devoted to the various buildings I toured that were part of the Wittelsbach family.  This family basically ruled Bavaria (where Munich is) from 1100ish AD to 1918, when monarchy was done away with after WWI.  They had a million places of residence over the 800 years they were around, and in Munich itself I toured through two of them, the Residenz, and Nymphenburg Palace.  The Residenz had 3 different parts to it that I went though, the palace itself, the treasury and a theater.  The theater was amazing because it was everything a decent opera house should be:  ornate, red, gold, ornate.  The treasury was the biggest surprise and the most astounding.  I didn't even realize jewels and crowns that over the top actually existed in real life, and that those things are still around today!  Um, definitely sign me up for the next opening as princess in Bavaria....  The palace itself was interesting, but I also sort of had the attitude of "once you've seen one ornate palace (a.k.a. Versailles), you've sort of seen them all".  See my next post to see how quickly that theory was blown out of the water....  The Nymphenburg was a trial to get to (mostly because I am dumb, not because it is actually that hard to get to), and it was super tiny and I accidentally missed out on the carriage museum which would have been cool.  But at that point in the day I was also ready to pass out (literally) and stopped caring that anything remotely interesting ever happened in history.  But there was one room that I loved.  So I suppose it was worth it.

Residenz Palace

This cathedral, which is part of the Residenz, has a neat story.  It originally looked like this:

But unfortunately it was destroyed in WWII.  It has been rebuilt though, so now it looks like this:

I forget so easily how other places and other people and other times have had to live through so much suffering and unfortunate consequences.

Treasury

Cuvilliés Theatre

Nymphenburg Palace

Meandering around Munich

I had an overnight train from Monaco to Munich, and it was not fun, though it almost was a million times worse.  I was first assigned in the same compartment with 4 young Spanish guys who wanted to party all night, and for some reason the German train conductor didn't quite get why I wanted to switch and kept telling me there were no other spots.  Finally I got through that I would only be comfortable in a compartment with another woman, and he went to see what he could do.  Luckily there was an old lady in first class who didn't like traveling by herself, as first class typically are assigned an entire compartment to themselves, since she had been stolen from on a couple different overnight trips.  She was delighted to have a young lady join her in the compartment.  So it all worked out in the end.  It was still super rough trying to get any sleep, and when my train arrived in Munich at 6:30am I was already dead tired.  But, as I had an entire day of sightseeing ahead, I freshened up in the train station bathroom and set out.

This first post will just be pictures of things around the city, like cool buildings or Christmas Market pictures.  I went inside a couple museums, but those will be covered in the next post.  The buildings in Germany were great.  One of these pictures is actually a city car park, but it looked super cool and super German.  People were probably wondering why a dumb tourist was taking a picture of their car park, but oh well.  There were a lot of old churches too, and they were all super close to each other and had fun clocks.  It was cool listening to them all chime the hour at the same time.  The Glockenspiel in the Marienplatz wasn't working, so I didn't get to see the clockwork animation at the hour, but it was still cool looking nonetheless.

German food was good!  I had wienerschnitzel, and bratwurst, and potatoes, and pretzels!  The pretzels were a huge deal and were everywhere!