Nymphernburg

Good Evening!

I'm trying to catch up, I really am, but things just keep coming up; I can't help it! Anyway, on to Tuesday.

Originally, Brad and I planned to go to Dachau on Tuesday but my friend Lauren wanted to come as well, so we postponed it until Wednesday (the next blog installment!).

With plans altered we headed down to Marienplatz in the latter half of Tuesday morning to have a good old-fashioned Bavarian breakfast. I had decided to walk over to "Augustiner am Dom", which is right by the Frauenkirche from the last post. We brought Sam too.

I've had bits and pieces of the whole meal, but never everything all at once. The traditional Bavarian breakfast consists of Weißwurst, Weißbier, big Pretzels, and sweet-mustard. It's all a very delicious and very filling breakfast, on par with eggs, bacon, and pancakes for how full and slow you feel afterwards. Brad really liked it.

On our way to breakfast we also got a chance to see the Glockenspiel at the Rathaus. It's definitely chalked up to be more than it is, but it was cute in a "kitschy" sort of way. It mostly consists of painted figures moving in circles or spinning.

We saw this too:



Makes me want to find one of Cleveland's sister cities.

Enough build-up, it's time for the main event: we went to see Schloß Nymphenburg, the summer palace of the now-gone Bavarian royalty.



To get there we walked along the various canals spanning out from the Schloß into this very residential part of the city. Idyllic.

The canals eventually reach the ponds in front of the palace:



And the front:



Inside was pretty nice. Not too big, but big enough to be royal and very well decorated.







I definitely think that the Residez museum is better (see ), at least inside, but the palace was still very beautiful and, unlike the Residenz, completely untouched by bombing. There weren't any informational plaques either, which was too bad. You'd have to buy an audioguide instead.

The best part, in my opinion, of the palace is not the building itself so much as the gardens around it, which alternated between Versailles-esqe cultivation and Metroparks forest. Take a look!









It's hard to tell from this picture but I these forests really seemed old and mysterious to me, like in a fairy tale. The trees seemed to intertwine with each other and form a natural wall along the lake shore like some distant and curious forbidden barrier. Not like an American forest, not quite as stark and much more gentle.



Scattered around in the garden-park were Royal Bathhouses, Party Halls, and Hunting "Lodges". A lodge, of course means, two rooms that look as if they came from the palace. Look look!



This one has some Chinese stylings to it, because the nobility at the time had this weird obsession with Asia. And porcelain.

And a few others:





There were a lot of statues like that in the more manicured part of the garden, the part directly behind the palace.

I can't remember what else we did on Tuesday. It wasn't much, but I thought it would be worth noting.

That's all I've got for the moment. Stay tuned for Dachau next. Unfortunately, I think covering the concentration camp in a blog entry may take a lot longer than usual, so I apologize in advance.

All the best!