Belatedly, our last week: We visited T. and K. last weekend in München, where they moved two months or so ago despite our extreme and desperate protests. Their new apartment is lovely, in a quiet neighborhood northeast of the old town, within a (long) walk to the University where T. is beginning his PhD program as a genius political economist.
I hadn’t exactly done my homework. I knew that at some point they set up lots of tables in Sept-Oct and drank enormous beers (the liter-large glass is called a Maß, I now know). I hadn’t realized the town was mostly destroyed in the war, (see: Berlin). Much has been rebuilt, and the town center’s Rathaus looks as gothic as ever, despite having been built largely in the in late 1800s; but the city as a whole has the feeling of modern German, certainly not medieval or quaint Bavarian.
We spent one day hiking out to the Kloster Andechs, a monastary on a hill south of the city that has brewed its own beer and schnapps since the mid-1500s. It was a perfect fall day, the forests strewn with yellow leaves, the Alps jagged and white in the background. The little villages in the hills there are still what I think of when I think Germany, despite having almost never experienced them. Smoke rising from steep, tiled roofs at sunset, onion-dome church steeples in every town, blue-and-white striped maypoles in front of homes or towering over town squares. A few pictures on Flicker here.