Munich – part 2

Today we got up bit later (07:40 am) to do some sight-seeing and shopping. We took the car “Candidplatz”, that’s where Paula is working currently and got into the subway to “Sendlinger Tor”. The day was starting sunny featuring 23°C at 9:00 am. Certainly I was wearing short pants and a tank top, as I’m used to have a weak till moderate wind blowing around me. We finally stopped at SportScheck to get something for Paula. She badly needed short pants and polo shirts for her physic therapy lessons she is giving at physico.

We found some shorts for her, but I was really impressed after I saw the price. 132€ for two short pants and three polo shirts is really expensive. For those tiny cotton rags it sucks majorly even it’s stamped by “adidas”.

SportScheck is having a special offer, they are giving away sun lounger for free if you shop for over 90€. So she got a nice sun lounger. It was already 11:10, so she freaked a bit out “Sandy I’m not going to get to work in time”, but Sandy told her she’ll only need ten or fifth teen minutes back to work. She relaxed. We brought her back to the subway at “Sendlinger Tor” where she forgot to stamp her subway ticket. She freaked again.
“I don’t gonna make it two levels up, stamp my ticket and make it back down here in time!”. Sandy told her she had eight minutes left to do so, and that it’s more than enough time. And in fact she made it back within four minutes till the subway arrived.

She got onto it and we got back up. Now we started the sight-seeing tour. We walked through half the inner city of Munich (at least that’s what my feet felt like), past the old and new town hall, past the cathedral and stopped at the “Hofbräuhaus”. I had some meat loaf (Leberkäs) with bavarian potato salad after I had a meat loaf roll (Leberkässemmel) an hour or so before. I started noticing there were only tourists around us (English, American, French and Japanese). After that little snack we continued our sight-seeing to Munich’s Königsstraße (the Königsstraße is in Stuttgart and is the longest shopping mile in the whole city), where we went into Saturn (on my behalf) since I’m starting to become a DVD collector. I brought myself “Spawn”, “Total Recall” and “Jarhead”. I also purchased some DVD+R DL to some of my recorded movies (I had a Premiere Abo till there months ago).

The sales man at the cash point saw the DVD’s and the blankets and noticed me that “it’s illegal to copy any copyright protected material for personal use” (thanks to Mrs. Zypries, our justice minister which will also be at the LinuxTag tomorrow, and the lobbyism of the german copyright holders). That pissed me of a bit, but only for a few seconds.

After we left the Saturn (you can’t imagine how I hate Saturn and MediaMarkt, both belonging to the Metro Group) we continued the sight-seeing. We walked Munich’s “Königsstraße” (I really can’t remember the name, sorry) through another part of Munich’s historic district till we got to the “Königssaal” where another platoon awaited us. Above us was a helicopter keeping altitude with a huge search beam and down the street we saw some people wearing ver.di flags and jackets. Seems like there had been an demonstration earlier including ver.di president Psierske, who was talking to the local media in a corner. Seems like the public service protested again in favor of the 38,5 hour week for the same money. We turned right in the “English Garden” (where even more police awaited us, watching over the few demonstrators left, ratio was something like 30 demonstrators and 80 – 90 police man.

We searched for a nice little spot with a bank, which we found after a short search. We settled down for half an hour or so (and it seems like I managed to get a small sun burn, which is really small only a bit red on my nose and my shoulders) and enjoyed the really warm spring day.

We got up (I tell you, after that half an hour I was really lazy) and continued our way through the English garden. We went past the building of the Bavarian prime minister (which is called Strauß-oleum after the guy who planned that temple of glass) and through a heavenly park. That garden seems to be really huge, at least if you trust the maps and Sandy. Somewhere in the garden we searched for another sunny place and settled down again.

The garden was crowding with mad city slickers, some of them naked, others playing soccer, Frisbee, Volleyball or even badminton with squash rackets. Another city slicker spanned a hammock between two trees and was reading in there.

After another half an hour we got up again and walked through the southern part of the English garden till “Schwabingen” where most of the businessmen are lawyers.

Afterwards we went to a street (whose name I can’t remember) where Sandy told me in the summer the road is completely closed and approx. 1.000 inline skaters were participating on a race.

We settled down again (as we did four times before) and enjoyed the sun again. Sandy took a smoke and that was finally the end of the sight-seeing tour. We took the subway back to “Candidplatz” and fetched the car keys from Paula. We even managed to find a store where they had so much water in bottles that they were selling it!

We arrived back home to relax our feet a bit. Sandy did some googling, shared some pictures that I made with his digicam and I finished writing my first blog post and started this one on paper.

Later on we picked Paula up from the gym and went to another “Biergarten”. That one was also quite nice, its located on a small isle in the middle of the Isar. When we got back we finally managed to watch “Jarhead”, which is really a great movie about the first gulf war (better known as Desert Strom) while we were looking over my resumee and my letter of application. I finally got to bed at 01:30 am knowing that my cell phones alarm clock would try to wake me up at 04:30 am.