München Day 4: No Theresienwiese Today

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Tram selfie!

 

Today Dave woke up feeling quite congested so I ventured out on my own with the tour group on a bike tour of Munich. Thanks to our guide Bob, I’m now drowning in interesting facts about the history of the city…and probably rode 7-8 miles. I was particularly interested in Munich’s choices in rebuilding after WWII using war rubble to simply patch some of the historic buildings.

After the tour Dave and I took a tram ride out to do a little shopping…Tim sent us on a wild goose chase for a food product called “ChoViva”: a brand new chocolate substitute made of fermented sunflower seeds and oats (Google it). Rewe (a grocery store chain here) carries the ingredient in some of their store brand snack products. I could only find one product with the ingredient and now I need to make room for a 400g bag of cookies for the trip home.

Massive pizza for dinner — with an early bedtime as we rest up for the next adventure.

Bike selfie.

 

Lots of city riding. Our guide didn’t seem to check on us much when he was riding and our group routinely got broken up by traffic light cycles.

 

 

This is Bob. A Munich native. Had a career in urban planning for the city, which was really cool. He had a lot of great personal stories that wove through the histories of buildings and the city’s layout.
This is the Alte Pinakothek. Or “Old Art Gallery”, from 1890. We didn’t go in, but instead talked about how the center of the long building was rebuilt in a not-subtle way with war rubble: to quickly bring the building back to a useable state, but also to remind Germans of the damage from a war that had its foundations on their own soil.

 

A memorial to Georg Elser, the mastermind behind an assassination attempt on Hitler. Google this guy, what a story! Look carefully, the round letters say “8 November 1939”. Elser crafted a bomb to explode at the Bürgerbräukeller on that date, where Hitler was scheduled to give a speech. After the speech, Hitler was to fly to Berlin the following morning. Due to a forecast of poor weather that would likely prevent the flight, Hitler was advised to cut his speech short, leave Munich early, and take his train overnight instead. So he wasn’t where he was scheduled to be. He missed being bombed by 13 minutes.

 

The stunning Theatine Church adjacent to the Bavarian President’s residence, it was built in the late 1600s to celebrate a male heir to the throne of Bavaria being born. It’s clearly an Italian Baroque architecture style, its yellow color is a striking contrast to surrounding buildings.

 

Seen in a grocery store called “Mix Markt”, a chain that caters to Eastern European customers. Those flavors!

 

This is my one product of the foodie mission Tim sent us on: “ChoViva”. Note the “ChoViva” logo in the lower right. I almost missed it. Dave was looking for a small package of hazelnut cream wafer cookies. I was only finding larger packages, including this one. The text towards the bottom reads: “With Choviva, a cocoa-free chocolate alternative with ground sunflower seeds.”

 

We could order a large pizza and divide the toppings. Dave and I couldn’t agree on anything, so we did this instead. We could only eat half of what was there.

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