Day 5 – Touring in Munich

Today was our day for touring Munich proper and we had a two-pronged attack planned. The first was a guided walking tour of the old city part of Munich and the second was to use the Hop-On, Hop-Off Bus to get to sights that were outside of the old city. We had good weather, sunny but still a bit cool. It was in the low 40s at the start of our touring but got up to around 60 in the afternoon.

Marienplatz

We started our walking tour in the Marienplaz (Mary’s Square) with a concert by the famous Glockenspiel. It plays three times a day for about 12 minutes and features figures at a wedding, a joust in honor of the wedding and some coopers dancing.

Interior of the Frauenkirche

The heart of Munich is the old town section of the city. This area is dominated by the twin towers of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) and no building is permitted to be taller than those towers until you get to the distant suburbs so they are very visible. In the photo, you can see the two green-tipped peaks of the church just to the right of the golden statue of Mary on the column. The glockenspiel is a couple of small windows about 50 feet up on the center bell tower of the Rathaus (city hall building) on the right. One thing to remember about Munich is that it was about 80% destroyed in WWII, but the church and the facade of the Rathaus survived.

Olympic Aquatics Center (foreground) and Olympic Tower

Olympic Stadium

We left the walking tour about mid-way in and moved to the bus part of our day as we simply didn’t have time to do everything in one day. The bus took us about 10 miles outside of the old city area and we saw Nymphenburg Palace which was the summer residence of the rulers of Bavaria, the BMW factory and museum - after all BMW does stand for Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Works) - and the site of the 1972 Olympics. We didn’t go into either the Palace or the BMW museum, but we walked around the Olympic grounds quite a bit and went up into the Olympic Tower, which is the highest structure in Munich.

From the tower you could see a great distance and the Alps were visible, but slightly hazy. You could just make out the Zugspitze, Gemany's highest mountain, about 70 miles in the distance and on a clear day they say you can see Switzerland. We also stopped in one of the museums (the Neue Pinakothek) in the museum district to take advantage of their one Euro price for Sundays and to see their excellent collection of Impressionist paintings.