I’ve always kind of given Bavaria short shrift. This trip is in partial amends of that. I don’t really have much of an excuse for it, except that Bavaria leans in to a particular set of touristy German stereotypes¹ and the region featured prominently in Nazi mythology.² That was enough to sour me on the place when I was just starting to travel; after I planned a trip after a semester abroad and my friends suggested starting with two days in Munich, I countered with two days in Berlin and for our Munich stop we see Castle Neuschwanstein one day and Dachau the next.³

But maybe I’ve mellowed, or at least become more tolerant of touristy kitsch. Now I’m more worried about the electoral strength of the AfD,⁴ but right-wing movements are a global problem. And I wanted to visit a friend in Austria, so I was going to be in the area anyway. So I caught a flight to Munich.

Arriving in Germany felt a little fraught⁵ but I made it all right and caught a train north to Regensburg for a few days. Regensburg is a lovely city with an incredibly well-preserved medieval core⁶ which was for centuries a major hub in a trade route linking Venice to the north.⁷ It’s small enough to see in a day, although the day I had to see it was filled with frozen rain so I ended up wandering around while terrified of slipping and smashing my head open on the cobblestones. It was pretty but I’d recommend going in warmer weather, when you can enjoy it more.

More successful was the side trip I took out to Walhalla, a collection of busts of famous Germans built by Ludwig I in the middle of the 19^th century. It’s a monumental building modeled after the Parthenon and sitting atop a hill overlooking the Danube. The terms for inclusion are a little wonky; the criteria is speaking German which means it includes Mozart and Catherine the Great and Jan van Eyck.⁸

Getting to the building is a rather punishing climb up 358 stairs, and it was only after I got up the first flight when I realized there weren’t going to be any handrails and there was still ice on some of the steps.⁹ I took my time getting up there, and ended up walking down along the road rather than taking the footpath back down all those stone steps.

After that I caught the train back down to Munich for the rest of the week. I had been tipped off by a friend about the Deutschland-Ticket, the 49€ all-inclusive transit pass that covers all local and regional transportation and had bought one at the start of the month, which was a huge discount since it covered the trains between Munich and Regensburg as well as the trams, buses, and subways in Berlin, Munich, and Regensburg.¹⁰

Munich was, as you might expect, a perfectly cosmopolitan city.¹¹ If you’re considering visiting the only thing I saw that I’d consider absolutely essential was the Deutsches Museum, an absolutely massive science museum filled with airplanes and musical instruments and robots and models of bridges and chemistry exhibits and a planetarium, with most of it studded with hands-on, interactive displays.¹² But there’s historic palaces to tour¹³ along with world-class art museums and architecture from Munich’s time as the heart of the Kingdom of Bavaria. It’s also got a kind of offbeat charm that I never quite felt in Berlin; I killed the better part of an afternoon at the Eisbachwelle, a narrow waterway at the southern end of the English Garden which has been taken over by surfers, of all things. The river there forms a standing wave¹⁴ and the day I turned up there was a small but hardy group wearing full body wetsuits taking turns riding the wave. Or, more frequently, bailing out into the freezing water after 30 seconds. They all seemed in good spirits despite the subzero temperature, and all I thought was missing was a street vendor nearby selling glühwein or hot chocolate.

I ended by catching the train to Vienna to stay with a friend for a few days. Austria technically isn’t Bavaria, but that was always more of a political division than a practical one. Bavarian German has much more in common with Austrian German than the more northern dialects, and there’s always been a fairly strong independence movement around Munich advocating separating from the Federal Republic of Germany and joining the Republic of Austria.¹⁵

I’ve visited Vienna often enough that I don’t feel much pressure to see the sights, having already seen many of them the first few times around. I took a half day to visit Schönbrunn Palace, summer residence of the Hapsburgs and the location of both the birth and death of Emperor Franz Joseph.¹⁶ But otherwise I spent time with my friend and prepared for the next leg of my travels.

I’m flying to Helsinki, where I’ve got to make a tight connection to Oslo. I’ve booked near the airport for the night. Tomorrow I’m heading to Svalbard for the weekend, for basically no reason other than it’s a weird place and I’ve never been and having recently been as southward as I could manage I thought I’d go northwards as well. I may be slowing down my travels but if I am I’m going to squeeze in as much as I can manage before I do.

It’s going to be a strange couple of months for me. I’ve locked in a month in Lisbon in March with the expectation I’ll be moving to Portugal on a semi-permanent basis before the end of the year.¹⁷ But time in Portugal is time I can’t spend in other EU countries, at least until I have a residency permit in hand. And I have things I’m planning to attend in Europe in April and May.

So both February and April have turned out to be devoted to staying out of the Schengen Area a great deal more than I had originally anticipated, all in an effort to stretch my visa as far as it will go. I’m looking forward to having a more permanent status than tourist. I just don’t know how long it’ll be until I get there.

Next: Oslo to Visby
Prev: London (LHR) to Munich (MUC)

Footnotes

¹ Leiderhosen, beer and bratwurst, particularly overrepresented in the imagination of the United States by the fact that the Americans administered Bavaria during the post-war occupation.

² Right wing movements have almost always found fertile ground in rural areas, and in turn the movements elevate the story of the good, honest, hard-working people of the earth vs. those evil rich liberal city-dwellers — comparisons with the current Republican party strictly coincidental here — largely as a way of pandering to their base, but like most things if you playact it hard enough for long enough it starts to become sincere.

³ In my defense, my friends had already insisted on three days in Salzburg so it wasn’t like we were missing out on the touristy spirit of the region. My only solid memory of Munich from that trip was playing putt-putt around the Olympic Stadium. A quick internet search reveals that’s still a thing.

⁴ I was there during mass protests against the AfD, triggered by the revelation that members of the party met with outright neo-Nazis to discuss deporting immigrants, including those with German citizenship.

⁵ The longer I travel the harder it is to find any particular entry stamp and the more suspicious particularly zealous immigration officials get. Germans, in particular, are known for enforcing the Schengen restrictions strictly. And that’s fine — I’m in full compliance — but it does lead to things like this:

⁶ The city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Regensburg has the advantage of having being considered kind of a backwater for most of the 20^th century, so there wasn’t much pressure to modernize and the subsequent lack of industry made it a low priority for bombing raids during WWII.

⁷ A 12^th century stone bridge was built across the Danube in an engineering marvel of the time. It’s famous enough that there’s a model of it in the science museum in Munich.

⁸ The German Empire was still decades away when Walhalla was conceived and built, meaning there weren’t Germans so much as there were Prussians and Hanoverians and Saxons and Bavarians and Hessians and others amidst a confusing welter of interests and alignments so Ludwig couldn’t have gone by nationality, but I’m pretty sure van Eyck spoke Dutch. At least Catherine was born in Prussia.

⁹ The monument was closed during the freezing rain the day before, which seemed only prudent. There were signs all over the place warning about the risk.

¹⁰ It’s a little tricky to get one; you have to buy it at the start of the month and then remember to cancel it by the 11^th or you’ll get billed for the next month as well. I couldn’t enter my billing address on the Deutsche Bahn website for it — the United States wasn’t an option — but I was able to download the Hamburg transit app and they accept PayPal.

¹¹ The same dynamic applies in the United States, where despite being surrounded by rural areas dominated by conservative politics large cities remain bastions of cosmopolitanism.

¹² I spent some time playing around with electronic tones and interference across from a display of replica instruments used by the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show.

¹³ I saw Nymphenburg Palace, summer residence for a number of Bavarian Electors and home to one of the most stunning Great Halls I’ve ever seen. Nymphenburg also contains the “Gallery of Lovelies,” a collection of 36 portraits of women Ludwig I considered the epitome of beauty. The gallery felt weirdly of a piece with Walhalla; it was an age that conflated physical beauty with moral perfection and happened right at the point where cabinets of curiosities were turning into proper museums.

Like Walhalla, the spirit of the thing hasn’t really lasted into the 21^st century. The women do seem lovely but not exactly the incontrovertible beauties of the age Ludwig felt they were — maybe I’m just not as into brunettes as Ludwig turned out to be — and their supposed moral virtue also turns out to be suspect. The most famous woman featured is Lola Montez, a Spanish dancer and courtesan widely known for performing the “Spider Dance” while not wearing knickers. Lola became Ludwig’s mistress and was elevated to Countess of Landsfeld and Baroness of Rosenthal over the objections of the cabinet, eventually leading to a political crisis and Ludwig’s forced abdication.

¹⁴ Helped in part by some jury-rigged wooden baffles to further narrow the passage.

¹⁵ Had the Austrian Empire won the Austro-Prussian War it’s quite likely the House of Hapsburg would have been the primary driver of German unification, and Vienna would be the capital of Germany to this day.

¹⁶ Schönbrunn is expensive, nearly 30€ for a self-guided tour which lasts about an hour, but it’s worth it, especially if you’ve taken some time to read up about the history of the Austrian Empire. Franz Joseph comes across as something of a martinet, easily voted “most likely to blunder into a World War” in their graduating class, but gets credit for their work ethic and living frugally, at least compared to their peers. And the rest of the palace is soaked in the kind of rococo splendor and massive wealth that you’d expect from someplace that was the seat of empire for centuries. If you go in good weather there’s extensive and meticulously cared for gardens right out the back and if you’re flat broke the gardens, at least, are free to wander through.

¹⁷ For the first time in six months people are reporting getting residency permits again, so at least some of the bureaucratic logjam appears to be clearing.