Through our hotel we requested a taxi for 7am, and it arrived a few minutes early. The ride across Sunday-morning Berlin to the HauptBanHof took about 10 minutes. The train pulled out on time and six hours later we were in the Munich HBF.
Our train was the white one.
We had a quiet afternoon, poked around our new neighborhood and found some supper, which it turned out is not easy to do on a Sunday evening. And did the SansSouci postings.
Berlin Thoughts
Of course Berlin is a major world capital and can't be summed up easily and it's rather arrogant even to try after less than a week. But still, these are the strongest impressions we took away from our stay there:
- It's not a pretty place. Most of the buildings are boring to ugly, and there's a lot of graffiti.
- On the other hand, it's very clean (aside from graffiti) and seems well-maintained.
- It's very liveable: there are lots of trees, lots of parks, lots of cafés with tables on the street (at least in summer), lots of people who look like they are content with themselves, lots of parents with little kids in tow. Only one or two homeless types, one drunk, no crazies.
- The public transit system is superb! We rode the heck out of the U-Bahn and also used buses and the S-Bahn, and it all worked smoothly and fast.
- A puzzle to us was: where do they buy their food? In 5 days around town we spotted two greengrocer shops and one supermarket, the latter inside the HBF (convenient for commuters but not for residents).
And a fashion note that seems to apply also to Munich: SCARVES! Most women and not a few men wear colorful floofy scarves wrapped 2 or 3 times around the neck.
At a tram stop in Munich.
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