Venice is sinking. These three words, meant literally, are being quickly imbued with hidden meanings, and, as quickly, becoming clichéd. Venice is sinking, literally, because fresh water has been drained from its underground aquifers, leaving parched and contracting sand below the city, and because, each year, global warming raises the high water mark on its glut of crumbling historical mansions. Venice is sinking, metaphorically, below the weight of its own history.
Munich
Munich is the heart of golden Bavaria, where the beer flows in litre sized steins, Sunday lunch is sausage and sauerkraut, and men really do don the traditional high waisted, above the knee lederhosen.
Its old city charm gracefully survives amidst fast paced European living. Her tall pastel buildings stand with poise amongst a sprawl of shopping streets. Pedestrianised and linear, Kaufinger Strasse is easy to navigate, and still has enough shoe stores to keep any shopper satisfied. Its uber-efficient transport network and modest pollution levels has helped it rank in the world’s top ten most “liveable” cities. And in the midst of this modern metropolis looms the grand old Glockenspiel, as ever, clocking up the city’s years.
I had visited Munich briefly in 2000, and spent most of my time exercising a new found freedom in the most eccentric clothes shops I had ever seen. Unfortunately, the city’s celebrated beer tradition was largely wasted on me. At 18, I would have far preferred sipping Bacardi Breezers to the litres of bitter beer I was presented with.
But now, coming from booming Berlin, I felt a fondness for Munich’s relatively diminutive dimensions. Its history seemed simpler, easier to imagine, while wandering through its paved streets, past palaces, cathedrals and beer halls that managed to evade the destruction of world war. Continue reading Munich>>
