Thursday, December 09, 2004

Day 1 : Guten Tag from Munich


Marienplatz Posted by Hello

Today I landed in Munich Airport. Took a taxi to Four points Hotel Sheraton. It was half an hour drive from airport to my hotel.

Almost everybody here has a BMW. The taxi I took was a Mercedes Benz. Anyway, I was tired from the flight and I slept for 2 hours in my hotel.

Then in the evening I went to Marienplatz. It's a huge shopping place(like mall in USA) and lots of stalls with vendors selling all kinds of things from arts & crafts to snacks, and food and drinks. There was a huge crowd. It looked like a fair. It was very cold though. In fact freezing. The temperature was below 0 deg C.

Everything there was written in German. I had no idea what they were. So I decided to do a 'Rahul Dravid' for a while. Then I got a drink called 'Madruzzo Ameretto'. It's kind of alcohol. It was good thought to have it in the freezing cold. Usually when you buy drinks in Europe in such places I guess they give you the cup as a souvenir. It happened last time when I went to Salzburg too. Then I was just hanging out taking pictures and then I got my favorite 'Crepe with Nutella and Banane'. It's some what like our dosa with Nutella and sliced banana stuffing. It was delicious. Then I also had 'Bratwurst in der semmel'. It was good too.

After hanging out for a while it got really very cold and freezing, so I decided to get into some store and I went inside a DVD Magazine store 'Hugendubel' checking out all Hollywood DVDs (dubbed in German) and all the German magazines. Staying inside also helped me to get warm little bit.

All shops in Marienplatz close at 20.00 and all the outside stall vendors close at 20.30. It was time for me to call it a day and get back to my hotel. During my flight my neighbor was a young German and I was chatting with him for a while. He thought I was a Christian because I had beef in the flight and he has some Indian friends who are vegetarians and he told that whenever they go out to eat they have this problem hunting for vegetarian food and so he assumed all Indians except Christians don't eat meat.haha. very funny. He also mentioned that lot of Indians come to work in Munich for Infineon Technologies. Even in the airport at the baggage claim section I saw a huge billboard ad for Infineon Technologies. Today I saw only one Indian girl in Marienplatz. My taxi driver on my way back to hotel told me that recently lots of Indian restaurants had opened in town. Probably our guys are busy checking out those restaurants. I just finished my 'Paulner Original Munchner Alkoholfrei' from the minibar that's inside every room in this hotel. I'll signoff for now.