April 20, 2025 to April 22, 2025
Three Days in Munich Part Zwei
Tennis and Chores
April 20th was Easter Sunday and there were quite a few families with kids at our hotel. It was hopping at breakfast. We rode out to the MTTC Iphitos tennis club at the edge of the English Gardens for the tennis final of the BMW Open. The ride coming and going was great - perfect spring weather again today - and we enjoyed being part of the tennis scene. The match, however, was sort of a bust; it was Alexander Zverev (German and the top seed to boot) against the young American Ben Shelton. While Zverev was favored we thought Shelton would at least put up a fight but he didn’t. He never even got a break point and was defeated 6-2, 6-4 in an hour and 15 minutes. The German crowd was polite to Shelton but obviously they got the result they wanted.
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Later that evening we walked downtown to Pescharia which has turned out to be our preferred, if a bit pricey, restaurant in Munich. This was our fourth time eating there. It's an excellent seafood place with a Provençal influence and the oysters are outstanding, which we were reminded of after consuming a dozen of them. Our waiter was from Croatia having fled there in the late 1980s as a teenager due to the brewing Serbian/ Croatian conflict; he initially relocated to the US before winding up in Germany and we had a conversation about the recent American policies and our general concerns about how well we would be received on this trip. He was very kind and encouraging and reassured us. Since we are out of practice with our journal preparation we forgot to get a pic of him. The restaurant was full of German families dining for Easter.
We walked the mile and a half to dinner but it was dark and cold when we left the restaurant so we decided to take the S bahn back to our hotel. We managed fine, but public transportation (for us) is never without its (minor) drama. The usual station - Sendlinger Tor- was shut due to construction so we had to walk to a different station down a very long underground passage that appeared to be brand new. We rarely take the S or U bahns in Germany without being amazed at the willingness of the government to invest in its transportation system. It makes independent travel so accessible.
The following morning we had another excellent breakfast. (Let the record reflect via the comments to yesterday's journal entry that it was Keith Classen, not Scott Anderson, that coined the term “ten jammer breakfast”. In fairness, Scott frequently uses the term in his culinary descriptions). Dave took off on his bike to do to a laundry run - a luxury we have due to spending the extra day in Munich. No drama ensued and there was only male launderers in the laundromat — a good sign for gender neutrality in Germany.
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We had to make a final bike run to our storage unit to drop off a few items I decided I didn’t want to haul around and then we started to walk the mile to Gartnerplatz Alm. I had made a reservation at this restaurant, or so I thought, a few weeks ago because I love fondue (its speciality) and we hadn’t eaten there since 2022. I was pleased to learn that it had reopened, having been closed the past couple of years. However, halfway through the walk I went to check our reservation and when I couldn’t find it, I launched into a laughable effort to locate it in my email account. Dave then noticed on google maps that the restaurant was listed as closed (it was a Monday) and that I had made a reservation at Pescharia for Monday instead (a while ago). Since we had eaten at Pescharia the night before we obviously needed to find a different restaurant for dinner. Since it was Easter Monday a lot of restaurants were closed but we quickly identified a place called Brenner’s downtown and it turned out to be lovely — even though there was no fondue. It was in the upscale touristy part of Munich (the Mandarin Oriental and the Kempinski were nearby) with an entirely different clientele than we usually see in the restaurants we pick. We wondered if would feel so fondly about Munich if we had picked that location to stay when we first stayed in Munich 4 years ago. We love our middle/working class neighborhood in Munich City on the east side of the river and it feels much less anonymous.
Today's ride: 16 km (10 miles)
Total: 21 km (13 miles)
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