Hi All
Goodness, we´re actually travelling. Really going from one place to another place thats different. What´s more, I´m enjoying it. The coach ride from Toulouse to Munich was long, but I like looking at countryside, reading and thinking. I occasionally spoke to Andy too, but he was to traumatised by the thought that he'd left his parents and was on the way to somewhere completely unfamiliar to do much more than wibble gently on the other side of the coach. I think having been to Munic a few times I was much more sanguine about the prospect, and was busy enjoying the trees and wild flowers. There were palms, mimosa and sheets of palest mauve thyme flowers near Montpellier and fields of poppies in the Rhone Valley and dark close pines with beech trees in their most delicate spring finery in the Black Forest.
There was only one bit of excitement on the journey when the super efficient driver left the woman sat behind us at the service station. We didn´t have the German to explain to the driver what had happened so had to go though another passenger, so it was a while before the coach got back to pick her up, and she gave them a right earful for forgetting her.
It was quite weird being dropped by the coach in a suburb in the for north of Munich right by the new stadium where the first match of the world cup is apparently going to be played - it look like a giant silver tyre from the outside. The Polizei checked our passports before we got off the bus, even though we could have got off at Stuttgart quite freely, and we decended to the opening bars of `That´s Amore´. We then didn´t have a clue where we were and what we should do so we phoned our HC host Antje as instucted and she was lovely and told us what to do and met us at her local station in the south of Munich.
Which is how Andy and I ended up sitting in ein Biergarten by the river with a picnic and listening to and oompah band play My Way.
Today we went into the centre of Munich, to the Marienplatz and saw the Glochenspiel, Marienkirche, the Michaelskirche and the superb shopping and bierkellers. I even found the same strange strawberry yoghurt chocolate bars that I had 20 years ago.
It makes such a difference having a local guide to help us decide what to do and where to go, and Antje has been superb (and left handed with good taste in music) with fluent English - it really puts me to shame, but my German is improving rapidly.
Auf weidersehen.
Ellen
