Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Frustrated then Firework Madness

Washing done .. we can all wear clean clothes.  Found a coin-op laundry about 2 blocks away so loaded the machines and went to have breaky.

I thought I’d go visit the Residenz and Tony & Lauren were headed to the Olympic Village.  We grabbed a train to Marienplatz and wnet off in our separate directions.  I got to the door and saw a sign “closed 31st December and 1st January” … oh crap .. OK I’ll go shopping, a bit late to head somewhere else.

1:50pm in the middle of some retain therapy and I hear “We will be closing in 10 minutes” … double crap!  Back to the hotel.  5 min later Lauren & Tony arrived.  Spent the rest of the afternoon grumping!

We didn’t make a booking for dinner, not that there are too many mid-range places round here (thousands of Kebab places .. well we are in the middle of Little Istanbul… so we headed out about 7.30 thinking we would use up an hour or so and have less time to kill between dinner and the fireworks … big mistake .. we walked half of this side of Munich before getting fed up catching a train back to the Hbf and returning to the little place we ate the first night.

Fireworks … we thought there would be some kind of big ‘city display’ but no, the Munich government has figured out how to save themselves squillions … just let the locals do it.  Neuhauser Strasser (the pedestrian zone) is about 1km long .. crowds line the sides and leave the middle clear, the whole length of the street and all the side streets for another km in every direction.  Fireworks go on sale the day after Xmas and I’d say every spare cent people have is spent on crackers. 

Thousands & thousands of skyrockets, roman candles & bungers are set off in a huge display of semi-organised chaos.  It is certainly something to experience, though I’m very glad we found ourselves a spot right against a shop window & only had to consider watching out for crackers coming from the front.  We saw a few examples of stupidity – young drunk men sending crackers into the crown .. and I did put my best teacher voice on when the clown beside us chucked on into the crowd… he apologised and didn’t do it again… go me!

The air was thick with smoke and we’re quite sure we will set off the explosive alarm if get tested at the next airport we go through.  Insane, chaotic, crazy .. seem to be good words to describe the last couple of hours of 2012 for us, but strangely appealing & great fun.

Happy New Year to all!

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