With the morning sun, I set off to explore Munich downtown. By this time, I had a fair idea of the S-bahn and Subway train services. The day pass took me to “Sendlinger Tor” on the train going to Feld-moching from Messestadt-Ost. “Sendlinger Tor” is an important station that takes you to the heart of the downtown while coming from “Am Moosfeld”. All the shops on either side of the road were closed on Sunday. These are certain areas where I thought Germany is probably closer to India than US. Especially like Keralalites, Germans preferred to stay at home even if that means loss of decent number of customers. Something else that might irritate you would be the people who keeps staring at you for no real reason. This was never the case in US but much like that in India. I could immediately place German culture somewhere in middle between that of US and India.

Munich city was beautiful. Especially the way buildings were painted. They retained the elegance of the past still with a modern outlook. Mostly, the buildings were painted in mild colors like ivory or bright white with ebony black linings. These monuments showcase the architectural skills and craftsmanship of Germans.

Unlike Americans, Germans do not use powerful air-conditioning, thanks to the decent year-round weather. To survive the winter snow, the buildings had protective double-walls with vacuum in between. Also, most of the rooms had heating systems. There were no sky-scrappers in the city; to uphold the dignity of the Central Church, The building rules of the city banned by law of construction that exceeds the height of the church.

The roads in the city and suburbs seemed to be quite narrow. With the excellent public transportation system, number of private vehicles remained substantially low. Of the available private vehicles, BMW, and Audi seemed to have the major share with Volkswagon, Renault and Mercedes brands not way behind. Many of the cars had manual gear system like in India (unlike in US, where more than 95% have automatic transmission). Contrary to the domination of Honda or Toyota across the world, Japanese cars had a very low profile in the region. Whereas I could hardly see any of the City, Civic or Corolla or even Accord or Lexus for that matter, I noticed a better presence of Suzuki with the Swift, Baleno and even WagonR parked on the streets. The traffic flowed very smoothly. Parking was mostly tricky; at certain places, vehicles were parked with front wheels well over the curb. The lanes and even whole of the road width in California would roughly be more than double of what you could find in Germany.

The city seemed to embrace art and music with a lot of passion. There were at least Twenty-Four different museums in the city with most of them showcasing the paintings or sculptures by various artists. Theatrical performance like Opera and live music bands were integral part of the city life. The Bavarian food is something that you will pay special attention to. The servings had a lot of quantity that would easily overwhelm any one from the sub-continent. Much of the main course would be dominated by red meat with most of the restaurants serving at least one variety of chicken, Turkey or Fish.

Fashion was another thing that Bavarians followed quite close to the heart, probably with the influence from their historically-hostile neighbor, the French. Across the city, number of designer wear outlets clearly dominated the show. At the same time, the degree of greenery in Munich could easily compete with any other city in the world. Bavaria would remain in my memory for a lot more years to come!