Our Journey Begins, May 5and 6, 2015

On Tuesday, May 5 (Happy Cinco de Mayo!), our Napa taxi service picked us up promptly at 8am for our trip to San Francisco airport.  Today, we have a 12:45pm flight to London Heathrow, where we will change planes and continue on to Munich, Germany.  We are very excited!  Traveling in Business Class means we will experience our first "lie-flat" seats.  That is the good news, the bad news is that although we are landing at about 7:30am in London, that will be only about 11:30pm on our time.  This will make it difficult to go to sleep.  We will do our best!  I'm not a fan of selfies, and certainly not when I am the subject, but nevertheless, we took one.  Here it is:

The flight was very nice -- super smooth, but I didn't get much sleep.  Rob, aided by an Ambien sleeping pill, did better.  Regardless, we arrived, made our transfer and flew on to Munich.  It is now May 6, and it was raining when we landed, but soon began to clear.  Our first course of action was to check in to the Hotel Excelsior (we got there at about 3pm local time) and take showers.  Then we set out to do a little sightseeing.  It was about 4pm when we departed the hotel.  We were not too ambitious, knowing that we will have two and one half days here in Munich at the end of our trip, but of course, we headed straight for Munich's main square, the Marienplatz.  As we walked there on a pedestrian only street, we stopped to enter St. Michael's church to admire its interior.  Rob took a lot of pictures.  When we arrived at Marienplatz, we took time to admire the Rat Haus (Old Town Hall).  There were lots of people out and about and the weather had turned perfect:  no clouds and pleasantly cool.  

We then strolled around the historic center and then went a little to the south to the Viktualmarkt, Munich's central open air food market.  There are several stands selling what is now in season, beautiful white asparagus.  We learn a new German word: "spargel."  Then, why not?  We joined with the locals and other tourists and drank beer in the beer garden, very pleasant!  The center of the beer market features a Bavarian pole:

For dinner, we ate at a restaurant near the Frauenkirke that had been recommended by users of Yelp.  It is called Andechser am Dom.  The food here is traditional Bavarian food, and everyone eats at communal tables.  I ordered pork with potato dumplings, and Rob had suckling pig, also with dumplings.  Both entrees also came with a side of braised red cabbage (blaukraut), that was the star of the meal -- yum!  With our food we enjoyed a nice crisp German reisling (very trocken, which means dry in German).  We struck up a conversation with a young man at our table who gave us a restaurant recommendation for when we return (Wirtshaus in der Au), whose specialty is dumplings.

By now it is after 9pm, and while we should be completely exhausted, thanks to our bodies' internal clocks, we are getting a second wind.  Well, we nipped that in the bud and went to the hotel to turn in early.  We must get ourselved un-jet-lagged ASAP!