We had decided we would spend a little over five weeks in visiting Norway and Germany. After finishing our Scandy tour in Oslo, we would then hire a car and drive down though parts of Sweden and Denmark and begin our German trip in Hamburg. This whole trip began after we had flown into Munich to spend a night before flying on to Bergen.
The image to the left is of the large covered area at Munich airport that stretches between the Terminal and the train station. We survived our flight and made our way by train into the centre of Munich and emerged into the most amazing city centre of any of the places we visited over the next month or more. We had arrived at Marienplatz station and although we had been here some years before, the sight of the huge New Rathaus before us as we exited the station was as exciting as we expected..
We were only staying one night before flying onto Bergen so our first job was to find our hotel, Hotel am Markt. While we knew where the Viktualenmarkt was, we of course took the wrong turn and it took us 20 minutes to eventually drag our bags into this lovely hotel next to the main city market place. Of course we spent some time on this first afternoon wandering around the centre of town after we had settled into the hotel, but we knew we would be back here in another month with a few days at our disposal to properly get to know the fascinating sights of this city.
It is a huge plaza dominated on the north side by the New Rathaus, a misleading name given that it was built here starting in It is called the Neues Rathaus simply because it was built to replace the old town hall which had simply run out of room for the demands of modern city administration. Even the New Town Hall had to be extended twenty years after its original completion. This suggested tour of the centre of Munich is set out on the map below based on using our Hotel AM Markt as the start and ending point.
It is suggested as a slow walk for a couple of hours and stops for coffee and cake are almost compulsory. From Hotel Am Market, we walked down the narrow street Heiliggeistrasse and then turned left with the back of the beautiful Old Town Hall standing in front of us. It was our gateway to enter Marienplatz.
