(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
Yesterday, I discovered a long-lost treasure: a photo album I assembled right after returning from my October 1999 trip to Bavaria (Germany) and Bohemia (Czech Republic). I’ve decided to prepare a few “Travel Flashback” posts for this special trip from a very different time.
I wasn’t alone: my friend Trevor was willing to join me on this exciting adventure. As flights to and from Germany were considerably cheaper than flying direct to Prague, we decided to fly into Munich…and back home from Frankfurt. In between, the focus of the trip would be the newly independent Czech Republic. This would be my first sustained trip behind the former Iron Curtain: other than 3 days in Hungary in 1991 (and a couple of hours in Yugoslavia on that same 1991 trip), Eastern Europe was still largely unknown to me.
To begin, however, we had a couple of days in Germany to acclimatize ourselves. In retrospect, this was a great idea: when stepping outside of your comfort zone, it’s a good idea to take baby steps at the beginning. I could survive in the German language, and I had been in Germany many times before. It seems strange to talk about culture shock in the Czech Republic now (here’s a link to the start of my posts from a 2014 trip), but back then it was still emerging as a travel destination and few of my friends and family had been there.
Alas, our brief stay in Munich was plagued by fairly grim weather. The old city is beautiful, as you would expect, and not even the wet/overcast weather could obscure that. You’d think that October would be a great time to visit, given that Munich is the home of Oktoberfest. Well, Oktoberfest actually ended the week before we arrived. The various pavilions (and they are indeed massive) were still there, but they were empty and abandoned. On the plus side, this explains why the accommodation costs were quite low and the various other attractions in the city were not very busy.
In addition to the medieval city centre and the Oktoberfest site at Theresienwiese, we saw the impressive Deutsches Museum, the Olympiaturm (Olympic Tower), the BMW headquarters…all the things one should properly see when visiting Munich. But we also knew this was only an amuse-bouche.
On the morning of October 11, 1999, we took a regional train from Munich to Plattling, in deepest Bavaria. In Plattling, we hopped on an even more regional train to Bayerisch Eisenstein: a small village right on the Czech border. In fact, the border runs right through the train station. We walked across the border, technically now in the Czech village of Železná Ruda, and hopped on the “regionalest” of all trains to our first Czech destination: Klatovy.
Stay tuned for my first immersion into the Czech Republic!