FROM BANGALORE, INDIA

(click on images to enlarge)

Munich 2007: A Renovated Old City

MUNICH, July 13, 2007 - I arrived in Munich from Madrid late Thursday night.  When I got out in the early morning for a brisk walk before my first business meeting, the sky was overcast and the air quite chilly.  As the day went on, it warmed up to the upper 70s F (mid 20s C).

There are places in the world that seems capable of producing more history than they can consume (the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucuses...).  Which leads to permanent indigestion.  Munich has also made history many times (Hitler got his start here; Munich Olympics 1972 ended in tragedy, etc.).  But this Bavarian city has also managed to absorb it, learn from it, and move on.  

Today, Munich looks as peaceful as it is graceful.  The city was largely spared the devastation that the allied bombers wreaked on the more industrial Germany areas in World War II.  So there are many pretty Renaissance era buildings still around.  They line the streets of downtown Munich (above), and are so beautifully renovated that they all look as if the 18th century architects and masons had just finished them.

The above pretty building, for example, is the seat of the South Bavarian government. All three shots depict the same building, only from different angles.  You can see in the middle picture, besides the pretty roses, that renovation is still going on.  "It's a constant process around here," one of my local German hosts explained.

The street my hotel was on is called Maximillianstrasse and so is this monument erected in its namesake's honor.  Don't ask me who this Maximillian was.  The only Maximillian I know of is the infamous emperor of Mexico, imported from Austria in 1864, and executed after  Benito Juarez's Republican forces captured him in 1867.  In other words, hardly a man that would seem worthy of such an imposing statue.

Off to the side of the statue, one can catch this view of a gorgeous cathedral that seems reminiscent of some Florentine churches built during the prime of the Renaissance era.

The two left shots are of a grand palace that looked worthy of being a parliament or something.  But I never had a chance to explore it as I was pressed for time to make my business meetings.  The building on the right is an art museum, also freshly renovated.

As I was driven to my meeting, I kept snapping pictures of interesting-looking places along the way (above).

In an entirely different part of the city, a modern office complex where some of my meetings took place, there was also a slab I recognize from 1989 - a piece of the Berlin Wall.  It looked exactly as the one that I recall seeing at my Paris hotel from that period (see the Paris travelogue).

And that's all she wrote from Munich...

London Heathrow: A Place to Avoid 

LONDON, July 13 - I had been dreading this part of the trip well before I left Phoenix.  London Heathrow has never been my favorite airport: too crowded, too many terminals, too hard to get around, too many rules... Since those terrorist scares began in Britain last summer, Heathrow has also become many a traveler's worst nightmare - stranded in a strange country with your flight canceled or hopelessly delayed.  My last few personal experiences with British Airways weren't great, either, so I have avoided that airline in the past couple of years.

If there was ever a week spot in my itinerary, I knew that Heathrow was it, especially if my Munich flight were to arrive at a different terminal from the one that was to take me to India.  It did...

The leftmost shot shows passengers disembarking the BA flight from Munich at Terminal 1.  From there to Terminal 4, several miles away, from where my India flight was to take off (second photo from left), the distance seemed interminably long.  The Heathrow security didn't make it any shorter, either.

The first thing the passengers had to do after disembarking from the BA flight from Munich was to go through a hand baggage X-ray checkpoint.  Yes, upon arrival! (not just before departure, as is the case with other airports).  If any of you see a point in that, please let me know.  It's delays and harassment under the guise of security, as far as I am concerned.

What happened next, however, leaves no doubt about it.  A couple of green-clad Heathrow security chaps were telling every passenger that we were allowed only one hand-carry item.  Everywhere else in the world, of course, including the Munich airport at which we all boarded, you are allowed "one personal item" and one hand-carry bag.  Most airlines don't even police that very tightly.  And NOWHERE do the security personnel worry about things like that.  Usually it's the airline staff that make such announcement at the gate just prior to boarding (obviously, therefore, after you had already passed through security).

Well, this is Heathrow... Don't look for common sense here.  Limeys have to be different from everybody else.  Which in and of itself is not so bad, except: what's a passenger to do who boarded a flight somewhere else with two items, and is not allowed to continue his journey through Heathrow because the rules have changed in the meantime?

When I posed that question to the two Limeys, who were getting quite belligerent with me at this point (how dare someone question their authority?), one of them said I should stuff my hand bag into the laptop backpack.  And if that didn't work, just stay stranded there at Heathrow in a no man's land between the two terminals?  Such a possibility didn't seem to concern these morons. 

So I just walked on.  They didn't try to stop me.

It took nearly half an hour after that to make it from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4 in a stinking, stuffy and overcrowded bus.

The short of the long story is... if you can help it, avoid London and especially Heathrow at all cost.  Or else just prepare to submit to abuse by morons.

Once on board of my flight to India, I was in for another surprise.  I have never seen anything as asinine as the configuration of business and first class on British Airways flights, such as this one.  Instead of sitting parallel to each other, as all other airlines have it, here you are seated kitty-corner from each other so that you're practically in your face with a stranger next door (left photo).  

Evidently realizing that belatedly, BA came up with a screen that you can pull out between the two seats.  But that makes it nearly impossible for flight attendants to serve both passengers without first completing a course in yoga.  Nor is there any leg room or storage room left on the floor.  All hand baggage must fit in overhead compartments.

"We're in a process of changing that on all our 747 aircraft," a nice BA flight attendant told me when she saw my bewilderment with this configuration.

The BA cabin crew were the bright spot in an otherwise long and tiring day.  They saved the day for an airline that, based on its ground operations, deserves to lose as much business as possible.  The head purser even upgraded me to first class when it turned out my TV screen wasn't working.  So I had a chance to see that the first class passengers weren't spared the stupidity of BA seat designers, either (right photo).

TO BE CONTINUED, hopefully in Mumbai, India...

Back to World Trip July 2007 Index

Back to Home