Day 17 Paris – Munich (Continuation):

We arrive in Munich around 5:30pm. We walk out of the train station and amazingly straight into a cab, unlike the 100m long queue we had in Paris. The cab driver helps us with our luggage and pops the booster seats in for the kids and then does their seat belts up, unlike the arrogant snob cab drivers in Paris. The cab driver heads off down the road towards an intersection where people are waiting to cross and he stops to allow them to cross the road AND the people politely give him a thank you wave, unlike in Paris when someone wants to cross the street this is the signal for the cab driver to speed up and toot his horn and then there is an exchange of abuse. At this point I’m asking myself “have we entered Jerry Seinfeld’s Bizarro World???” We continue on and arrive at our apartment. The cab driver gets out and helps us with our luggage. He then gives me the correct change from a €20 note, unlike in Paris where they assume it’s a keep the change policy. The cab driver takes off and stops 50m down the road and gets out and runs back to return a half full bottle of water we have left in the car. What is going on? We have arrived in some sort of parallel universe!!!

We enter the apartment and get greeted by the owner’s husband and he’s a really nice older bloke. The apartment is fantastic with plenty of room, much more room than the Paris apartment. We get settled in and think we will go for a wander and see if anything is open. We’ve been told that being a Sunday evening, not much will be open. We are staying in Schwabing a suburb sort of similar to Mt Hawthorn in style and distance from the city. We walk about 100m and there is an Italian restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Nothing else is open. We are straight off the train and we are starving and tired and we look starving and tired. We just walk in and ask for a table. No one looks down their nose at us, it’s actually the opposite we are welcomed. This is a beautiful restaurant, very traditional, owned by an Italian and the waiters are Italian, they speak Italian, the restaurant has table cloths and candles. We just spent a week in Paris and didn’t see one restaurant that had table cloths. We order our meal and the food is amazing and they just keep bringing food out that we didn’t order, on the house. This is a restaurant that would be 5 stars in Perth yet the mains here are between €6 and €12 a pop. We pay the bill and walk back to the apartment, no crowd’s just a couple of people walking on the streets. What a change from where we have just come from. We left Paris exhausted and drained. We have just regained the spring in our steps!