Man vs. Munich. The verdict.

As you’ve probably seen in the pre-tour post on our Man vs. Munich excursion, great things were planned. 5 British gents were going to embrace Munich and savour all of its varied cultural hotspots – the Town Hall, The Olympic Stadium, the Allianz Arena, the Cathedral Church of Our Lady, the English Gardens, the beer halls, the night life, the traditional cuisine, the Deutsche Museum and BMW World. We were going to do it all.

In short, we didn’t do many of these things.

In short, we got drunk. Very drunk.

You see, there’s an interesting fact about the German people: they like beer. They like a lot of beer.

We visited the Hofbräuhaus where we had our first Stein – a ridiculous measure of beer that would make Hercules – or even Tom ‘the muscle mountain’ Moorer – quake in his boots. We also savoured some of the local delicacies – bratwurst, bockwurst, weisswurst, sauerkraut, Leberkäse  and, in an instance that Mr Euan ‘Conductor of the Banter Bus’ Millard would rather forget, what can only be described as brain soup. Awful.

We met and partied in some of Munich’s ‘top’ nightspots – Milchundbar and P1 Bar (almost) – with some of Munich’s unsurpassably friendly patrons – Pippa, Mike, Ben – and some wildly entertaining and equally as friendly visitors – Andy the Austrian, Paul the pool shark, Federico, Luciano and Federico (of ElectroLatinRock group El Rio) – and we were overwhelmed by all of them. I love London dearly – it’s an incredible city. But when it comes to people skills, we have a lot to learn from Munich. A LOT to learn.

Case in point – on our last day, we’d been for a couple of steins before the airport and had heard about a pub we should check out before we left. So there we are, 5 dishevelled delinquents (still drunk from the night before (and the night before that)) bewilderedly gawping about speaking English in Marienplatz, when a girl – probably 19 or 20 years old, but not a day older – approaches us out of a sea of people and asks us in perfect English whether we are OK and “do we need any help finding somewhere?”. We were shocked at first, but after we told her where we were looking for, she explained where it was, and then walked us pretty much to the doorstep to make sure we didn’t get lost any further.

Now, this might not sound like much – there were no lives saved, there were no over-sized cheques exchanged in front of red-ribbon, but how often would this sort of un-provoked charity happen in London? If you saw a group of drunken German tourists standing about looking lost, would you go and ask them if they needed help? In perfect German? Probably not. Would I? Probably not. But people in Munich do. And this was just one example of their warm welcome we were offered while we were there.

We made countless acquaintances on nights out from people who wanted to come and ask us about England or what we thought of Germany or just to practice their English. And to be honest, it made us all feel embarrassed. Embarrassed that we, as a nation, seem to have lost the desire to learn a language other than our own, because let’s face it – the entire world speaks English, so why bother?

Well after meeting X number of 18-26 year olds who all spoke better German, English, French and Spanish than I speak English when drunk, it gets a little embarrassing.

So, we might have failed to enjoy all of Munich’s highlights – we did actually make it to the Olympic Centre, the Town Hall and a few of the most widely touted beer halls and we embraced the Munich nightlife by clubbing until 6am – but the cultural highlight for me was manifested solely in the girl on the street in who helped us in Marienplatz.

Because – and listen up London – we need to learn to be friends again. Munich’s doing it, and is thriving on it. San Fran’s been doing it since the sixties. Christchurch has got a degree in it and Madrid’s all over it. But how good at it are we? Hhmmm…I’m not so sure. We’ve become noticeably separated. We need to become friends again, or at least we need to become more than strangers.

Just a thought…