Achtung Baby

In a couple of hours I am getting on a plane and flying to Germany for a vacation. If anyone had told me a couple of years ago that I would be heading to Europe for a holiday, I would have thought Germany would have been about the least likely destination for a trip. Other than a fleeting thought which rocketed through my mind a few years ago, I had never seriously considered vacationing in Germany. Maybe by now I should be getting over it, but to me Germany was just a nation that tried to invade my home country of England twice in the last 100 years. It was not a place to be visited or celebrated in any way.

But a couple of years ago I determined it was time to get my friends Mike and Bryan to the mainland of Europe and started looking for destinations that might suit the three of us. Mike and I visited as far into Europe as Great Britain in 2007 and Bryan has never been to Europe so it's about time in my opinion that they spend some time in a place where English is not the first language. I had Spain and Vienna high on my list but Spain seemed too romantic for three dudes to roam around and I couldn't see the three of us drinking coffee and looking at Art Nouveau architecture in Vienna together. So I moved on to other countries: the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy and rejected them all for one reason or another.

Then I started looking at Germany and saw a country with a rich beer culture, some pretty spectacular scenery, architecture which stretches all the way back to before the Holy Roman Empire and significant historical sites. I thought it might have potential. I started out with an idea of doing a country wide tour, spending a few days each in Cologne, Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt but the more I dug, the more interested I became in spending time in Bavaria. And as that idea developed, it seemed like we could easily spend a week and a half there and not run out of things to do (not running out of things to do on vacation is important to me; I like to explore and pack as much as possible in).

Germany as it currently exists is very definitely a late nineteenth and twentieth century notion. The country as it stands today was mostly assembled after the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871 and is made up of multiple states whose borders have shifted around over centuries. To make things more complicated, the country was split into East Germany and West Germany following World War II and reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But Bavaria, which is the largest state in present day Germany, has existed largely as it does today since the middle of the first millennium. Therefore the place has to a great extent maintained its identity as Bavaria first and part of Germany second and that appealed to me far more than doing a country wide tour. There seems to be plenty of beer to drink, awesome scenery and some interesting history to explore (although not all of it is pleasant).

So tomorrow, I'll be in Munich trying to stay awake as late as possible before the six hour time difference and the four or five hours of uncomfortable sleep I get in Lufthansa coach kick in and I crash. Starting Saturday, I'll start exploring. Can't wait!