Today: Munich

Today, the EYM and I head for Munich, on the RE (regional express). Bought a "Bayern Ticket," for 28 euro. It is supposed to be good 9 am today until 3 am tomorrow, for up to five people. On pretty much anything except the ICE trains.

Thanks to AM, of Nurnberg, for taking me through the way to buy a Bavaria Ticket on the Fahrkart machine. Interesting that they have ways to purchase the ICE tickets (which are unbelievably expensive) in English. But if you press the "English" button on the machines, and then try to buy ANY of the discount cards, the machine suddenly forgets how to speak English, and suggests that perhaps the Amerikaner Schwein would like to pay full price? All of the discount tickets are multiple layers in, with ONLY German labels for the fields.

But AM had showed me how to press the right buttons, and I got the ticket. Two odd things happened, though.

A kid noticed (by standing six inches behind me, and poking his head over my shoulder) that I was trying to buy a Bayern ticket, and offered to sell me his, for only 22 euro. Since the legit one only cost 28 euro, and the tickets are emphatically NOT transferrable, this seemed odd to me. In fact, if you get caught trying to use a discount ticket that way, there is decent sized fine. There is a fine if you just fail to SIGN the sucker. But when I said no, the kid was pretty pissed off. "Everybody does it. It is common! You save six euro!" Look, kid, this is a discount ticket. You want to buy one, you don't want to buy one, okay. But I am not going to take a chance on getting messed with by the police (for having knowingly committed a crime!) for a lousy six euro. Reminds me of the (apocryphal) Winston Churchill story, about haggling over price.

The EYM noticed a street sign on a street with shop we wanted to remember. "It's on Einbahnstrasse!" It took me a full minute to realize that that meant "one way street." Good thing we figured it out. There are LOTS of Einbahnstrasse; we would never have found the shop again.