Olympiapark in München

To give our day a better start, we went to the Victorian House at the Viktualienmarkt for breakfast. Breakfast at the hotel was not fantastic - the coffee tasted only bitter and the "service" from Never-Smiling-Annie was non-existent. She really isn't suited to a job that involved people. The Victorian House is a bit schickimicki* but the food was pretty good.

We went out to the Olympiapark for a bit of a nose around. I remember being impressed by the stadium as I watched my first World Cup final in 1974 and I wanted to see what it was like in the flesh as it were. You can see the Olympiaturm and the BMW World building (BMW is the Bayerische Motoren Werke if you didn't know and it has its headquarters here in München).

The stadium itself is a bit shabby but not too bad (the toilets are, em, primitive). It was supposed to be 3 Euro to get in but a nice chap opened a side gate for us and we got in for free (we paid the favour on when we did the same for a couple taking photos from outside).

It's quite sad that the grass is gone and it's just a big bowl with a concrete floor. They use it for concerts and they also open it for "Public Viewing" of the football. They've added a Zip-line thing which allows you to swing from one side of the stadium to the other (only 30 Euros or so) or you can do the stadium roof walk and abseil** from the highest point down to the stadium floor (only 70 Euros for that). Not my cup of tea though.

It was a rather low key day. I think we were both pretty tired

* And you instinctively knew what schickimicki meant, didn't you?
**Hands up if you knew abseil came from the German verb "abseilen". From "ab" meaning down and "seil" meaning rope.