Munich before the bells

It was raining sideways across the front of München Hauptbahnhof when we got in, and the first thing I did was walk into a plywood hoarding, because the door I wanted was gone. The whole station is mid-surgery, has been since around 2019, won't be done until something like 2028, and you feel every year of it in the dust and the temporary signs and the corridor that used to go somewhere and now ends in a steel wall with an arrow. Marc, who likes a building site, read the boards about the new S-Bahn tunnel as if they were a menu. I wanted coffee and a roof.

Three hours before the onward train, the kind of margin I plan for on purpose. Bag in a locker, umbrella that lasted four minutes, tram into the centre. By the time we came up near Marienplatz the rain had eased to that bright, undecided grey, the sort with another shower loading somewhere over the Isar.

Breakfast was the whole reason for the early train. Café Frischhut, which everyone calls the Schmalznudel, has been frying the same pastry since 1973: a flat ring of yeast dough fried in lard, torn-looking at the middle, dusted with sugar, and it comes so hot you have to juggle it hand to hand. Cash only, which I'd remembered; a queue of six wet people, which I hadn't. I ate mine too fast and burned the roof of my mouth and would do it again tomorrow. Marc had a second out of solidarity.

We caught the Glockenspiel on the Neues Rathaus at eleven, because a morning person either catches the eleven or sulks. Life-sized figures, not the little clockwork dolls I'd pictured, a jousting duke and the coopers doing their barrel dance, twelve minutes of it in the drizzle under a forest of upturned phones. I'd filed it for years under tourist nonsense, and it is, and I loved it anyway.

Then back to the Hbf, which is where the rebuild stops being charming, because the Salzburg trains don't leave from the big hall but from the Holzkirchner wing on the far south side, reached through more hoarding than I remembered. We had the Railjet, the fast one, an hour and a half down to Salzburg. No Föhn, so no Alps to see, just flat wet Bavaria and a coffee from the bar that I drank slowly because my mouth still hurt from breakfast.

— Tobi