Lessons in bicycles: Munich

Eisbach River, Englischer Garten, Munich, Germany

The phrase "it’s just like riding a bike" generally means "once you learn how to do something, you will never forget how to do it again". But this phrase is highly misleading – especially when it relates to bicycles. I’ll elaborate on that later.

We had a brief half hour to spend in St Goar in the morning. This was plenty of time because St Goar is miniscule and the main attractions were two shops: a beer stein shop, and a cuckoo clock shop which housed both the largest cuckoo clock in the world, and what must be the smallest Babushka dolls in the world (the smallest was smaller than my smallest fingernail. Very, um, small.)

We arrived in Munich later in the afternoon following a lengthy drive along the highways of Germany (which included our coach being pulled over by the cops to check that the coach driver had the right documentation)(he did). Munich was surprisingly beautiful, and our hotel wonderfully comfortable too. Contiki had included a bike tour of Munich for us, which would wind its way past some of the city’s impressive architecture and through the Englisher Garten, an enormous expanse of parklands with a beer garden in its centre.

Our tour guide for the bike ride was an energetic Canadian who greeted us with "Now, does everyone know how to ride a bicycle?" I hadn’t ridden one since I was about ten, but hey, it’s riding a bicycle, right? Once you learn, you never forget how?

WRONG.

My entire childhood had been spent riding fixed-gear bikes, and the bikes for our tour were proper multi-geared bicycles, not fixies. I decided to leave it in first gear and climbed confidently aboard, pressed my feet to the pedals, and pushed the bike forwards.

I toppled sideways almost immediately. My foot stamped the ground, pushing away as I tried to right myself, and then toppled over in the other direction instead. This went through several repetitions before the bike finally moved in a forwards direction, albeit with a lot of wobbling. And terror. Sheer terror on my part. Because did I mention we had to navigate our way through streets full of cars, pedestrians and other cyclists, all moving in a myriad of different directions?

Suddenly, all my confidence was gone. What was this crazy, unsteady, wobbly contraption and how the hell was it meant to transport me around for three hours? It didn’t stay upright and when I went to brake by instinctively pushing backwards onto the pedals, they spun uselessly and I continued to move crazily forwards.

Thankfully I wasn’t the only one having trouble, but it still felt like a slap in the face. Of course I knew how to ride a bicycle. Just not this particular one. This bicycle, I was convinced, was engineered with the express purpose of killing its rider.

Eventually, those of us who were struggling and swearing our way through the streets of Munich managed to get the hang of it. I even came to enjoy it after a while, but was a little disappointed I didn’t get a chance to take photos of the absolutely amazing parklands we rode through.

I never expected Germany to be so stunning, but the English Gardens were unexpectedly amazing. The parklands were enormous and included a running river (I saw a duck with a family of DUCKLINGS! SO CUTE), a nudist meadow (thankfully not too many naked people were there at the time) and the aforementioned beer garden.

Thanks to the river running through the park, the people of Munich hang out there like they’re at the beach. Everywhere I looked, people in swimwear were lazing around on the grass, tanning themselves in the summer sunshine and swimming in the river. There is even a standing wave at one part of the river, for surfing.

Surfing. In a river. In a park. In the middle of the city of Munich. I almost wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t get to see it for myself.

My wobbly method of bicycle riding started to blend in more with the rest of the group following the visit to the beer garden. I partied hard with an orange juice and pretzel while everyone else guzzled litres of beer served in enormous glasses.

Beer generally seems to be cheaper than orange juice in Germany. I found this out later when we went to Hoffenbrauhaus (hope I got the spelling right there) after the bike tour. It was an enormous restaurant and bar where you sit at long wooden tables on wooden bench seats, eating German food, drinking German beer and listening to a live German band playing traditional tunes. The service was quite poor, perhaps because the place was so crowded and busy, packed full of tourists yelling "PROST!" and smashing their beers together.

The menu was in German, which proved to be a struggle for us. I finally had the chance to pull out my German phrasebook and frantically tried to translate for myself and everyone around me – before the waiter came over and handed us an English menu instead. I ordered dumplings, a German side dish which I’d been told wasn’t bad. Dumplings come in potato or bread varieties and consist of a soft ball of the stuff served in a small bowl of gravy (everything in Germany gets smothered in gravy). They weren’t great – bread dumplings essentially tasted just like stuffing, and not much else.

It was a relief to get out of the noisy, hot Hoffenbrauhaus and get back to our hotel, where I joined a few other Contiki-ers at the hotel bar. Finally, somewhere I could get an alcoholic drink that wasn’t wine or beer! We ordered cocktails, which looked great and tasted even better, and we talked until our eyelids started to droop.

Germany has been the biggest surprise of my tour so far. It’s a really beautiful country and nothing like I expected – and I was even able to remember a fair bit of the German I learnt in high school. I didn’t want to leave Munich, and would have loved to have spent more time there (though perhaps not in the restaurants). Instead, our coach would leave the next morning for Austria…and bobsledding.