I went to Munich for a few days for some work. Munich’s nice. The weather was hot.
I got the chance, for the first time, to work closely with Lawrence Kitson, who is a gent and a friendly feller and a pleasure to work with. So that was nice.
He and I both had a chance to try out the local electric scooters. I was very impressed. The sign-up process was pretty quick, the learning curve hardly there, and very soon I was zipping around the streets of Munich and having a lovely time.
Munich has 2 things that made this easier: it’s very flat, and the streets are wide and generously supplied with cycle lanes. A local told me that cyclists get annoyed by scooter-riders, because the scooters are speed limited and therefore tend to get in the way of much faster pedal-power people.
But as a visitor with no bike, I thought scooters were efficient, reasonably priced and fun to use.
Munich’s river isn’t like the rivers I’ve seen in other European capitals. It’s been made a focus for leisure, and there are miles of parkland on either side of it.
So the locals treat it like a beach, sitting the gravel and taking cooling dips in the shallow, fast-flowing water. A delightful way to spend a summer evening.
This was a work trip so I didn’t get a lot of time to explore. But Munich felt nice, much more relaxed than a similar-sized city in the UK would be. It’s roughly the same size as Sheffield, but it didn’t have that sort of feel. Maybe that’s a Bavarian cultural thing.
I might get a chance to go back. If I do, I’ll be straight back on one of those scooters. Oh yes.
Filed under: travel and work
(26 July 2019)