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I noted the other day how good the Munich underground is. Here’s a map of it.

We’re staying just near the Nordfriedhof station on the U6 line. It’s really, really easy to navigate your way around; the signage at each station is great, and the entrances to the underground are really easy to find. At street level you’ll see big blue “U” signs signposting the entry, and they’re everywhere; lots more stations than the Melbourne underground, and a lot closer together. Everywhere you go is close to a station. Paul lived here for 2 years and didn’t have a car; you could easily live and work here without a car. Train and bike would be more than enough.

Trains run a lot more frequently than in Melbourne; usually every 6-8 minutes during peak our, and every 10 minutes outside that. They start at 4am and run through to 1am the next day. They always run dead on time and the stop as well, so clearly the local company didn’t make the brakes.

Another neat thing is that the newer signs at some stations show the next 3 trains coming, and for each train they show how many carriages long the train will be. The platforms are marked showing where they’ll stop depending on length; a quick look at the sign and you can know exactly where they stop. And they hit their marks every time.

The centre of town is Marienplatz, and that’s also one of the biggest stations; it’s across several levels, and you can easily transfer from one line to another. An added bonus is that you walk out of the station and this (the town hall) is right in front of you. That’s where we went on Tuesday; we walked around the city centre then finally dropped back into the underground to head back to the hotel.

Yesterday we jumped on the U6 line then transferred to the U3 line down to Machtlfinger StraBe which is one of the handful of stations in that area that service the Siemens buildings. You can see “Siemenswerke” on the S line just to the right of Machtlfinger StraBe on the map. Total time from the hotel to the meeting room at Siemens was about half an hour, and that included 10 minutes of walking through the Siemens campus to find the right building then the right room. It wasn’t that we got lost; it’s just a big campus. All the buildings are numbered, as are all the rooms, so knowing that you’ve got a meeting in room 1755/375 is enough that you can find exactly where you need to go — site, building and room.

Unlike Melbourne, where the lines have names based on the terminal station, here they’re just numbered, and it makes life a lot easier for someone who doesn’t read German. It’s simple to head down into the underground then just find your way to the U6 platform. From there you can see where the train is heading (north or south) and pick up the right one.

Tomorrow morning when we head out to the airport we’ll jump onto the U6 and work our way onto the S1 line which terminates at the airport.

Our second day here was all work — a full day inside a meeting room with whiteboards, overhead projectors and lots of interesting discussions on a whole range of topics.

After work we squeezed into the very cramped Audi A6 AllRoad belonging to one of our hosts and headed off to the restaurant they’d picked for the evening. The trip through Munich peak hour traffic was a strange sensation; I found it very disorienting to be on the opposite side of the road than I’m used to, so the lines that all the cars were taking through corners didn’t make any sense. Maybe as a driver it’s easier to get your head around the difference, but as a passenger it was weird. Had I been driving I’ve got no doubt we’d have been involved in at least 3 head-on collisions.

The restaurant we went to was the Paulaner brauhaus (pub). Our hosts chose it because it combines a menu of traditional Bavarian food with the beer that they’ve been brewing since 1634. We had an excellent meal along with a beer or three…

Tomorrow (today?) will be another day of work, although my travelling partners have more confirmed meetings than I do. I’ve got nothing solid booked until the afternoon, but I’m going to head along to some of their morning discussions anyway, even though they’re not quite my domain.

(Background: There’s three of us travelling, and we’ve got very different skillsets. I’m technical, Paul is business/commercial and Sam is high level architecture and PBX/telephony).

Today is our last day here and we’ll no doubt spend the evening somewhere else that involves beer. That’s because everything in Munich involves beer. Paul told me about a local saying that roughly translates to “There’s no beer in heaven which is why we drink it now“. People here live by those words. Munich truly is the home of beer (the famous Oktoberfest beer festival is held here) along with lederhose, pork knuckles and pork sausages.

We can’t be out too late tonight because we’ve got a pretty early flight to Heathrow in the morning. In about 30 hours I’ll be heading out the big silver doors to spend 48 hours in London en route to San Francisco.

This might be my last blog entry for a day or two, but I’ll try and squeeze in another update before I head out.