It’s never a good idea to write down impressions of a city or anything after having just returned and with two hours of sleep behind you the night before, but that’s precisely what I’m going to do. I was in Munich attending IIR’s Fixed-Mobile Convergence Summit 2007, a subject that I gather is of approximately zero interest to the readership of this blog, so I won’t be talking about that at all here.
The arrival experience to Munich could’ve been a bit better. After a flight delay caused by a flat nose wheel tire, the taxi driver at the Munich end tried to make up for the lost time in unnerving ways. I’d never before ridden in a taxi that was driven by what looked like an 80-something old man with white hair, thick glasses, hunched over the steering wheel — and promptly whizzing along the crowded autobahn at over 200km/h (120mph). I never again want to experience that. Despite the odds being clearly against it, we landed safely at the hotel. The only reasonable thing to do in a new city is to go downtown by public transportation and walk around, so the action plan was clear. Munich metropolitan area is supposed to have 2.7 million people, but somebody saying it had 20,000 could’ve fooled me on this Sunday evening. These are the crowds I had to put up with on the subway:
It would’ve been slightly less spooky had the downtown had a few more people in it. But no. Granted, Sunday nights are hardly the peak of activity in any city – especially on a rainy night – but it would’ve been nice to see someone. Anyone. Or at least have some company, but luckily that part was resolved in later days. What I did see was lots of places that no doubt would’ve been beautiful had it not been raining. And some were okay even as it was:
Things took a turn for better once the conference began and weekdays arrived. Below left a nice upscale mall, Fünf Höfe, and on the right, a rare occurrance of the sun in the form of a nice sunset visible on the last day there. Of course it was replaced by rain by the time I actually made it to downtown to do any walking around but that’s just Murphy’s Law. I quickly located a Zwilling store, which was necessary as the Finnish Zwilling distributor can’t even order certain knives in their selection. Combined with their high prices, don’t even get me started on how they rank in the customer experience scale. The real thing in Munich solved all those problems.
Anyhow, even the conference was good (so this was not one of those conference trips where you’re like “The conference? Riiight, I think there was a conference too” afterwards 
) but what made the trip great were the people; I had the pleasure of meeting many exceptional people and having one of the longest dinners of my life with some of them (over 5 hours) at Lenbach helped ensure the subsequent lack of sleep that’s completely worth it. In any case, it’s always a wonderful thing when people (initially strangers, really) from completely different cultures can so easily hit it off and enjoy life – thanks to Éva, Vladimir, Flavio & Gianluca for that! I hope I meet at least some of you again someday, somewhere.
the lights at the mall looks pretty