Page 4 - GC-Sept-Oct-Guide-2025

Guten Tag, Munich!

by Amber Healy I’ve ever visited, let alone explored before my 9:40 p.m. flight to
n July, I was fortunate enough to on my own. Rzeszow.
spend two weeks in Rzeszow, After a mostly smooth and un- There were two destinations sol-
IPoland as part of Pomost Inter- eventful pair of flights (Buffalo to idly on my list: the famous Glocken-
national, a group of volunteer teach- Chicago, Chicago to Munich), it spiel, in the heart of Munich, and the
ers who work with teenagers and was a matter of finding, first, a bot- original Haufbrauhaus, despite not
adults to practice their American tle of water to fend off dehydration, having a fondness for beer. But,
English as part of an enrichment then out to the shuttle bus that de- when in Germany . . . to paraphrase
program. When considering travel parts the Lufthansa terminal every the saying.
arrangements, a friend suggested 20 minutes en route to the city cen- Let’s preface this adventure by
booking a flight with a layover ter. With my backpack squarely in being totally honest: I speak less
somewhere new, somewhere fun. If place, I wanted to make the most of German than Polish, which is to say
I’m making a trip halfway around my layover. basically none at all. My phone’s
the world, might as well make the In total, there were about five GPS and map were pretty much all
most of it! and a half hours available to run I could rely on for this trip and,
That’s how I came to pass sever- around the city, factoring in the time again in the name of honesty, I was
al hours of Friday, July 4, in Mu- it would take to return to the airport turned around a couple times. But
nich, the first true European city
calling back to my grandma’s ad-
vice, “If you go out with the idea
that you’ll have a good time, you
will,” I started on the roughly 25-
minute walk to the Glockenspiel.
A timeless wonder
Officially the Rathaus-Glocken-
spiel, this is a massive, ornately dec-
orated and carved clock tower in
Marienplatz Square and is a beloved
tourist attraction for the two-level
performances of mechanized swirl-
ing and twirling dancers telling two
chapters in Munich’s history. The
first is a pair of knights jousting for
the hand of Renata of Lorraine, won
by Duke Wilhelm, complete with all
the pageantry that went along with
such a spectacle in real life and not
restricted to a motorized track.
The second, slightly less grand
but just as delightful, display, on the
lower tier, consists of a series of
young lords spinning the coopers’
dance, encouraging people to come
back out of their homes following a
plague in 1517. (Fun side note: the
from March through October – to
dance is performed in Munich every
seven years by real-life dancers and see the spectacle. Bells chime from
atop the tower at the top of each
was last done in 2019.)
There’s nothing quite like this in hour to mark time, with additional
chimes indicating the show’s about
the United States. The Glockenspiel
is huge and the square in front of it to start. The whole display runs less
than 15 minutes, with a golden bird
fills with people before each perfor-
mance – 11 a.m. and noon all year, on top of the clock chirping to an-
with an additional play at 5 p.m.
Continued on page 6

4 • THE GERMAN CITIZEN • September - October 2025