Began the day…passing this Mercedes Benz ? Headquarters…Definitely felt like Germany!
Our plans for this day was to visit Viktualienmarkt, akin to a farmer’s market, a foodie’s delight!
Enroute we stopped at Marienplatz for the Glockenspiel. The clocktower has a twin-level moving (puppet like) figures, with a king and queen, musicians, courtiers etc. Nice for a short stop, but not with rain! I forgot to mention that the second day had rain all the time, and we had reason to thank our hotel staff for sending us of with umbrellas.
Once inside the market, we first entered a cheese and wine shop, tasted and bought a truffle cheese (melt in the mouth stuffed brie with the aroma and taste of truffle cutting through) and rosemary cheese. There were many charcuteries, but with four vegetarians there wasn’t much point…
We then went to a wine shop and bought two German wines, troken (dry) white Riesling and robust red Spätburgunder. Rieslings in US etc are commonly sweet wines, but here, dry tasty Rieslings are the norm. The Spätburgunder (pronounced Shpæt Boorgoonda) is German for Pinot Noir, and is called so, as it’s late ripening compared to Burgundy Pinots. Delish wine anyway…This buy started our wine bottle counter. W2, meaning two bottles.
The next shop we went to was Honighaus, where everything was about honey including beeswax candles, organic honey and… Mead which is an alcoholic drink made from fermented honey and water, best drunk warm.
We tasted a glass of Mead, bought a bottle of Honigwein aka Mead and also bought some liqueurs. W3.5
Next we moved onto some gift shops, some fruit shops, more cheese and more wine shops.
We thankfully didn’t buy more wine bottles, but we stumbled on a delightful shop “Chocolates & more!” that hubby had researched about before.
The shop had the usual run of nougats, flavored chocolates, chocolates with rum, with nuts, orange peel etc, but it was when we asked for dark chocolates, single origin, that the young lady got animated, and started bringing the most exotic chocolates, including an Amadei couverture dark chocolate drops (pistole) Venezuelan raw cocoa bar, different types of cocoa beans, (African, South american, Sri Lankan) roasted and unprocessed (yummy Cocoa tasting!!). While the ladies and the baby were getting raptures sipping on the delicious hot chocolate; DH and dad tried out different bars of Ecuadorian and Madagascar chocolates (bean to bar) and some Criollo chocolates from Venezuela.
After this heavenly experience we sauntered through the market, buying some fresh fruits, some more beer tasting, ogled at some beautiful crafts works and then decided to eat some more!
We reached the same alley with Andechser am Dom and decided to try Augustiner today. We had a tasty tomato soup, some Ravioli like German dish, Sauerkraut and Nuremberg sausages along with a wheat beer.
The one notable point was our server, a tall Valkyrie in a “Lederhosen”. I researched it later and found that there is a recent fashion of girls dressing up in these leather short pants; you only look good in them if you are fit!
After miscellaneous shopping and eats, we headed back. Dinner that night was at an Italian place called Mozamo, close to our hotel, with super thin crust wood fired oven baked Pizza with some good Chardonnay!
Gute Nacht!
