Food. It's what's for eating.

Food is quite possibly going to be my downfall while I'm here. That or stockings.

See, I like to try new things, and when I'm in a place like the Victuals Market of Munich, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of new things to try. From fruit stands to vegetable stands to meatshops to honey shops to bakeries...for a sensualist like me, it's maddening.

So today I had my first bratwurst and my first taste of sauerkraut. The brat was delicious, of course, but the sauerkraut...it wasn't bad, but my tastebuds definitely aren't used to the flavor. Every bite I took startled me all over again.

The seafood portion of the market had a stall where you could pick out fresh fish and get them to cook it for you right there. I spied some shrimp big as lobster tails (no joke) and got those sauteed in garlic and butter and spent a couple of extra Euros on a glass of sparkling wine. If you're reading this and don't know me, you should know I don't drink alcohol (and therefore have no alcohol tolerance) so casually buying a glass of anything is a big deal for me. The goal is to work up to a mini mug of beer before I leave Bavaria; it would be sad, truly, to have come all this way and not sample what the region is famous for.

After the shrimp, I had an apricot jam filled doughnut and a cappucino, and later I had a chocolate covered cherry steeped in some kind of alcohol. Gods. If indulgence is a sin, then I'm a sinner through and through because I'm not holding back.

But that's not all. Yesterday, I had a rum, raisin, and hazelnut chocolate bar, the vanilla creme filled doughnut from Oktoberfest (rivals Krispy Kreme, it's so good, and I don't say that lightly), and several Bavarian pretzel sandwiches. Oh, the pretzels...before now, I've only had cheap and pasty imitations. The pretzels here are amazing, and they're everywhere.

A small, plain pretzel (about the size of one you'd buy from a mall vendor back home) are around half a Euro. Buy it with butter and that's about 1 Euro. With butter and cheese is 1.5 Euro. And you can keep going until you have Bavarian pretzel sandwiches with everything from tomato and mozzarella to three different kinds of meat on them. And the pretzels come in sizes other than small; at Oktoberfest, in some of the beer tents, I saw pretzels the size of hubcaps.

Random: BMW manufactures the citybuses here.

I'm back on my preplanned schedule which is reassuring because 1) I like direction and 2) I don't like finding last minute accomodation. Now that I've seen the city, I'm ready to venture outside it. Tomorrow, I go to Dachau and hopefully I'll be able to post about my experience there soon.

Oh, oh! I forgot to mention, I saw the German chancellor today, Chancellor Merkel. She was giving some kind of speech in Marienplantz and it was crazy. Police everywhere (police here carry the largest batons I've ever seen--not that I've seen many--they stretch from hip to knee), people everywhere, cameras everywhere. I need to find an English language newssource to see what all the hubbub was about.

The cafe is about to close so I have to leave, but I should be able to come back later on this week and finish my updates. Ciao.