✷ pictures of bavaria
It has struck me that, although my love for Bavaria and my photo collection of Bavaria are both well known to almost everyone I know in real life, I have neglected to post the very best photos I have taken of Bavaria yet thus far. I would like to give, thus, a photo account of what Bavaria means to me.
Near the lake Königssee, on the border between Germany and Austria, there is a little creek which runs turquoise. The banks hold mossy stones on which to sit, and the water is icy cold -- snow runoff from the Alps. Beside you bloom little flowers shaped like fairy lampposts. I waded in as much as I could bear. It felt like a baptism.
Coming back in the evening, we found a festival with live music – American songs. It was April, and cherry petals were falling as children played.
Bavaria is special to me in a way that is hard to express in words. It's a slower pace of life, a world where life is meant to be enjoyed rather than to be spent burning out. A world that is about people. About living a comfortable life – yourself and your family in your community – in the beauty of nature.
A friend told me that in Bavarian villages, when a baby is born, the parents will hang some baby clothing outside their door to announce to the community the baby's birth. I love that. Learning about your neighbors' lives not through Facebook announcements or status updates, but by walking around outside and being in real life.
So many of the friends I made in Munich had grown up in these small villages, speaking the Bavarian dialect at home and in their communities. Local pastries and bakery items, even in Munich, are always labeled in Bayrisch – to the extent that I no longer recognized the German word for 'bread roll' when seeing it in a bakery in Aachen.
I asked a Bavarian boy from a small town what his favorite song was, and he replied with "New York, Rio, Rosenheim." It is a paean to the way of life here – the lyrics are about a festival of lights, with candles lighting up major world cities and a tiny village in Bavaria. It's a nostalgic song, about childhood friends – brothers – and their love for their home.
It is such a calm life.
I spent so many days taking the train from Munich to the countryside. An hour's journey, and then you're in these landscapes. Munich is Germany's third largest city, and it lets you have both – both the culture, youth, and happenings of a larger city while also being so very close to these beautiful Alps and tiny villages.
I love how family friendly, how human-friendly Munich is. So many American cities feel as though they are only geared towards young people – that when you become old, you get edged out of full participation in the city. In Munich I saw wheelchair ramps being used by mothers pushing strollers and wheelchair users alike. I saw parents biking with a wagon attached to their bike, three young children inside. At the top of a mountain in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, I encountered a woman in her seventies with her cream-colored mountain dog. She seemed indomitable – like she had climbed up to the snow cover herself, whereas I had just taken the cable car. I want to be like that when I'm seventy.
Munich feels human-shaped. The green spaces, the peace and quiet, the ease of living. It's a very open city – forty percent of residents of Munich were born outside of Germany, and in everyday life English and German are essentially on equal footing with each other. In my neighborhood, when I found a cat one night and went to a friend for help, he told me cats roam freely here.
It is a place where you can live the life of your choosing.