We had an ambitious plan for our first day of the trip, and our execution was pretty good. We arrived Munich airport shortly after 10am as scheduled, found our way to the hotel (which is more or less in between the airport and the city center), checked in, then came back out to visit first attraction of the trip, Nymphenburg Palace and Park. I knew pretty much nothing about this place, except that it is one of the top attractions in Munich. Getting there was a bit tricky, as we had to switch from Metro to streetcar, but their transit system has an excellent website, allowing us to print out detailed instructions, so we got there no problem. (I wish we had done the same for all places in Munich, especially for the art museums, where we lost quite a bit of time looking for them.)
On this trip, we were planning to visit a few attractions just like this: a palace with a big park or garden. So Nymphenburg became my reference for comparison, and I think Nymphenburg is as good as the other ones in most area. The interior of the palace was a little old, and the exhibits were not that memorable (although carriages and snow sleighs for the royals were kinda neat.) The palace does have a nice big Grand Hall in the center. On the other hand, we enjoyed the park much more. The park is huge, probably bigger than any other park we saw. The parks in Austria probably have better gardening than Nymphenburg park, but we got better weather here, and there are lakes and canals with leaves turning. Nice thing about this park is that there are numerous pavilions we can visit (so we forced ourselves to walk most of the park.) Of the ones we visited, I like the Amalienburg (with a octagonal hall of mirrors, rococo style) and the Pagodenburg (Semi-Chinese style pagoda with two levels only.) We stayed there until sunset, around the closing time. But this is only half of our ambitious plan for the first day; we still had a museum and a historical pub to visit that day.
