I wasn’t there for very long, and in the short time I was there I was somewhat preoccupied with a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. The nosebleed was mine, which made it even more distracting.

I can remember Munich having a very nice square with gothic architecture and a big old clock that pulled in all the tourists to watch its jolly little animatronics. However when the big moment came for it to strike midday, and for its cavalcade of animated figures to go through their paces, most of the tourists were too busy watching me standing in a pool of my own blood whilst desperately trying to staunch the flow with bits of rolled-up newspapers.

It finally stopped bleeding at around teatime, after my legs and arms had gone all floppy because there wasn’t any blood left in them.

I then spent most of the evening in one of Munich’s beer halls. I think it was the Hofbrauhaus, where that little Austrian comedian Adolf Hitler used to do his stand-up routine. Unfortunately his audience at that time had little appreciation of irony and an ‘off the cuff’ comment about invading Poland got him in all sorts of trouble with the rest of Europe.

munich hofbrauhaus

These beer halls are cavernous aircraft-hangers with an oom-pa-pah band at one end and trestle-tables from wall to wall. It’s quite a simple concept; you drink gallons of fizzy booze, link arms with the drinkers at your table and then sway from side to side until you vomit.

I’d almost forgotten about something to eat in all the excitement. I’d been looking forward to a large plate of Teutonic sausages. Unfortunately by the time we left the beer hall all the sausage vendors had shut up their stalls and gone home. So there wasn’t a sausage to be had in Munich, not even for ready cash.

Sausageless, but desperately in need of food to convert into blood before I collapsed, I carried out one of the most heinous of crimes that you can commit in a foreign country. There was no excuse for what I did, but there was nothing else open. I had tried to find something Bavarian to nibble on. I’d hunted high and low for even the smallest smackerel of sauerkraut or the stingiest smidgeon of schnitzel but there was nothing to be found. So I had no choice, and thus I grudgingly ordered ein Gross Mac und Fritten aus McDonalds.

So heed my wise advice. If you wish to gorge yourself on spicy Munchen Wurst, washed down with fine German wines, then eat early in Munich. Otherwise you’ll end up eating the same old tush that you can get down your local high street, except you’ll feel ten times worse about doing it.

The hotel receptionist gave me some more advice and that is to avoid Munich like the plague in October. This is the time of the Munich Beer Festival, and it is an excuse for every English football hooligan to exchange breaking heads on the terraces for a weekend of breaking heads on trestle tables instead.

It must take the local population right back to the nineteen-thirties.

Update: I went to Munich again recently, and I got a sausage. Just to prove it, I took a picture.

For my other guides to Germany click here.