As I write I am listening the 'The Urbanist' from Monocle24 and reflecting on how very much my life in Munich is concentrated on the village... the Schwabing district... in which I live. To be sure, I take the short trip into the city centre a couple of times a week but that is about all.
Last week I had to go the the studio of a new translation/voiceover client, the television production arm of the vast Munich convention, exhibition and trade fair complex. Now I did not have the advantage of GPS coordinates but when I arrived I had the funny feeling of standing bang in the middle of an airport runway. For the last time I was at this precise geographical location... over twenty years ago... the entire terrain was the Munich-Riem Airport.
After the end of the war, Munich-Riem was the first airport in Germany to be used for civil aviation. Post-war operations started on 6 April 1948 with the landing of a DC-3 operated by Pan American World Airways. Flight operations ended in 1992, when the new Munich Franz Josef Strauss Airport opened.
So there I was in the recording studio, recalling that the last time I was at Riem was when we sent our daughter... then aged two... off on holiday with friends of ours who had a super villa in Mallorca.
Now my family years in Munich saw us living in a different village, Arabella Park. And there we had our favourite local restaurant. For some reason... possibly with the Riem experience as the impetus... there was a decision to re-visit this restaurant yesterday evening. I would not have thought that it had been so long since I last dined at La Cambusa. But it had clearly been long enough to allow for the building of a brand new tram route which passed where we had once lived and then turned to pass the restaurant.
And I thought it was only in the Sandlands that the urban landscape changes so radically whenever one's back is turned.
No comments:
Post a Comment