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Germany: München / Munich: A Visit to the Viktualienmarkt

EuroCuisineLady had the good luck to be passing through Munich on business last week when the weather was particularly fine. Her schedule left her just enough time to make a fast pass through the Viktualienmarkt or Grocery Market, probably Munich's most famous open-air food market.

The place is a feast for the eye and nose any time of the year, but in the summertime, the market and the beer garden at its heart come into their own. There are something like a hundred and forty stalls and shops (the butchers tend for the most part to be located in a block of regular buildings near the west side of the market). Every kind of fresh food you can imagine is to be found here, as well as spices, flowers and plants, woodwork, knives, kitchen utensils, you name it. At the heart of it all is a small handsome beer garden shaded by the traditional chestnut trees, so that after your shopping's done you can sit down and have a beer or a coffee and a good gossip with your neighbors.

Click on "read more" for more pictures. (If you're a Flickr user, you can also click here for the whole photoset, where you can get at the full-size images and read the stalls' signs.)

Gorgeous sausages, especially Munich's famous weisswurst.

Handsome knives of damascened / patternwelded steel. And not cheap.

One of the Viktualienmarkt's numerous cheese markets.

"Munich's smallest pub", or so the sign claims.

The beer garden. Such gardens are traditionally shaded by chestnut trees, which kept the sun off the ground when the beer was kept in dug-out cellars directly beneath.

More stalls.

Shoppers do their thing... The stall in the background is selling fresh-squeezed juices and smoothies of many kinds. On either side of it are a gourmet soup stall and a place doing Chinese and Thai specialties, both ready to eat / hot off the grill and to take away.