(Not) The first day in Munich

Hello. Oder Hallo.

My name is Bartek, I’m 25, Polish and I just moved from Cracow, Poland to Munich, Germany to become a Business Consulting intern at Virtual Identity. These are a couple of random thoughts I had collected during the first two days of my six months stay in Munich. Let us begin.

Hostels

A bed in a dorm-style room in a hostel in Munich is around 12-20EUR/day. I’ve stayed at Easypalace on Mozartstrasse and at A&O Hostel on Arnulfstrasse and I prefered A&O by wide margin. It just provided a lot higher standard, i.e. everything was clean and tidy, dorm-type room had 4 beds (in comparison to… uhm 6 or 8 or something), furniture was new, etc. Easpalace is a bit closer to the city center, though.

Internet access at A&O hostel through WLAN is 1EUR/1h, 1.5EUR/2h, 5EUR/24h, not having your own computer will set you back 1EUR/30min or something. My antedeluvian (2001 baby!) and previously untested 3COM WiFi PCMCIA card worked, but it required me to be logged in as an administrator (or power user) and the password to the accesspoint to be at least 6 characters long. Initialy, neither of these were the case ;-) but I managed to sort it out.

Accomodation

Looking for a room turned out to be a pain just as major as it is in Cracow. There are two issues, namely the deposit and rent time. The deposit is usually 2-3 times the rent (2-3MM, 2-3 Monate Miete), but you might be lucky to find a room with the deposit of just 1MM. So you may need to pay from, say, 250 to 750EUR, which is a big deal. The second thing is that most people want to rent rooms for at least a year or more. A single room in a shared flat (Wohngemeinschaft - WG) will cost you around 300EUR, with a propensity to cost more than less than that. There are some websites that will help you out, e.g. www.wg-gesucht.de. Basic German skills will not hurt. Anyhow, I wouldn’t pay attention to offers listed without a phone number. It is my experience that in this business (either in Munich or Cracow, or wherever I guess) you actually have to make a phone call, otherwise you’re unlikely to get any response. I’ve tried email, but I got one answer for 10 emails or so. Bear in mind though, that the phone will not be much more productive. A hell lot of times nobody answered or voice mail turned on. But it just may be a coincidence.

By the way, pay attention to the street name and district. For example, there are 2 streets that are named Schulstrasse. One is in Munich itself and the other one is in Graefelfing, which became a part of Munich some time ago as I learned.

At one point I was afraid that I would have to pay as much as 100EUR/month for the MVV ticket. I thought I would live in 10th circle or something, but the Zone no. 1 (comprising 4 circles) is so large that I don’t think you’d ever consider living outside of it. Graefelfing is in the 4th circle and is already quite far away from the city center.

Public transport

Public transport in Munich consists of four parts: buses, trams, U-Bahn (subway) and S-Bahn (city railway). I have no experience yet with buses and trams but U-Bahn is absolutely fabolous. I mean you can get from point A to point B very fast, even if they are far away from each other. But it just might be me, coming from a city with no (so much needed) subway. I can actually imagine how much it would help, if there was a subway system in Cracow. One could live in, say, Prokocim and get into the downtown in 10 minutes. However, I don’t hold out to much hope, that it will become reality anytime soon. S-Bahn operates on larger distances and allows people living in the suburbs to get into the city center in a very reasonable time.

People living outside of Munich, but working there, are encouraged to leave their cars on the outskirts of the city and then take the S-Bahn or U-Bahn. There are large parking lots (P+R) to accomodate this, e.g. in Fröttmannig, near Allianz Arena.

Economy

I am shocked how many world-class companies one can come across in Munich. Munich is home to BMW, Siemens, Infineon, Alianz, but companies including GlaxoSmithKline, Yahoo, MAN, KPMG, Deloitte or Ernst & Young have their divisions there. I haven’t seen PricewaterhouseCoopers yet, but I imagine it’s just a matter of time. And by the way, I don’t mean small teams, I am talking about huge divisions occuping entire buildings. E.g. Ernst&Young’s building is about the size of the main part of Buma Square in Cracow (the one with Motorola and Electrolux banners on it). The same thing applies to most of the companies I listed. There is also a lot more office space to rent, you can read “Büro fläche zu vermieten” everywhere. And more is being built. Munich is very much unlike Cracow in this respect. And it is a shame, I guess there is a direct correlation between office space availability and economic growth (think Google’s retreat from Cracow).