My trip to Germany is finally wrapping up and we made it to Munich and left on Saturday. So far, Munich was the most "touristy" and crowded city (but that was kind of to be expected). With the colder air approaching more people are indoors, and as I looked on the news, sadly more covid numbers. While most places check to see that you are vaccinated, at least a couple did not. As an advisory I would suggest wearing an n95 mask at minimum on public transport as it gets very crowded between 3pm-7pm and yes, there are coughing people everywhere. Of course you can't tell if its covid, a person who smokes or just general cough. I personally wished they checked the QR codes or cards to get on busses and rails, but I know that isn't feasible. Museums always check. A few places did want to check the QR code/app or card to your actual ID of some form, though this is more rare, but always have some form of ID with a picture on you just in case. Munich was a really lovely city and I really enjoyed the variety of places to visit and food. As Rick mentioned they are very into cash, so make sure you have some for restaurants.
On a side note they have an amazing Afghani restaurant called Chopan (there are several all over the city) I 100% recommend checking it out.
Overall this was the most empty trip I've ever been on (the only the other place it seemed even close - but not nearly this empty was Cornwall in early April of 2019. I'm someone who tends to go on trips when there are less tourists, and this had to be the epitome of less people (due of course sadly to the pandemic though I do enjoy visiting places and not being overwhelmed with other people, particularly when taking photos). While we occasionally ran into one American (maybe one once per day) in general there were not many, most people were German tourists with a splash of people from Asia at some of the larger sites in Fussen (like the Swan castles). I'm hoping though things get back to normal for all of us so we can travel more and visit so many great countries and experience places around the world.
If you want to see what Germany looked like the past two weeks or are curious I'm uploading my pics here (slowly) of this amazing trip without many tourists to the Black Forest and Bavaria here:
my photos from October 2021