Garmisch-Partenkirchen

 Dear Olympic Committee, Munich wants to try again, and this time it promises there will be no screw ups.  In its bid for the 2018 Winter Games, Munich has teamed up once again with Garmisch-Partenkirchen (a partnership that brought you such memorable events as the 1936 Olympics) with the best intentions of rewriting history, but has made the unfortunate mistake of settling on the slogan the Friendly Games.  As the city museum reminded us, Munich's last shot at redemption, the 1972 Olympics, took a page out of the same PR thesaurus and called itself the Happy Games.  You may remember what happened that time. If not, Steven Spielberg does.
    Poor marketing aside, Garmisch-Partenkirchen was a very nice resort, with a lot more going for it than Munich.  Munich was full of tourists and historic buildings under construction.  Garmisch-Partenkirchen may have had the tourists and outspokenly Anglo-hating Bavarians, but it also had the Alps.  No one would dare cover the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain, with one of those cloth awnings that reproduce the original facade of the heavily scaffolded building underneath and claim it was basically the same experience.  We also didn't have to deal with the world's most annoying English speakers turned bicycle tour guides once we headed deep into the Alpine woods.
  Sadly, judging from the treatment we received in one of the guesthouses we stopped at for a drink on our hike up one of the surrounding mountains (which started with a trail hacked through an extremely narrow gorge carved by a very close, very roaring stream), just because we didn't encounter any off-duty tour guides that weekend does not mean that said annoying Anglos have not already made it to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and ruined the reputation of English speakers everywhere.  Even German-speaking English speakers.  We got the slowest service, the wrong drinks, and general non-responsiveness to any and all requests (including to pay).  On the plus side, we got cold drinks on a patio after hiking halfway up a mountain.  Definitely not a complete loss.