Munich

Home Diaries Best Pictures Road Trip

Munich, Back to Museums

November 12, 2001

Dear Family and Friends.

It was time for us to head to a city again. In Bavaria, "city" means Munich and we looked forward to the change from Bad Reichenhall.

It was Marianne's turn to drive. We've developed a system whereby one of us drives for the whole day, no matter how long or how short the driving day is. Normally, we each like driving our car but in new cities our blood pressure goes up a notch or two so Marianne started nervously toward Munich. To make matters worse, the roads were wet and just a bit snowy and we are still inexperienced in the stuff. Our car is equipped with a fancy electronic anti-skid system but we don't want to test it out.

Fortunately, it was still early Sunday morning when we hit city traffic. The ride in was mostly uneventful. We were aiming for a small hotel on a one-block long neighborhood side street, the Uhland Garni Hotel. (I asked my German travel expert, Marianne, what "Garni" means in this case and she said it's a small hotel that has some extras, like "garnish" on a dinner plate I guess.) We made a couple wrong turns but recovered quickly. We're getting this down. Maybe cities aren't so bad after all.

Sunday afternoon, we managed to work in two art museums, the Alte and the Nueue Pinakothek. Marianne is still trying to get me to be more cultured. It's a tall task. The two museums did have an impressive array of work though, all the big European names: Da Vinchi, Durer, Renoir, Rubens (lots of Rubens), Van Gough, El Greco, Rembrandt, Matisse, Picasso, etc, etc, etc. We've added a separate quiz in order to show some of the Pinakothek pieces. Even for an engineer, the collection was quite impressive.

Monday, it was Marianne's turn to tour an engineer's museum, Munich's Deutsche Museum. This is a huge place, filled with rooms and rooms of "technical" history. There were wind machines and water machines, dozen or more of each. Good show and tell stuff.

Then we turned a corner and hit the airplanes. Marianne wanted to fly the old Bell helicopter but I was more impressed with this example of the first jet aircraft, the 1944 Messerschmidt Me 163.

Of course there were several rooms with cars. The best part here was that there were also lots of buttons to push. Push a button and the truck wheels turn. Push a button and the assembly robot installs a seat. Push a button and lights light up. Better than Picasso.

Of course the most exciting was the driving simulator. This was a glorified video game but it did simulate our own car's fancy anti-skid system and Marianne really got into driving fast. For four deutsch mark she had two passes at a road filled with curves, hills, crossing trucks and lost hay bales. The second time through she made a believer of the guy running the machine. Not bad for a girl.

By this time, we had reached our two-hour museum limit. That is a time period we have empirically determined for how long it takes for whatever we are looking at to start to blend together and our eyes to cross. The Deutsche Museum had lots more for us but we had nothing left for it. On to the rathaus.

I think a rathaus and a cathedral define all city centers in Germany. A "rathaus" is an old city hall where the town leaders did their business. Of course they did their partying in the basement, the ratskeller. Munich's Rathaus was particularly large and ornate. The square in front was filled with folks, many of them tourists like us. We traded a Ratskeller lunch for one in a guidebook-recommended restaurant nearby. We had more rich Bavarian food so it's no wonder we're not losing any pounds.

Tuesday morning, we left for The Romantic Road. We left with good feelings about Munich. Maybe it was set up by the stress-reduced arrival, maybe by the world-class art and technical museums or maybe just by the atmosphere in the streets. We'll be back.

Take care and be careful of men drivers.

John and Marianne

Previous Diary

Next Diary

Home Diaries Best Pictures Road Trip

Created on November 19, 2001.

This page created on a Macintosh using PhotoPage by John A. Vink.