We slept till 9:30am (oops!) and forced ourselves to get up despite getting 9 hours of sleep. We had fresh croissants with Nutella, Muesli and fancy European espresso (despite how good it tastes, for cost reasons, I think we’ll stick with good ‘ole drip coffee). We rode the subway 4 stops up to Universitaets Platz and got off for a stroll around the Englischer Gartern.
We saw the Chinese Pagoda and walked around a nice duck pond/lake that was partially frozen over (would be great for ice skating), with a beer garden that must be lovely in the summer time.
We mosied our way back into town and saw some guys “surfing” a spot where the small river that runs through the park moves rapidly and tumbles down a small drop to form a standing wave. It looked very cold, but considering their only option within their country is the North Sea, I guess it’s not too bad.
Our ultimate destination for the day was the Deutsches Museum, as the forecast was calling for rain. We check trip advisor, read our guidebooks, ask for reccommendations, but sometimes it’s a bit of a gamble if a particular museum will appeal to you. In this case, we won the lottery! To say the Deutsches Museum is HUGE would be an understatement. We spent 4 hours there, but felt like we needed at least 4 days to make it through all the wonderful exhibits.
The Deutsches Museum is part Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, part science museum and totally awesome! We started with the mining exhibit which was creepily underground and HUGE (we spent an hour there not realizing that there were 50 other exhibits to see).
We then picked up the pace and checked out the aircraft/spacecraft hall, boats/ships, old-school computers, microscopes and telescopes (including an old-school original electron microscope), nanotechnology, printing presses, musical instruments, and photography… just to name a few… They had old stuff up through modern day, and even though most of the descriptions were in German only, it somehow worked (sorry, my knowledge of German mining terms is limited). The size and scope of their collection is really awesome and a great gift to the future…(i.e. when the next generation asks what a floppy disk looked like, it’s captured in the museum).
With our ticket, we got a free admission to one of their two branch locations (they have so much stuff they set up auxillary locations for aircraft and trains, cars, etc.)
After the museum closed at 5pm (so sad), we made our way to Marienplatz and noshed on another pretzel with cream cheese and chives, some Nuremberg Bratwurstchen and a 1L Mass of Paulaner…very exciting indeed! We wandered around the Viktuelienmarkt and then made our way home by foot. We are so glad we have yet another day in Munich!
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