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Monday was my final day in Munich and it was another scorcher. As I had to close my window the previous night due to a student argument, I wasn't awoken to the sound of heavy drilling, meaning I had a leisurely lie-in before packing and checking out of the room. I had to print my boarding pass for my flight, which came with the usual rigmarole, but the hotel lady was very helpful and we got it sorted eventually. I dumped my bag in the left luggage place as my flight wasn't until 9:45pm and headed out into the summer sun.
My intention had been to visit the Allianz Arena, home of Bayern Munich. They do daily stadium tours and they also have a museum there dedicated to one of the most successful club sides in European football. I noticed their flyer in the hotel so set off on the U-bahn with the hope of getting food along the way. It was only when boarding the U6 in the city centre that I realised that the train was only going to Munchner Freiheit, about two thirds of the way there. This is a nice little area just north of the student district, with many restaurants and eateries so I stopped there to get some breakfast before analysing my options. An Amerikaner, a disc-shaped iced donut thing, and a can of Coke may not be the best way to start the day but it's what I fancied and that was the most appealing thing that the bakeries in the Underground station had (seriously, nearly all of their sandwiches came with frigging tomato - can't stand raw tomato - it's just rubescent mulch). It was at this point that I noticed that there was a rail replacement bus service for part of the U6 and upon deciding that it would be far too much hassle to get involved with that, I opted instead to go to the Deutsches Museum, the biggest museum dedicated to science and technology in the world.
Any museum which has a 188 page booklet dedicated to it is going to be an intense experience. Founded by Oskar von Miller in 1903 and situated on the middle of an island in the Isar River, the current building is very authoritarian in design and comes straight out of the 1920s. Spread over six floors, all of the exhibits are undergoing renovation, a process that takes 15 years to do so unfortunately a handful were closed, including the planetarium and the observatory. I was at the Museum for a little under five hours and even then I only scratched the surface, deliberately avoiding all of the sections which I knew about (I have a Natural Sciences degree from Cambridge) and focusing on the main attractions and the niche subjects about which I wanted to discover more. Nearly every branch of science was covered and every field within that branch. There were exhibits dedicated to aeronautics, astronomy (in the observatory of the building situated on the sixth floor), chemistry, optics, microelectronics, computing, music, biology, the genome, tunneling, oil and gas exploration, pharmaceuticals, timekeeping, mining, metallurgy, agriculture, glass, ceramics, civil engineering, environmental technology, pure mathematics, coding, communications, aviation and a special children's section worringly called Kinder Reich. They even had a roof terrace dedicated to the history and variety of sundials, upon which you could enjoy an excellent panorama of the city. The whole building was a warren but one with surprises at every turn - not least the grand opening area with its huge boats and early planes hanging from the ceilings, threatening to destroy the world below. An early Wright Brothers plane is exhibited here - the Double Decker Type A from 1909 - while there were also examples of Messerschmidts, Fokkers and a range of US and German military planes.
There were two cafes in the building - the Internet Cafe which was sadly closed and another cafe which gave an excellent bird's eye view over the planes. Here I had a Coke and the driest slab of lemon cake known to man, but I didn't mind such was the view. The museum itself was not a particularly hands on affair, although there were opportunities to try and fly a model airplane or climb inside the cockpit of a WWII German supply plane. In the optics section, you could experiment with Young's Double Slit experiment and a variety of other trials with prisms but in the main, it was a look at things museum rather than anything interactive. The vast majority of exhibits had explanations in both English and German, except for the oil and gas exploration section, which for some reason was just in German, a standard of German far beyond my meagre knowledge.
What I particularly liked about the museum was, as well as the sheer variety of scientific endeavours covered, the context in which all this was put. The history of scientific enquiry from the Babylonians through to the modern day was covered and in areas such as optics and astronomy, the discoveries were put in chronological order and tied together to form a narrative. This was particularly the case in the mathematical, coding and computing section - something I studied very little at university but which even I found fascinating here. There was an Enigma machine on display and the exhibit took you through the history and methods of coding and the mathematical principles behind it. Even the industry sponsored events - specifically the section on nanotechnology and particle physics - were very well presented, with the explanational balance pitched perfectly so that someone with little scientific knowledge could understand yet someone with significant scientific knowledge could learn something new. All this for a €3 entry fee was amazing (admittedly the guide cost €7 but without it you would be lost) and I was sad when the lady announced the museum's closure over the PA system. I could have spent two or three full days here and would still have found something of interest. In the end, considering I wasn't even going to go at all, I was delighted I could spend a handful of hours in such an interesting building.
Upon leaving the museum, I decided to have a walk into the gay district of Munich to see if I could find any other bars of interest. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the gay venues are far more diffusely spread than they are in the UK and with little taking my fancy, I opted to go back to the hotel, watch a bit of Top Gear USA where they advocated punching a clown, pick up my bag, head to the main train station and board the S8 S-bahn back to the Airport. This would have left me about three hours early for my flight but with the time being 6pm and thus in the middle of rush hour, coupled with the fact the train journey was the best part of 45 minutes and the Hauptbahnhof is fricking complicated, I thought it would be better to get there early than rushed. Furthermore, upon arrival at the airport last Thursday, I had noticed a bar in the outdoor area between Terminals 1 and 2 which claims to be the only brewery that is situated in an airport in the world. This I had to try, so I thought I'd combine a meal with a beer and sit in the sunshine on the large square they had constructed between the two terminals. Apparently, this was the largest covered beer garden in Europe - the sky adorned by a perspex roof not dissimilar to that of the 1972 Olympic Stadium, which I visited on the Friday.
The bar was called Airbrau, which makes sense really, and I tried two of their mainstream beers - one in the square and one inside the terminal building itself after I had gone through customs. Their unfiltered pilsner had a nice aftertaste while the Flieger Quell, a more hoppy ale variety had its own smooth distinctive taste. The ambience of the main square was changed slightly as they had a large outdoor screen and stands set up to allow people to watch the World Cup - if only I had remembered this when looking for an outdoor venue to watch the Germany game two evenings before - but it was still nice sitting on one edge of the garden and watching passengers flit in and out of the terminal building under a giant head-on photograph of a plane which looked like it was going to run you over at any moment. The service at Airbrau wasn't the greatest in all honesty, but along with the nice beer, I also had a nice plate of food. Eschewing the Bavarian cheeseboard in favour of three dollops of Bavarian soft cheese on bread and a pretzel, I was happy with my choice although the paprika taste of the cheese could have been more intense. Pretzels plus filling are the way forward though and the sheer amount of salad you got with it made it more a meal than a snack as I had hoped it would be. This was just as well really as they served some smingy sandwiches on the aeroplane, specifically pepper and aubergine and chicken and feta, with the feta cancelling out the chicken completely. Again they came with fricking tomatoes.
I caught the final five minutes of the Netherlands match in the World Cup zone before going through customs and finding myself with an hour to kill before my flight. Cue my second experience with Airbrau in the terminal building, which shockingly closed at 9pm, and me flirting with the idea of buying a wolf looking sorry for itself in the duty free. I didn't, but it was a wrench. The flight itself was interesting as I was originally asked by a woman in her Fifties whether I could move so her daughter could sit next to her as she was afraid of flying. The daughter refused to move so I stayed where I was, but this broke the ice and we spent the whole flight chatting, which put her off her phobia. She was a triathlete who had just come back from an event in Kitzbuhl where one of the Brownlee brothers had been competing. She lived in Newark so told me all about the by-election and as she worked in policing, she told me some interesting things about crime in the area too. It was great chatting to her and she loved my dry, sarcastic humour. It was a nice end to a nice trip.
My intention had been to visit the Allianz Arena, home of Bayern Munich. They do daily stadium tours and they also have a museum there dedicated to one of the most successful club sides in European football. I noticed their flyer in the hotel so set off on the U-bahn with the hope of getting food along the way. It was only when boarding the U6 in the city centre that I realised that the train was only going to Munchner Freiheit, about two thirds of the way there. This is a nice little area just north of the student district, with many restaurants and eateries so I stopped there to get some breakfast before analysing my options. An Amerikaner, a disc-shaped iced donut thing, and a can of Coke may not be the best way to start the day but it's what I fancied and that was the most appealing thing that the bakeries in the Underground station had (seriously, nearly all of their sandwiches came with frigging tomato - can't stand raw tomato - it's just rubescent mulch). It was at this point that I noticed that there was a rail replacement bus service for part of the U6 and upon deciding that it would be far too much hassle to get involved with that, I opted instead to go to the Deutsches Museum, the biggest museum dedicated to science and technology in the world.
Any museum which has a 188 page booklet dedicated to it is going to be an intense experience. Founded by Oskar von Miller in 1903 and situated on the middle of an island in the Isar River, the current building is very authoritarian in design and comes straight out of the 1920s. Spread over six floors, all of the exhibits are undergoing renovation, a process that takes 15 years to do so unfortunately a handful were closed, including the planetarium and the observatory. I was at the Museum for a little under five hours and even then I only scratched the surface, deliberately avoiding all of the sections which I knew about (I have a Natural Sciences degree from Cambridge) and focusing on the main attractions and the niche subjects about which I wanted to discover more. Nearly every branch of science was covered and every field within that branch. There were exhibits dedicated to aeronautics, astronomy (in the observatory of the building situated on the sixth floor), chemistry, optics, microelectronics, computing, music, biology, the genome, tunneling, oil and gas exploration, pharmaceuticals, timekeeping, mining, metallurgy, agriculture, glass, ceramics, civil engineering, environmental technology, pure mathematics, coding, communications, aviation and a special children's section worringly called Kinder Reich. They even had a roof terrace dedicated to the history and variety of sundials, upon which you could enjoy an excellent panorama of the city. The whole building was a warren but one with surprises at every turn - not least the grand opening area with its huge boats and early planes hanging from the ceilings, threatening to destroy the world below. An early Wright Brothers plane is exhibited here - the Double Decker Type A from 1909 - while there were also examples of Messerschmidts, Fokkers and a range of US and German military planes.
There were two cafes in the building - the Internet Cafe which was sadly closed and another cafe which gave an excellent bird's eye view over the planes. Here I had a Coke and the driest slab of lemon cake known to man, but I didn't mind such was the view. The museum itself was not a particularly hands on affair, although there were opportunities to try and fly a model airplane or climb inside the cockpit of a WWII German supply plane. In the optics section, you could experiment with Young's Double Slit experiment and a variety of other trials with prisms but in the main, it was a look at things museum rather than anything interactive. The vast majority of exhibits had explanations in both English and German, except for the oil and gas exploration section, which for some reason was just in German, a standard of German far beyond my meagre knowledge.
What I particularly liked about the museum was, as well as the sheer variety of scientific endeavours covered, the context in which all this was put. The history of scientific enquiry from the Babylonians through to the modern day was covered and in areas such as optics and astronomy, the discoveries were put in chronological order and tied together to form a narrative. This was particularly the case in the mathematical, coding and computing section - something I studied very little at university but which even I found fascinating here. There was an Enigma machine on display and the exhibit took you through the history and methods of coding and the mathematical principles behind it. Even the industry sponsored events - specifically the section on nanotechnology and particle physics - were very well presented, with the explanational balance pitched perfectly so that someone with little scientific knowledge could understand yet someone with significant scientific knowledge could learn something new. All this for a €3 entry fee was amazing (admittedly the guide cost €7 but without it you would be lost) and I was sad when the lady announced the museum's closure over the PA system. I could have spent two or three full days here and would still have found something of interest. In the end, considering I wasn't even going to go at all, I was delighted I could spend a handful of hours in such an interesting building.
Upon leaving the museum, I decided to have a walk into the gay district of Munich to see if I could find any other bars of interest. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the gay venues are far more diffusely spread than they are in the UK and with little taking my fancy, I opted to go back to the hotel, watch a bit of Top Gear USA where they advocated punching a clown, pick up my bag, head to the main train station and board the S8 S-bahn back to the Airport. This would have left me about three hours early for my flight but with the time being 6pm and thus in the middle of rush hour, coupled with the fact the train journey was the best part of 45 minutes and the Hauptbahnhof is fricking complicated, I thought it would be better to get there early than rushed. Furthermore, upon arrival at the airport last Thursday, I had noticed a bar in the outdoor area between Terminals 1 and 2 which claims to be the only brewery that is situated in an airport in the world. This I had to try, so I thought I'd combine a meal with a beer and sit in the sunshine on the large square they had constructed between the two terminals. Apparently, this was the largest covered beer garden in Europe - the sky adorned by a perspex roof not dissimilar to that of the 1972 Olympic Stadium, which I visited on the Friday.
The bar was called Airbrau, which makes sense really, and I tried two of their mainstream beers - one in the square and one inside the terminal building itself after I had gone through customs. Their unfiltered pilsner had a nice aftertaste while the Flieger Quell, a more hoppy ale variety had its own smooth distinctive taste. The ambience of the main square was changed slightly as they had a large outdoor screen and stands set up to allow people to watch the World Cup - if only I had remembered this when looking for an outdoor venue to watch the Germany game two evenings before - but it was still nice sitting on one edge of the garden and watching passengers flit in and out of the terminal building under a giant head-on photograph of a plane which looked like it was going to run you over at any moment. The service at Airbrau wasn't the greatest in all honesty, but along with the nice beer, I also had a nice plate of food. Eschewing the Bavarian cheeseboard in favour of three dollops of Bavarian soft cheese on bread and a pretzel, I was happy with my choice although the paprika taste of the cheese could have been more intense. Pretzels plus filling are the way forward though and the sheer amount of salad you got with it made it more a meal than a snack as I had hoped it would be. This was just as well really as they served some smingy sandwiches on the aeroplane, specifically pepper and aubergine and chicken and feta, with the feta cancelling out the chicken completely. Again they came with fricking tomatoes.
I caught the final five minutes of the Netherlands match in the World Cup zone before going through customs and finding myself with an hour to kill before my flight. Cue my second experience with Airbrau in the terminal building, which shockingly closed at 9pm, and me flirting with the idea of buying a wolf looking sorry for itself in the duty free. I didn't, but it was a wrench. The flight itself was interesting as I was originally asked by a woman in her Fifties whether I could move so her daughter could sit next to her as she was afraid of flying. The daughter refused to move so I stayed where I was, but this broke the ice and we spent the whole flight chatting, which put her off her phobia. She was a triathlete who had just come back from an event in Kitzbuhl where one of the Brownlee brothers had been competing. She lived in Newark so told me all about the by-election and as she worked in policing, she told me some interesting things about crime in the area too. It was great chatting to her and she loved my dry, sarcastic humour. It was a nice end to a nice trip.
