Week 39: Munich

We spent the last weekend in January in Munich. I was in the area for work for the end of the week, then headed out to Austria on Sunday late in the day, so it was a convenient trip. Jason flew down from the Luxembourg airport (he, like me, is now converted to flying Luxair--you get a sandwich, a real, good, sandwich, and a drink on a one hour flight in economy--the only way to fly!) and we met up at the apartment that we rented through AirBnB (if you aren't familiar with AirBnB, it is a site where people can put their extra rooms or even their whole apartment up for rent for a day or a month--we've used it a number of times here in Europe and it is pretty great). The apartment happened to be over a yoga studio. This was our second apartment rented through AirBnB that was over a yoga studio...the lasts one being in France. I wonder if that is a hint from the universe...

For our first evening, we walked around Munich near the Marienplatz and came across a rather good group of street musicians. More of a street quintet. It is hard to see in the video but the flute player appeared to have a broken finger. Talk about suffering for art. After we watched the group for a bit, we found some food that is hard for us to find in our hinterland: Japanese noodle soup. It was good and hit the spot on the chilly night.

The next day we walked over to the Bavarian National Museum, which is one of my favorite types of museums: those with rambling halls and a wide variety of a stuff that is well curated. We spent about 3 hours checking our the wide variety of stuff: from a Tiffany lamp to the statue of Death shown in the photo below. Death, here, is from a clock tower and the bone in his right hand rang the bell. I kinda want this in my living room.

Death Rings for his Supper

We took a walk from the museum to the downtown area, passing by one of Munich's larger parks. I had remembered reading briefly in our guidebook about the fact that you could go surfing at one of the parks. They have an artificial wave built up on one of the streams, and people grab their little surfboards and go at it. I was not expecting, though, for anyone to be out this time of year, especially in the 20-25 degree F weather that Munich was seeing that weekend. Well, as you can see in the video below, my expectations were wrong. These guys were out in their full-body wet suits, many with hoods, to surf in weather that was only borderline-good for being outdoors.

We spent a couple hours on Sunday at the Deutsches Museum, which is another museum of my ilk, with a huge amount of exhibit space and well curated collections. I was reminded of the Henry Ford Museum, which Jason and I had visited about a year ago in Dearborn, MI, but the Deutsches Museum was organized far better than the Henry Ford and did not have a vague smell of hot dogs from the Wienermobile permeating all the exhibits.

For those of you who are a fan of the Theater of Electricity at the Museum of Science in Boston, the Deutsches Museum had a bit of a smaller venue, but a similar show. We walked in in the middle, just as the host was getting his last shock in his Faraday cage (the ball on the left in the linked photo). Don't worry folks! He was fine--the Faraday cage protects you from the shocks. Once the host climbed out of the cage, there were a series of high voltage demos, that went as follows:

Host: "Achtung!"

Crowd: (Covers ears)

Electricity: "ZAP! POP!"

Displayed Item that was Just Hit by the Electricity: (Catches on fire)

which is always a good time.