Day Trip to Munich (March 3, 2007)

Complete Set of Photos

Last Saturday, Margrethe (Canada) and I went to Munich for the day. We had to catch the 5:48 cheap ticket train from Stuttgart to get there directly in an acceptable amount of time! We both just slept on the train, I having gone to bed at 2 that morning! We arrived around 9:30 in the morning to pouring, torrential rain unfortunately. This put a damper on our sightseeing plans, so we ended up going to the Deutsches Museum (German Museum) first, to see if it would quit raining.

The Deutsches Museum is the world's largest science/technology museum, and they're not joking. The place is huge! We were there for about 4 hours, until it stopped raining and the sun came out, and I saw probably less than a 1/3 of it. I'll definitely have to go back. Some of the cool things I did see were the first jet aircraft (a German ME-262 from WWII that was not destroyed), the V1 and V2 rockets, and other various airplane stuff. There was also a computer section with really, really old computers with vacuum tubes and such. There's a picture of me next to a Cray Supercomputer as well!



After a while, the sun came out so we got to walk the tourist route and see some of the Munich sights. This included the Frauenkirche, a huge church built in the 1400's, the new and old town halls, city gates, and more.



We also made a stop at the Hofbräuhaus, which is a beer house for the main Hofbräu brand of beer (famous from Oktoberbest). Inside was just like a mini-Oktoberfest! You sat at an old-fashioned wooden table, ordered a liter of beer in a huge mug, and a Dirndl-clad woman would walk around and sell huge pretzels! There was even live oom-pa music with the musicians wearing lederhosen! It was quite a good time!

After some more wandering and buying pickles at a street market, it was time to head back to the train station, taking the "scenic" route to get there. I also had my first German Burger King, which was some insanely hot burger with jalapenos and spicy sauce. My lips hurt after eating it!

Well, seeing how Munich is so close, I will definitely be going back sometime in the near future. I would like to finish up at the museum and also go to the concentration camp at Dachau, just a short S-Bahn ride away. More on that later!