Day 6, Of Munich

Posted: June 3, 2013 | Author: thediaryofadork | Filed under: The Diary of a Dork: Regensburg '13 |6 Comments »

Time for an out of order post! (Also a long post, reader beware)

Last Friday (May 31?) the entire group went to Munich (or München, wenn du Deutsch sprichst) by train in the morning. It was about an hour and a half ride there. We arrived in a pretty big train station, the München Hauptbahnhof. The weather was still bad; it was colder than it was in Regensburg and still raining. I think there was actually a severe weather warning out.

The train we took was actually nice and very clean, even though it wasn’t one of the high speed, expensive ones. I think it was my first time on an actual train.

Once in Munich, we went as a group to the Marienplatz, a plaza in the city center where the Glockenspiel was located. We saw a few other landmarks on the way, like a city gate left over from more medieval times.

The Glockenspiel is in a big square lined with shops and tourist traps. A big group of tourists stood around with us in the cold rain while the clock rang noon and the Glockenspiel didn’t move. I personally thought that was on purpose to make fun of all the fools who stood stared up at this old building and nothing happened, but five minutes later the little figurines started to spin and dance to the music. Apparently, the building was constructed around the turn of the century, the Glockenspiel at the top re-enacts a historical, typically Bavarian event, a wedding of nobility and a jousting tournament to honor it. It is mostly for tourists, with an information center on the first floor, a large restaurant in the basement, and an elevator up to the top of the tower for visitors to use.

After Marienplatz, we went to another famous tourist trap, the Munich Hofbräuhaus.It was crowded and somehwat overpriced, but you can’t go to Munich without going there. I preferred my apple strudel to the spanferkel (suckling pig? Too fatty for me, but the guys had no trouble helping me finish it off) I ordered for lunch at the recommendation of my professor, and though I did not order a liter of beer like everyone else, my sparkling apple juice did come in a stein. The Bavarian band was playing in the other dining room so I didn’t get to hear much of the traditional music, which was a little disappointing. I also don’t think anyone walked out with a stein under their jacket, which was also disappinting. (Just kidding.)

Moving on. After the Hbh we all split up. The weather had gotten worse and my roomate was slightly tipsy so we went in and out of shops for a while to avoid the rain. Then we made our way to the subway and hopped on for one stop to go to the Deutsches Museum, where I scored a ticket for 3 Euros with my international student identity card. My roomate did not join me on this adventure because she had already been there and apparently had no desire to wander through the museum again.

Overall, the musuem was a bit like the Smithsonian, based on sciency stuff. I only had an hour before closing, but I went through as many floors/rooms as I could. My least favorite was the chemistry/biology floor, where they had a small display on planned parenthood and tied a feminism plug into an informational blurb about hormones. They did have several other, more interesting exhibits, however, including a giant room with full-sized ships, an aeronautics section, and a giant selection of cameras. As is my luck, the musical instrument exhibit was already closed for the day.

However, probably the best exhibit was in the basement, taken up entirely by the mining exhibit. The whole thing started off by a set of winding stairs behind a wooden drilling patform that led you several floors down and proceeded to turn into a cave, reminding me very much a waiting in line at splash mountain or thunder mountain railroad (I heard the American preteens behind me saying the same thing, actually). The exhibit was probably the biggest one they had, since apparently coal mining was a very important part of German history, and the entire thing was built to actually look like a mine, lantern-lights, rock walls, tunnels and all. There was even a mine cart and tracks.There was a definitely a lot of effort put into it. My description doesn’t really do it justice and the lighting wasn’t right for any good pictures, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

After the museum, we were going to go to the english gardens, but the weather drove us back to the subway station instead, where were went back to the Hauptbahnhof and caught the next train back to Regensburg, which, to my personal fascination, was a double-decker contraption very similiar to the first train except that it had two floors. Obviously, we sat on the second floor (and this time I made sure to face the way that the train was moving to avoid some motion-sickness). For the first time all day after our various uses of public transportation, someone actually checked our ticket- which I fortunately had not managed to lose- and we were on our way without a hitch, except that the conductor had to keep apologizing over the speaker to the punctuality-obsessed German population about being ten minutes late.

So yep. That was my day-trip to Munich. I had fun despite the weather, and will probably be back to Munich sometime during this trip, so hopefully I’ll get to see a couple other things there as well.

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