Munich!

So I promised that I'd talk a little bit about my weekend in Munich. Lots of sights to see for such little time, but Matt and June and I managed to get through many of them, and kind of get a feel for the town. Would I come back? Certainly! (especially for Oktoberfest...) But here are some pictures, and I figure I will just narrate as I go along.

This is Marienplatz -- smack in the middle of old Munich, it's quite the sight to behold. The work on it is really intricate...and this is also the site of the Glockenspiel, the old decorative clock that's on the tower that has moving figures and stuff.

We went to the Deutsches Museum, which is a massive museum of science and technology. When I say massive...it's HUGE! The thing is like a giant cross between a museum and Science World. We took about 5 hours in the place, and we only managed to cover about half of the place. This is June and me in front of a really reflective thingy...and possibly the coolest-looking piano ever. In fact this was built so that it could be played as an acoustic piano, but also accepted plugs for effects pedals and computer control (a la guitar pedals and stuff).

This is part of the Residenz, which was a living-place for nobility of old. It was a beautiful day too, luckily...it had rained on the way out and in the morning, so we were really worried that we'd be trudging along in the rain for some of this outdoor stuff. However, we lucked out!

This cool-looking statue was on one side of a massive town square, which was really cool. We were kinda puzzled because as we were here during the day, there were people setting up sound, lighting, PA...little did we know that as we crossed this area again in the evening, they were just playing some dance music and people were dancing in the street! (Including one member of our party of three, who just kept spinning and spinning and spinning...)

In the middle of the Residenz was a really beautiful park, the Hofgarten. The old buildings, meticulously well-kept, and everything...it's a really nice town. I can definitely see why the people rank Munich right up there as a top city to live in, in terms of quality of life.

My travelling companions, Matt and June. Their tired look can probably be attributed to a 5:00am wake-up time to catch the early train, plus a lot of beer.

The next morning we took a train out a little ways and visited the memorial for the Dachau concentration camp. The lettering on the door reads "Arbeit macht frei," or roughly, "Freedom through work". Walking through the exhibits was quite disquieting and disturbing...I didn't really want to take many pictures.

Upon our return to Munich, we visited the BMW Headquarters and museum, which is possibly the coolest-looking building I have ever seen. It practically looks like something right out of Sim City! The permanent museum was under renos so we went to their temporary exhibition which was pretty cool anyway. I swear the entire purpose of the museum is to make people love BMW and want to buy one, because that's certainly what I felt when I walked out of it!

Of course, I had to take that aerial photo of the BMW building from somewhere, and that somewhere was the Olympic tower, right across the street. It's something like 200 metres tall, and the view from up there is definitely spectacular. We tried to pick out the sites we had gone to see over the past two days from the top of the tower, but it was rather difficult...we were reeealy high up.

...where to go next?