Wednesday

I'm going to start this one with a bold statement: the Deutsches Museum is now my favorite museum. I spent about four hours in it and I'd love to go back again.

The Duetsches Museum is a science and technology museum. According to the New York Times, it's the "largest technological museum of its kind in the world." It started in 1903 by the Association of German Engineers.

I walked to the museum this morning, through the Marienplatz - the city center of Munich. It was packed with tourists and tour groups. This is the site of the city hall (Neue Rathaus) and it's famous Rathaus-Glockenspiel, which goes off at 11:00am every day.

The museum is on an island in the Isar river but your might mniss that fact - the river is pretty small on either side. The museum building is huge but if you follow the signs to the entrance it becomes apparent that only half of the building is a museum. The other half is the Deutsches Museum Library.

A ticket was 8 Euro. The entrance hall isn't too extravagant, but is quite functional. The first exhibit I went to was the steam engine exhibit - it had examples of engines from medieval windmills to modern day generators. From there I went on to Aviation,then Space, then tunnel construction, then robots, then cameras, then clocks, then weight measurement, ... there were a lot of really, really cool exhibits.

I went to the coolest one last - mathematical tools. This one started with the compass and straightedge and ended with the microprocessor. Unfortunately, this exhibit was under construction (along with half of the museum - it was a bit difficult to get around). Everything was still there - adding machines, vacuum tube computers, Enigma cypher machines, microprocessors, but about half the stuff was covered in plastic. It was still the coolest museum exhibit I've ever been in.

I did have to miss out on the Telecommunications exhibit due to the construction. That means I need to go back.

I spotted one sound system - it was a center cluster of Fraizer horn loaded speakers. I was first surprised because I hadn't heard of these before, and even more surprised that they are high quality speakers hand made in Dallas, TX. Unfortunately, it looked like someone had decided that a center cluster wasn't cool enough and added a pair of K+H speakers on stands on the sides of the stage with a subwoofer that I haven't figured out yet. By the way, K+H doesn't exist anymore. It's been rolled into Sennheiser and it looks like most of their speakers have been discontinued.

After a walk home I went to dinner at a the Bier und Oktoberfest Museum because it looked cheap and I hoped the museum would be open. It was cheap but the museum wasn't open. The restaurant really wasn't set up for one person dining. Dinner was sausage, sauerkraut, potatoes. I feel like that's going to become a reoccurring theme.

Next is bed time!

Oh, I forgot my USB cable. That means I have to buy a nice, expensive one tomorrow before I can upload any pictures.