You Go Nate!

From Miscellaneous Munich

Alan Comes to Visit - Part V:
MISCELLANEOUS MUNICH (Sep. 12th)

Originally we had planned to spend a day at Neuschwanstein, the famous castle (where I still have yet to go.) The weather wasn't too great on Friday and so we decided to spend the day in Munich instead. I later found out that Neuschwanstein is under construction and covered in scaffolding, so it's a good thing we didn't go!

Our first stop of the day was Nymphenburg Palace. Nymphenburg is a schloss (poorly translated as: "castle") This Baroque palace was built as a summer residence for the rulers of Munich. It shares some similarities with Versaille with its encircling wings around a central driveway and a stately garden behind the palace. A large forest with streams, lakes, meadows and trails spreads out like wings behind the main palace. Nymphenburg Park is not too far from where I live and I come here to run quite often.

Here I am by the front of the palace...

The gardens behind the palace.

We didn't go into the palace, but we did peek in through the windows...

I made a new friend...

A Schwaan!

Scattered throughout the park are various buildings, serving different functions and built mostly in the 18th century. The most famous of these buildings is the Amelienburg, a small hunting lodge that is considered to be a masterpiece of German rococco art.

Here I am at the Amelienburg...

We paid €2 and went inside. We saw the dog kennel room, the bedroom with a stairway to the roof next to the bed...

From the roof the "hunter" could shoot birds that flew up from the neighboring meadow.

This lodge was a mini palace in its own right...

Most of the decorations inside featured hunting themes. Pheasants, deer, boar, guns, and dogs could be found in painting, and stucco throughout...

The kitchen was tiled in the Oriental style that was popular at the time. It featured small scenes from a mythical idyllic China.

Next we walked to Nymphenburg's largest lake. Here is the Temple of Apollo built in the 1860's by the lakeside...

From Nymphenburg we went to a good Indian restaurant I know of and had curry. After that we went to the Deutsches Museum. This museum is the like the Smithsonian of Germany and is huge. I came here back in May with the missionaries and even after visiting it twice I still have yet to see everything inside.

Here you can see it as the domed building in the center with the dark glass panels of the Head European Patent Office next door.




We headed to the mining exhibit where I wasn't able to visit the first time I was here. There we saw some actual stone-age tools...

And then we followed through tunnels of recreated mines through the ages and the mining equipment used.

Here are some figures in a recreated salt mine....

Next we went to the boats section. Here is Alan peeking in one of the first WWI U-Boats...

Nate in the underwater exhibit...

The aerospace section...

The outer-space section included a moon rock and a flag from Germany that was carried to the Moon aboard Spacecraft America during the Apollo XVII mission and presented to Germany by Pres. Nixon in 1973...

We visited several more very interesting exhibits. You can see more from the Deutsches Museum at my blog entry from when I was there previously.

We had a nice view of the inner-Munich skyline from the museum. We left the museum and went to the pedestrian area to look for some good souvenirs for Alan.

After acquiring souvenirs we had dinner at a German restaurant right next to the Frauenkirche (the church with the two onion-domes.) There we both had typical German dishes, excellently prepared and Alan even got an Apfelstrudel. It was an appropriate and fitting (and filling) final meal for Alan's visit to Germany.

After dinner walked to the Marienplatz just as the sun was going down and got some fun twilight photos of the Rathaus and its surroundings.

From Miscellaneous Munich

We got home fairly early because the next morning we had to wake up at 4AM so that Alan could make it to the airport on time to catch his 7AM flight.

It had been great fun to have a visitor for a week (especially one who brought beef jerky). Six days and over 1700 pictures later (I didn't keep all of them, but it's taken me this long just to get through them all), it was nice to relax a bit on the weekend before going back to work on Monday. We had packed a lot of trip into such a short period of time.

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