Munich Gardens and Museums

20 June - Day 96 BMW Munich

We took the U Bahn down to Olympic park where the BMW world and museum are housed, and of course the Olympic stadiums too.

First stop BMW. BMW is has two exhibitions here. On the U bahn station side is BMW Welt (world), this is a working showroom where all the current models are displayed for test driving and sales. There is a section for new car pickups, and a number of cafes and resturants within the building.

They cater for curious visitors, displaying their latest cars and motorbikes.

They even have a dirt bike section for bikes made by a vacuum cleaner company Hasquarva.

The building looks very space-age.

We decided not to visit the museum because Marcus has been, and I was not that interested.

After this we took a walk to the Olympic stadium which features a lot of tent like structures, large and small stadiums and swimming pools.

Naturally for Munich in every open and people friendly space, you will find a bier garten. We stopped here for a quick beer before taking the U bahn back into the city.

Next stop was the worlds largest technology and science museum the Deutsches Museum on the Isar river.

This museum has all science and technical exhibits from shipping to robotics.

Materials technology to real scienctists working on DNA sequencing (in that pod behind Marcus).

Flight and aeronautics too, with some cool WW2 planes and rockets thrown in. It would take days to explore if we looked at every exhibit, so we could not do justice to this place in the 2 hours we spent there.

After a late lunch, the weather turned and we went home just in time. It was thundering and raining but despite all that racket we heard a lot of yelling from the street below. So we opened the window for a look.

There was a guy running down our street yelling loudly (perhaps he thinks he was singing - but to us he was yelling) in the rain and stopping every 50m or so for a few push-ups before carrying on. He was of course cheered loudly by on-lookers including ourselves. He soon disappeared around the corner.

Munich streets have lanes for three kinds of traffic. People, cars and bikes. Bikes have priority and the law on their side. We have so often seen cyclists exerting this right over pedestrians with loud bell ringing and cutting people off if you encroach their lane or right of way. Drivers have been at the receiving end of lectures as well. For all the safety practises here, helmets don't seem to be compulsory and only small chilldren wear them. Marcin our guide from yesterday said that if you get hit by a bike, you will be asked for your insurance details so that they can put in a claim against you.

 

21 June- Day 97 Still in Munich

The very large Deutsches museum has two annexes elsewhere in Munich, one is the transportation and the other flight. Today we visited the transportation one in the Bavarian Garden.

The theme is land transportation. So we have history and development of bikes, cars, trucks and trains.

There are some cool exhibits here including this pink caddilac that features in many rock and roll songs.

There is a Mercedes powered by hydrogen fuel cell technology. Some classic and iconic sports cars including this Alfa and BMW are here.

One whole building was dedicated to trains, with working models to show how the engines and brakes work. This again took 2 hours and we did no justice to it.

Being in the Bavarian garden, we were greeted by a bier garten upon exiting the museum, so quick beer stop. The beer gardens here work in two ways, with service or self service. If you want service, then sit at the table clothed tables. Otherwise sit anywhere else. They have a seperate dispensing area for self service and you return you glass and plate at a collection point. All beer gardens serve one brand of beer only (but various types). So you choose your brand by choosing the particular beer garden.

I wanted to have lunch at the Augustina beer garden, after this one but after walking around for 20 mins, we gave up and stopped at a cafe.

 

22 June - Day 98 Englische Garden Munich

We started the morning walking towards the English gardens northeast of the city.

On the way we walked past Konig Platz. This was the headquarters of the National Socialist party (NAZI), Munich was where Hitler started this party.

Of course during the war it was heavily targetted by allied bombers. Even post war there were debates about rebuilding in case it became a shrine for neo nazis. It looks like they have partially rebuilt some of it.

This plaza was the scene of the Nazis book burning night depicted in Indiana Jones Last Crusade. The Nazis have kept meticulous records of the city so that there is no issue with replicating the destroyed city. The extent of the destruction circa 95% means recontruction continues till today, the Konig Platz being one example. Today the buildings house a theatre and a museum.

The English garden along-side Munich university is huge. It has streams running through, plenty of grassland, a lake and a Chinese theme garden within.

Without saying it has a bier garten too, with seating for 3,000 people.

It took us more than an hour to walk through it and along the Isar river back to the city. The walk along the river was interesting too. They have dams and locks, creating water falls.

This loop took us back into the city past the famous Hofbrauhaus. So a beer stop for Hofbrau, for me, and apfelshaft, for Marcus. The beer comes in two size 0.5l or 1l (also called mass - short for massive I guess).

On the way to lunch we walk past the hotel where Michael Jackson held out his son from his balcony. There is a shrine underneath a statue for him

I find German meals too filling, so we went for some Chinese noodle soup where we got to practice our Mandarin with the waitress.

 

Geneva to Munich

18 June - Day 94

This morning we left our hotel in Segny to drop off our mostly trusty Peugeot back to Peugeot at Geneva airport. The drive was 10km so by the time we got there, we had driven the car just shy of ten thousand kilometers in total, 9992km.

We gave the keys back off at the French side of the airport before heading over to the Swiss side to bum around for two and a half hours waiting for our train to Munich.

The train ride was 8 hours in total, consisting of 3 seperate legs and frantic dashes between platforms to reach our next train in time but we rode first class all the way so that was pretty cool. It's not as fancy as it sounds though, it just means that you have enough leg room for your knees not to touch the seat in front of you.

We arrived in Munich at quarter past nine (my [Marcus] second time in this city in less than a year) and walked to our hotel and that was it.

 

19 June - Day 95

Today we took a free walking tour of Munich. We met our guide, a British guy named Marcin (a Polish name, cos his parents were hippies), in the city's Marienplatz. Here is where they have the new town hall, which is in fact older than the old town hall, as the old town hall was blown up during the Second World War and subsequently reconstructed. It's also considered the second most overrated tourist attraction in Europe, behind Prague's astronomical clock tower.

Marcin, who was hilarious, spent about four hours taking us around and telling us about the history of Munich and Bavaria. Mostly, it revolves around beer and the antics of the Bavarian royal family, often both of them at once. For example, when Duke Wilhelm (at least I think it was Wilhelm) the First (and I think he was the first one) bankrupted the entire state of Bavaria by giving free beer to its army and all the surrounding armies. Then one generation later, his son (possibly another Wilhelm but maybe he was a Maximillian or a Ludwig) faced the threat of invasion from the Swedish. Confronted with the impending conflict, he bravely rounded up his army, marched to the city walls and promptly ran away to the mountains.

The city was saved by the citizens who coughed up 160,000 pieces of gold and all their beer to appease the Swedes.

Among other things, we were shown St Peter's Cathedral which has a cannonball lodged in its side, fired by the Austrians at some point in history. During the Allied bombings of Munich in WWII, it was dislodged and found by an emergency worker helping to shelter the people from the bombs. Years later during the restoration of the city, he went up to the workers working on St Peter's and gave them the cannoball to stick it back in its original place.

The Germans also have a place to park your dogs when you're visiting the pharmacy.

And also a statue of Juliet, a gift from the Italian city of Verona, which people like to rub for good luck.

We also stopped at the famous Hofbrauhaus, the beer hall. Here we learnt its story, mainly about its bathroom facilities. When it was first built, the Hofbrauhaus suffered from the fatal logistical flaw of not having a toilet. This resulted in the men (because at the beginning it was a male only affair) having to come outside, pee on the street then go back inside and start a punch up with whoever had taken his seat while he was gone.

To resolve this issue, they took the next logical step and built gutters and drains under the tables so the men would be able to empty their bladders where they sat and rapidly fill them back up again. The problem with this was that the urinator would inevitably make urinatees of either himself, the men on either side of him and the guy sitting across from him, predictably inciting more urine-soaked punch ups.

One night at the hall, an old man innovated the art of pissing on the floor by unveiling his walking stick which had a spiral groove carved down its length, which would direct the flow with minimal splashing and also minimal hygiene. His inebriated audience couldn't quite grasp this concept, so the man kicked aside a table and demonstrated it right there.

As far as I know, the Hofbrauhaus now has proper toilets and allows the entry of women. In fact, they even installed a vomitorium in the mens' bathroom which was a really big bucket with handles and foot flush, but they had to remove this because women constantly kept bursting in to look at it.

We also learnt a lot about Hitler and the beginnings of the Nazi party which interesting but generally a lot less entertaining.

After the tour, we went for some lunch. Dad was gonna go for a beer tasting tour but the guide never showed up so he didn't.

 

Large Hadron Collider - Meyrin

16 June - Day 92

We completed tidying up the Charmonix apartment and prepared to leave early today. The management inspects the apartment before refunding our 200 euro deposit on it. It is a 1 hr 10 min drive to Meyrin just outside Geneva. We were there at 9.30 for our 10.30 am tour. Meyrin is the location of CERN, the Centre for European Nuclear Research. There is no dyslexia here, in French the acronym is correct. I booked this tour in February.

Again there is no border control, but at the disused customs checkpoint, there were a couple officials selling vignettes. Switzerland uses the vignette system for the highway tolls. You have to pay 40 CHF for a year ending December. $54 for driving on about 5km of Swiss motorway in our case.

We were early, so I asked if we could use the cafe to get a coffee and breakfast. Negative, cafe was for staff only, but we could use the vending machine. That didn't take long, so to kill the rest of the time we did the self-guided Microcosm Tour. This exhibition shows the sub-atomic side of physics (the period between the big bang and formation of planets).

Here is Marcus pitting his strength against the "strong force". (There are four kinds forces: strong nuclear, weak nuclear, eletromagnetic and gravity). Strong forces hold together quarks, the components that make up neutrons and protons.

Our very own Nobel prize winning Sir Ernest Rutherford from Nelson features here too, as the person who discovered things were made up of atoms (not fire, wind, earth and water).

The other exhibits were around the equipment used and previously used by CERN in their experiments.

We have detectors for detecting and recording behaviour and energy levels of sub-atomic particles.

The energy level detectors are called calorimeters (stolen from fat farms, I'd say).

We have cryogenically cooled magnets. Super cooled to reduce electrical resistance (to increase power). Magnets are used to accelerate particles. Particles must be +ve or -ve charged, otherwise the magnet has no effect.

CERN itself may be just a small cluster of buildings. But the large hadron collider (LHD) they built is 27km in circumference. A 100m underneath the wheatfields and cows grazing around Meyrin, there is this 7 storey high tunnel with supercooled magnets pumping protons at the speed of light 11,000 times a second around the 27 km circumference and 5 complex detectors picking up all the data arising from when the particles collide.

At 10.30am it is time to start our tour. The tour was lead by a mainland Chinese scientist. He explained that CERN is now a global collaboration effort, so that is why he is here.

The first part was a video of how CERN came to be. It was intended to keep Europe from losing scientists to Russia and US, because no pure physics research is being done in Europe. Finally in the 1950s the 17 european member countries agreed on the structure, funding and so on.

You can see the member flags in the car park. It was a very political process. Today they spend 1 billion euros a year on CERN.

The current objective of CERN is to: find out how the universe came to be, train new physicists and other scientists, make new discoveries to benefit mankind and unite the world under the language of science. So WWW came from CERN, and they think they can target photon attacks on cancer cells without killing surrounding cells.

The young Chinese researcher then took us through the theory behind why they are crashing protons at high speed. And how the LHC and the detectors work.

He also explained how the equipment were built and showed another video of the detector build process. We were taken to the LHC control centre where a whole bunch of scientists were monitoring the acceleration and collision of protons. He said that the hardest part was not accelerating the particles. Rather it was steering these very small protons to collide with each other head-on and release their component parts (remember? quarks) and any other particles no one knows about. These can then be detected and analysed. I thought they should consult our SH1 designers who have no trouble creating hundreds of collisions a year.

I have to say that this is a volunteer led tour and not Hollywood quality. If you are not interested in this sort of stuff, it will be slightly dissapointing.

Once the LHC and detectors have been installed, they are operated continously. So no humans are allowed down there. I guess it is too dangerous. Remember Marie Curie died from ovarian cancer because radiation poisoning was not understood back then.

Anyway he said that one of the detectors called ATLAS is scheduled to be taken off-line for upgrades and maintenance between 2013 and 2014, so anyone visiting can go down and have to look.

One of the questions these guys are trying to answer is why some particles have mass and substance, and some don't. For example protons and neutrons have mass, and photons (light particles), electrons (electricity particle) graviton (attractive gravity) have no mass. Dr Peter Higgs about 40 years ago said that mass is due to these bosons now called Higgs boson. So when they collide protons (which has mass), they are trying to detect Higgs bosons. For people high BMI indicates an excess of Higgs boson.

After this we went to this big globe.

Inside is an exhibition on the universe (as we know it today) and its relationship with the various kinds of particles. The darkened room is in brothel blue.

Our GPS took us to Segny 15 mins away in France to lunch and our motel. It is more cost reasonable to stay in France when visiting Switzerland, I thought.

 

17 June - Day 93

Segny is a very small but nice village. Good boulangerie, a few nice restaurants and a huge Carrefour at French prices (40% lower than Swiss). Wheat farms too.

But we are 8km from Geneva, so a visit is a must.

We took the bus instead of driving, I heard parking even on a Sunday was expensive. Bus fares are expensive too, 4.8 euros for one way. Luckily I read that weekends, 2 can travel a full price bus ticket. Other large cities charge 1.2 euros max for a one way trip.

Geneva is a lovely city. It has a lake and iconic fountain.

Elegant monuments and accurate clocks.

Old city and mainly closed shops on Sunday.

But unless you have family and friends, there is not alot on. Plenty of United Nation Agencies here.

One or two old banks.

After lunch we were back in the motel to reconfigure and eliminate weight from our baggage because we will be returning our car tomorrow to Peugoet.