I got up at 6am this morning. Easy when your body thinks it’s 2pm. Still dark. Off to the Deutsches Museum, after a few hours spent on emails and looking for a shopping centre the BnB host directed me to that I never found. It has stopped raining!
Slight hiccup on the train on the way into the city too. It stopped at Ostbahnhof and there was an announcement in German that I couldn’t understand, so I ignored it and continued daydreaming. I knew I had 2 stations to go. When I awoke from my reverie, I was the only person on the train. The door wouldn’t open, or the next door. I knocked on the window to enlist help from a passer by outside. She couldn’t open the door either. I could see the driver a long way away down the train, and sprinted through several carriages to knock on the window just as he was about to leave too. He let me out through the driver’s cabin saying something in German. It’s probably good that I couldn’t understand it. The next train was right in front and everyone got into that and off we went. The Museum is marvellous, a famous technological museum with much more interesting stuff than you can see in one day. I spent 6 hours there and missed quite a bit. I was briefly there about 17 years ago, and the computer history displays didn’t seem to have changed at all. Many other displays are decades old but didn’t need modernising. It was good to go back after so long and not have everything you like swept away. Some of those ancient computers were designed and built in my lifetime!
At one stage I found the cafeteria, and feeling thirsty, discovered that the cheapest liquid available was beer, cheaper than bottled water. Most other customers seemed to know this too. After the Museum closed at 5pm I wandered toward Marienplatz, the Golden Centre of Munich.
Along the Sendlinger Strasse a busker was playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, concerto number two, 3rd movement, on an accordion. Living in the Southern Hemisphere, I think of that movement as February. It was fabulous. The accordion was electronic, so perhaps he wasn’t actually playing it. If so, he fooled me. I paid 3€ to climb the bell tower of St Peters, good view. Thousands of people in the streets, no vehicles. Lots of bicycles too in Munich, no helmets. I quite like Munich. It reminds me of Strasbourg, strangely enough. The people here dress differently to the French. Everyone wears jeans, just about everyone. A lot of people smoke too.