Germany: Munich Weeks 3 and 4

Friday is Good Friday and Monday is the day after Easter and both are holidays here in Germany. So for the 4 day weekend, Justin Speer, Joey Heekin, Bridget Gibson, and Claire Koenig came to visit Munich. Corey Knapke works with me at BMW here in Munich, but he spent the holidays in Rome for Holy Week where he got to visit the Vatican and see the pope. It just so happened that my roommate was on vacation for the whole weekend, so we decided to smash the 5 of us in my small room about the size of the dorm rooms in Calhoun Hall. Thankfully my mentor was super nice and let me borrow a two-person airmattress.

Everybody arrived Thursday night and the first thing we did once everyone got settled in was head to Hofbräuhaus. There we all ordered a beer of course and I ordered schweinebraten which is a cut of roasted pork and that came with potato dumplings. It was delicious. Hofbräuhaus was packed with tourists from a bunch of different countries. There was a full brass band there playing traditional Bayern polka music which was awesome. It was honestly a little bit embarrassing though to see tourists going up to some of the older men wearing full traditional lederhosen and big white beards and asking for pictures with them as if they were Mickey Mouse or Scooby Doo or something. I’m sure they’re used to it though. After we left, we went past an ice cream place that served dark chocolate ice cream. Dark. Chocolate. Ice Cream. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had to get some and it was perfect.

I can't help it, they're so photogenic.

Friday we decided to take a walk to Olympia Park. Along the way, we stopped at BMW Welt. In there are a bunch of cars, motorcycles, and engines on display. There’s a lot of non-car related abstract things in there too that add to the BMW image of being an art and a luxury. The coolest thing was the robots that follow you around…

After that we walked to Olympia Park. We sat down next to the lake and had a picnic with sandwiches and fruit for lunch. After that we walked around the trails a little bit and then scaled a huge hill. It was really steep and we decided to take a shortcut up the hill instead of going up the trail. Everyone was exhausted once we got to the top haha. It was worth it though because it was an amazing view of Munich.

After that we stopped at Schloss Nymphenburg and got some pictures on our way to Hirschgarten. Hirschgarten is the largest beer garden in the world and seats 8,000 people. There I ordered a pan of roasted pork, duck, and ham leg with potato dumplings and König Ludwig Dunkel Weissbier. Our table also came with pretzels just like breadsticks or rolls in the U.S. MMmmmm… It might have been the best meal I’ve had here so far. The coolest thing about Hirschgarten is it’s located right in a park and before we left, we saw some people feeding about 6-8 deer.

Sweet subway station

On Saturday, we decided to go to Deutsches Museum. We were only there for 3 hours though which was not nearly enough time to scale 7 floors of the largest museum of science and technology in the world. The stuff I was most interested in were the Musical Instruments, the Nanotechnology, and the Ships exhibits (vastly different topics haha). After the museum we had reservations at a nearby pizza place called Gast. Their pizza was very good but it was so thin. All of the pizza here in Germany is super thin and I’ve been told it’s that way in Italy and all over Europe too. It was delicious, but I really like thick pizza. After that we decided to go back to my room and watch Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix dubbed in German. It was interesting. I’m not a fan of dubbing. I would have rather seen it in subtitles, but it didn’t really matter because I fell asleep after only about 10 minutes.

What the....

Is that a trombone? yes it is.

Look at the size of that piston! It goes in a ship engine.

On Sunday morning, Claire and Bridget went into the Altstadt to go to an Easter service and I hung back with the guys. We chatted until they got back and talked a lot about our upcoming trip to Berlin the first week in June. Once they got back, we went to Englischer Garden and walked around in the amazing weather around a big lake until we came to Seehaus, a beer garden and restaurant directly on the lake. There everyone ordered crepes except me because my stomach hurt for some reason. Later in the afternoon we all went to the Hauptbahnhof and said our fairwells while everyone caught their trains back home.

This week at work, my mentor Fritz who I do photogramatry with was on vacation, so I worked with Corey and my other mentor Jann on vibrations and acoustics testing. We’ve been running tests on a Mini cooper by cementing steel plates across gaps between the body and doors and windows. We’re trying to see the effects of the increased stiffness on vibrations picked up by accelerometers and acoustics picked up by microphones located in the driver and passenger seats where a person’s ears would be. It’s really interesting to me. I scheduled classes this Wednesday and chose to do the acoustics/vibration track for my senior year department electives. I’m really excited about working with it hands on right now in my job and it will definitely help me for studying it in the classroom next year.

The next Saturday, I went to some grocery stores and bought some cooking supplies during the day. Around dinner time, the FC Bayern Munich soccer game against FC Schalke 04 came on and I decided to go to a sports bar to see it. The three people from work I invited to go with were all busy at the time so I just decided I would go anyway, order a beer and try to strike up some German conversations. I definitely chose the wrong bar though….everyone was like 50 years old or more. At least I got to see the game which was awesome. I don’t have a television here and that was the first soccer I’ve watched since I’ve been here.

Sunday, a coworker named Christoph from Frankfurt who is doing his Master’s degree at BMW, another intern named Rob from Holland, and I were going to go to Deutsches Museum but it was closed because May 1^st is a holiday here in Bayern. Rob ended up not coming, but me and Christoph went to BMW museum instead which was surprisingly open. The museum was really cool seeing all of the old BMWs, the new BMWs, and even some of the old aircraft engines. It was cool to talk with Christoph in German about the cars and about a lot of other things as well.