Saket Vora

This was a really great day. I woke up when the alarm on my cell phone went off at 6am, but my sisters were still sound asleep. I took a shower and got ready then at 7:30am they finally awoke. It was ok though, because they got ready quickly and we left the hotel at around 8:30. There was still a lot of snow on the ground, but fortunately the skies were clear and the sun was shining. We walked to the train station and had breakfast in this nice bakery called Müller. It is a chain of bakeries but the staff here was friendly. After breakfast we walked to the Marienplatz to see it in the sun. The whole façade there is quite a sight, reminding me a lot of Brussels and Brugge. Sapana and I were feeling very cold this morning and I think every ten minutes I said to them “It’s really cold out here”. This meant we would often duck into a store and browse around for a few minutes. We sort of re-traced our steps a bit from the previous night, walking to the Residence and seeing some of the gardens from afar there. We also went into the Dallmayr store to buy some more things, like coffee and such. Sachi was going to buy tea for her ‘Tea Club’ back home, and she first picked up some Dallmayr black tea but then I saw they had ‘rooibush’ tea and immediately told her to get that instead. I remember drinking it with Christian and Judith while watching a movie and even though I’m not a huge fan of tea, I really liked it. It was getting near 11am, so we slowly made our way back to Marienplatz. We hit up the post-office to buy stamps for postcards, and tried again to use the machine outside (remember the disaster in Brugge?) Once again, we messed up again, this time buying European postcard stamps instead of international ones. I went inside and spoke to a lady about my problem, but she was very nice. She took the stamps back, gave me the right ones, then simply asked I pay the difference. All of it was in German, so I was feeling pretty good at what I knew. We stepped into a bookstore to warm up a bit then rushed outside once we heard the bells to see the famous ‘Glockenspiel’. Turns out that not all the churches are synced. We waited some more, seeing all the crowds gathering with their heads turned upward. I remembered the same thing happening in Prague, where I thought the whole thing was rather overrated. The bells starting going for real at 11am, though we waited about 5 minutes before anything started to move. The knight hitting the other knight was kinda cool, but still, maybe I just expect more from these things. We then went to Ludwig Becks and looked around a bit before going outside to the fountain to meet up with Christian at 11:30am. Right on time, he and his girlfriend Miriam came and we greeted each other and they met my sisters. We pretty quickly decided to go eat dinner and Christian pulled out a list of Indian restaurants. We said anyone of them was fine, so they led us down to the metro and we rode it for about 10 minutes or so to a part outside central Munich. We told Christian how we always buy metro tickets but that no one ever checks for them. He said that in 2 years he has been checked maybe four times. The area where we were had a lot of cafes and restaurants and stores and stuff, but not all high-end like the area between Karlplatz and Marienplatz. This was more suburbian. We navigated our way and found the restaurant, and they had some good choices. We went in and ordered, with four of us on Christian’s cue getting spezie, which we can’t find at all in the States and is a drink that is definitely German (it’s a mixture of coca-cola and orange fanta, plus some other things). We talked about our trip so thus far, how expensive Switzerland was, and our trip to Olympiapark the day before. I also asked about their upcoming skiing trip to southern France. Christian has a new snowboard he wants to try, and we took bets on who could race down the mountain faster. Miriam said she is faster on her skis but Christian takes a lot more risks (which I can totally understand). My sisters are rooting for Miriam, I am rooting for Christian, of course. We also discussed what was coming up next for Christian and Miriam, and I inquired about his departure from Lund and such. Christian mentioned that he recently saw a newspaper article in which a minister in German has publicly supported Intelligent Design, so we discussed how this rather sad American export is at least breaching Europa. The food was good (just about the same quality as that in Switzerland at half the cost!) and best of all after the meal they served us chai (Indian tea) which was really, really, authentic. My sisters and I were impressed. Christian pulled out his wallet, intending to pay for the whole dinner, and I attempted to stop him, but he beat me to it ultimately. What a gentleman. I did a little to make it up by beating him to the Deutsches Museum (where we went to immediately after lunch) and at the Hofbraühaus. I guess I’ll just have to come back to Lund and buy him dinner there!

The Deutsches Museum is something I have wanted to visit ever since hearing about it my German language class in middle school. It is one of the largest museums in the world dedicated to science, technology, and engineering. It was funny to see Christian’s eyes light-up when we mentioned the DM. They actually three campuses, one is their main one but there is another dedicated to aircraft and another dedicated to automobiles. The DM is something you can easily spend two days exploring, at least. As it is situated on an island in the middle of the Isar river that runs through Munich, we had to cross a bridge. We went down to the riverfront, walked under the bridge, then back up on the road and then across the bridge we walked underneath! Heh. After giving our coats to the garderrobe, we proceeded to explore the museum. We had about 2.5 hours before it closed, so we had to move fast. We first went through the electric power and machinery, with Sapana and Sachi wondering why this was all so interesting. For me, I could relate it to the internship I did at Progress Energy just this summer. We moved on then to something more excited – aeronautics. The Germans led the world in pioneering the jet engine, so there were many exhibits on jet planes. This area of the museum, which spanned three levels, reminded me very much of the Smithsonian Air and Space museum (the crown jewel in my opinion of the Smithsonian museums in Washington). We wandered upstairs to the astronautics, where they had a model of the Mercury capsule and a whole line-up according to scale of large rockets. I expressed my love and admiration for the Saturn V, explaining to Christian how I was the kind of guy who could name every Apollo astronaut. We saw a special exhibition on medical technology, so we ventured there and here is when Sachi’s eyes lit up. She got really excited here, and looked with fascination at this video of a procedure to replace someone’s heart valve. I only saw maybe 1 minute of it, but afterward I was honestly feeling a little queasy. I did see a demonstration on the EKG and I actually knew something about this cause of Dr. Snyder in ECE 301. On our way up the stairs we also saw the DM’s Foucault pendulum, which pretty much any respectable science museum has an example of. We continued onward to chronometry, saw a life-size model of one of Gutenberg’s printing presses, telecommunications (I was surprised at how informative it was…reminded me a lot of the digital communications course I took this semester), weights and measures, and into astronomy. As we were walking into another wing, Sachi caught a look outside of a wonderful sunset over Munich, with the red sun lighting up the horizon. The pictures I tried taking of it didn’t do it justice. Alas, it was time to go. We tried passing the Foucault pendulum on our way down but they kept shutting doors off, and finally we got to the aeronautics center where Miriam was reading her newspaper. She wasn’t there, so we went over to the garderrobe and picked up our things. Pity the museum isn’t open longer, though I do not know how long the Smithsonian museums stay open. I really must come back to the DM and see it entirely…especially the aircraft and automobile museums. We left the DM and headed to the metro, where we went to Marienplatz. It was about 5:20pm or so, so it was nighttime. We made our way over to the Hofbraühaus next. The Hofbraühaus is perhaps the most famous beer hall in the world, and as a result is so incredible touristy. The hall is enormous, which large long tables. It’s not uncommon to share a table with strangers (as we did). A lot of smoke and loud talking and waiters quickly walking through the crowds with enormous glass mugs in their hands. At first it didn’t look like we would find an open table, but Miriam spotted one and we quickly sat down. For being the Hofbraühaus, they serve maybe six kinds of beer. The classic of course it the house light brew, served in a mass (one of the ridiculously large 1 L glass mugs). Miriam, Sapana, and Sachi got one mass to share and Christian and I each had a 0.5 L weissbier. I was telling Miriam and Christian about how we’ve been trying to get Sapana to try a lot of beers but how she’s never liked any of them. Surprisingly, she actually liked the brew! We have a good picture of her hoisting the stein. Christian hadn’t been in the haus for around 10 years, and I could understand that entirely. There seemed to be more foreigners than Germans, though we did see people wearing the traditional hats, even some groups of elderly people around a table enjoying a drink. This was also the first time in my life that I could consciously feel the alcohol having an effect on me. Before this I had drunk 0.5 L or just a bit more, but it was always with a lot of food. Today, it had been five hours or so since I had eaten and we had been on our feet walking around the whole time. After we left, we stopped at a bakery and I got a pretzel to try to absorb some of the alcohol. We made our way back to Marienplatz and it was here where we said goodbye to Christian and Miriam. They had been so generous and helpful taking us around Munich and afterward I was feeling very down, realizing that it would be a long time before I see them again. My sisters were also feeling sad too, and they told me that I was right – all of the friends they had met were amazing people. From here we did some of our last souvenir shopping; we bought two steins, one for Sunil Uncle’s relatives and one for the O’Connors. I bought some more of the addictive roasted mandelnusse (which we actually determined after asking Christian were almonds), and as we made our way to Karlplatz we went into the Kaufhof and bought a German stainless steel Thermos. Sachi said mom and dad already bought a thermos, but I figured if they don’t use it, I will. Then I can start the story again of a cherished German thermos which I lost, and maybe my kids will go and buy me another one from Germany too. With the beer inside of us and some pastries from before, we weren’t feeling that hungry so Sachi and I picked up some falafel for take-away. We went inside the train station to check how tomorrow’s S-Bahn trip will go, and Sapana went to buy a tomato-mozzarella baguette (she had had enough falafel for the trip). Later at the hotel, the falafel turned out to be very spicy. We finished off some of the other food and did our packing while I was showing Sachi and Sapana some of radiohead’s songs. They think radiohead is a bit weird, which they are. I went down later to the lounge to check and write some e-mail, and when I got back (my sweater still smelling of smoke from the lounge), mom called us to check-in before we went traveling. We talked to them a while then finally went to bed. I was checking the photos from the day as I was lying in bed and couldn’t stop from laughing when I saw how many of Sapana’s shots were completely crooked. I then started looking at some ‘NichtLustig’ comics and had many a good laugh too. Brilliant stuff.  It was getting late, so at my sister’s insistence I shut down the computer and went to bed.

It was such a terrific way to end our European trip.