Our last day in Munich!

Thursday, 14 March, 2013

Guten Abend!

A cold, snowy morning

At the Paleontological Museum

Fossil of pine brance

Archaeopteryx

Fossil of life on a sea floor

Fossil plants

Our last day in Munich, as we catch the train to Paris in the morning!  Up bright and early to a sparkling but very cold and frosty day.  It is periodically snowing, with flakes coming down the size of small bed sheets.  Down to breakfast about 7, and ready to head out shortly after.  In our hunt for good museums, we have two more than we plan on seeing today.  The first one is the Paleontology Museum, which is located in one of the local university buildings.  We caught the tram into town, and got off at the main train station (from where we’ll be leaving tomorrow).  There we caught the #100 MuseumBus, which took us up to the university.  We found the building with no problem – it isn’t technically speaking a “museum” because there are no entry fees or staff – rather it is a four story building, with the museum built around the atrium on each floor.  In a way, it reminded me a bit of Caltech, as the students and professors offices were all spread around.  There wasn’t a word in English anywhere, but fortunately most of the skeletons were self-explanatory, as they had a large collection first of ancient fossils of animals and then plants and flowers.  The highlight of the collection was an ancient archaeopteryx (a reptilian precursor of birds) on which you can actually the fossil remains of feathers!  Really neat!  They also had several floors of a geology museum, but that definitely needed more translation than we could manage.  All in all, though, a much better collection than anything we saw yesterday, so we were encouraged.

Glyptothek interior

Roman bronze

Athena at the Glyptothek

Early Greek sculpture

Greek decoration

From there we walked to the Glyptotek, one of two buildings housing the Greek and Roman antiquities.  Building one, which we had practically to ourselves, encompassed mostly the sculpture side of things.  Unfortunately, during the last days of the war in 1944, the building was bombed.  They have pictures of the “old” set up, so you can see what the rooms had looked like “before.”  The building – rebuilt using plain brick -- now is much less decorated – it is very plain indeed, but the proportions are what they were before, and there are some really beautiful galleries.  There are also several friezes from Crete and Greece – quite a lovely collection.  Then, across the very large courtyard is Part II – mostly the jewelry, glass and pottery collections.  There was at least one school group here, which definitely livened up the place.  This building wasn’t nearly as interesting content-wise, but there were a fair amount of English translations, which were helpful.  

By now it was after one, and we thought we would head homeward, first taking the 100 MuseumBus to the end of the line and back.  Nice trip, but to be honest, Munich, while a really nice, neat and clean city, doesn’t have the architecture or old buildings that we like so much.  On our way to pick up the tram, we stopped at the same place for lunch where we’d been the other day.  Nice and warm (considering that it is somewhere in the 20’s, but feels like 21 degrees according to the weather channel…) restaurant.  Robert had their St. Tropez salad – grilled skewers of shrimp with greens.  I had their special “Chef” salad – narrowly sliced cheese and ham with artichokes, tomatoes, and endive lettuce – honey dressing, which was great!  All washed down with some good red Italian wine!  Then it was back outside into the C-O-L-D to find the tram back to the hotel.

Chef's Salad

Grilled shrimp salad

Got in somewhere around 2:30 p.m. and down for naps!  Have to admit that we do keep asking ourselves – “how did we ever live in this weather?”  Between coat, scarf, hat, gloves, etc. – takes forever to get into and out of clothes!  Obviously we are REALLY spoiled by living in Tucson!!

Someplace local for dinner tonight; not sure where (as it is already 5 p.m. and I’m not hungry in the least!)  Then, train tomorrow morning at 10:28 a.m.  There is one train change, in Stuttgart, to the TGV, which gets us into Paris around 4:30 p.m.  A long day, but shouldn’t be too difficult – we just have to sit and watch the country fly by!  

More after dinner!

m

xxx