For my last day in Munich I got up early to go to the Deutsches
Museum, “the world's largest museum of technology and science.” I was really excited. It is located on an island in the Isar River and
the building was originally used as barracks for workers that transported wood
down the river. It was donated to the museum in 1903.
Overall, I was sort of disappointed in the museum. Quantity does not mean quality. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
blows this place out of the water and I even liked the Galileo Museum in Florence
a lot more. However, here are the
highlights: you can take an awesome
picture of the famous Munich skyline from the window’s of the staircase; the exhibit on photography is interesting;
the recreation of Altamira cave (the Spanish cave with some of the oldest cave
paintings in the world) is really cool, since almost no one is allowed to visit
the actual site; they have a fully
automated miniature clay brick factory that is neat to watch; finally, the
space exhibit was awesome.
The space exhibit had satellites and equipment that has
actually been in space. They also
recreated the lunar rover and Mercury Capsule (it is not very big) and they had
a lot of space suits from astronauts and cosmonauts. They also had a lot of space food including
dehydrated cheese sandwhiches that were about 1 inch square. It was interesting to see so much stuff from
the Russian space program. A lot of
displays had Cyrillic labels (including the food. Хляб, anyone?). This was my favorite part.
After leaving the museum, I took a nice walk down the river
to the English Garden. It is one of the
world’s largest public parks that was established in 1789. On my way there, I passed by the Bavarian
Parliament, which is an impressive building to say the least, and the Angel of
Peace, a monument created in honor of the 25 years of peace following the
Franco-German war. Once I got to the
park, I saw beautiful leaves and a nice lake.
By then I was tired, so I just caught the train to the airport.
Now, funny story, I was at the airport 4 hours before my
flight. I read my ticket and headed to
gate 29. Turns out, I read that number
wrong (it happens sometimes, I’ll tell you more about it if I ever get around
to blogging about my trip to Serbia) and almost missed my flight, which was
leaving from gate 39. AAAHHH! Brain!
Why do you do this to me? I heard
the last call for passengers to Sofia and ran to the gate and got on the bus
with my heart pounding from panic. I was
soon joined by the president of the school and his wife. They were coming home from Portugal and their
previous flight had just gotten in. At
least they had a better excuse for being late than just reading their gate
number wrong. The important thing is
that I made it home and since I met the president and his wife, I got a ride
back to campus.
