Working in Norway: Munich, Germany Day 16

8:30am Breakfast followed by returning the rental vehicle to Europcar. Took a walk back afterwards back to the hotel where we got ready to leave for the BMW museum.

11am Walked to Marienplatz which has been the central square of Munich since 1158. We were going to catch the train to the BMW museum from the train station. Like the Norwegian Tog, you have to validate your ticket before boarding. Seems to be a common theme in Europe. We didn't validate our ticket in Italy and escaped with just a warning. Anyway we caught the correct train but stopped at Olympia-einkaufszentrum before realising we were at the wrong stop. So we had a bit of a short delay. The correct stop is Olympia-zentrum which is 2 stops before Olympia-einkaufszentrum. The cost of our day ticket was 9.80 Euro for the both of us.

Schwanthalerstrausse walking to Marienplatz

The new city hall and Apple store. No iPad 2 available here.

Check out the acoustic pyramid like walls of the Olympia-einkaufszentrum train station where the trains come and go. They are used to absorb sound, I thought that was pretty cool.

The funny looking building in the distance is the BMW museum.

We started off at the BMW welt which is sort of like a huge showroom

What the part of the building structure looks like

1pm I ordered a drink from the cafe in the BMW welt (shown above) which is a mix of cola and orange. It tastes like Lemon and Paeroa. Lauren had a Beck's Green Lemon beer. After we had our drinks we went around the area and took photos. We didn't have lunch.

These strange things were moving about randomly on ground floor

Z4. Did you know one of its predecessors, the Z1 was an employee's hobby project? They built it in their free time! Now that's what I call passion. Who needs worthless numbers in a bank account when you can live off your passion?

A weedle BMW

The Ute BMW

The interior of the BMW welt

1:30pm We took a walk to the museum, along a short path which joins the welt to the museum. Entry tickets were 12 Euro per person.

Had to rush ahead to take this picture because there was a Chinese group behind us and I didn't want them in the photo.

They had a temporary exhibit which consisted of "artsy cars" and that's what we started off with.

On the left, the Aboriginal BMW

There's other cars but you get the idea. After that we moved on to the museum. BMW started off with creating engines, then bikes then cars. Here are some photos.

This was a really cool display of animating steels balls that moved up and down in a pattern.

What started it all...

The first bike

The first car

Matrix like hallway

Aluminium frame of a model

Me and my engines

The different BMW models

They also had some other cool bits of tech on display. For example they had a surface which had moving text projected on the surface and if you pressed on the moving text new videos would be displayed and it's fully interactive. Sort of like Surface technology. That was really impressive. There were also large picture books where if you flip the pages like a book, the cameras above the book would detect what pages have been flipped and provide audio narrations for the pages which are currently in view. Very cool! It's like being a kid again and having your parents read to you. :)

4:30pm Left and took the train back to Marienplatz. We walked to Weisses Brauhaus where we had dinner. They actually sell their menu for 1 euro cent if anyone wants to buy their menu to take home. :)

Walking along Rosenstraße

Where we had dinner!

5 different sausages, potatoes and sauerkraut to share

Crackling, hash browns and sauerkraut

I had fillet of trout with white wine sauce and tomato rice

6:40pm After dinner we took a walk, took more photos, then I entered a departmental store called Konen where I bought some clothes. Probably spent more than I should have. :) At 8pm we walked back and arrived in the hotel at 8:30pm or so.