Rainy Munich

Yesterday it rained. All day, and it was not warm. Nonetheless, we toured museums and took a double-decker bus tour. We started with the Archeological Museum, which used to be called the Prehistoric Museum. The high point was an exhibit about Herculanium, one of the cities destroyed by the explosion of Pompeii in 79 AD. (It was covered under 65 feet of volcanic ash! The inhabitants – the ones who didn’t escape within the first couple hours or so – were killed instantly when temperatures rose suddenly to 400 degrees Celsius. This temperature change meant that all the moisture from people’s bodies and household objects was instantly evaporated, so a lot of things were preserved that usually would not be.) We were able to really enjoy the exhibit because we listened to the English audio tour. The rest of the museum had displays of prehistoric arrowheads in addition to Roman artifacts.

We also went to the Bavarian National Museum to see items from this part of Germany – a lot of Christian art, statues and carvings of Jesus and the saints. They had one room with an exhibit of games through the centuries. Backgammon looked about the same in 1500 as it does today!





We had dinner at Augustiner Brau, a restaurant across the street from the Munich Hofbrauhaus. I (Mike) had schnitzel with mushrooms and a cream sauce. Melanie had some type of tender pork (schweinbraten). We sat with a German couple on vacation from a town up north. They claimed they didn’t speak much English, but the husband actually did quite well with it – fortunately for us, as our German (between us) is about limited to hello, goodbye, please, thank you, and counting to ten. On the way home we stopped for a beer.

Today our plan is to go to the Viktualien Market and the Museum of Unusual Objects, which appears to consist mainly of chamber pots.