So a Peugeot 205GTI is small?
We get up around 5:30. Breakfast at the buffet downstairs at 7:15, off to the Deutsches Museum at 9. We manage to hop off the tram in front of a drugstore, so we pop in and manage to buy some Augentropfen before hoofing the seven or eight longish blocks to the museum.
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| Just a small snippet of the sights at the Deutsches Museum |
The Deutsches Museum is incredible. First exhibit through the door is power machinery, ranging from waterwheels to water pumps to steam engines to gas turbines. Funicular railways. Cutaways of full-scale early electric and diesel-hydraulic locomotives. To say it's spectacular doesn't even begin to cover it.
Cars? A Porsche 959 drivetrain on one wall, a MAN city bus drivetrain on the other. Complete suspensions borrowed from production cars - solid-axle to Porsche five-link. Did you know the 1969 Opel Diplomat had a De Dion rear suspension? Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz Nazi-era GP cars. Engines from DKW to Graham-Paige to Horch. A bare aluminum Audi A8 unit-structure. Would you believe an exhibit on Ackermann effect in a public museum?
Planes? Messerschmitt 163, Messerschmitt 262 with a cutaway Jumo engine. Various jet-age hardware including an F-104. Cutaways of a dozen different gas turbines from the first Heinkel to a Pratt & Whitney JT9.
Space travel and rocketry - interesting, not as big as the exhibits at Cape Canaveral, but fits well. A sizeable presentation on the development of the V2, focusing on the engineering achievements, of course, not the, ahem, less pleasant details of their construction and use.
A whole floor on computer development. A whole floor on telecom. We didn't even get to the top floor. This place begs to be seen 2-3 hours a day over a period of multiple days.
We leave the museum in early afternoon; by this time my head was spinning. The subway over to BMW Niederlassung (service center) was hotter than hell. We pile out of the station, let the sweat dry a little, then head into the dealership and check in at the desk.
A few interesting cars on the floor - the new E46 320i. An M Roadster, with full-boat 320HP engine. A 540i with Xenon HID lights, parking sensors, and radial-spoke 17x8/17x9 wheels (none of which is available on '98 US-market E39s) priced at DM130K. By way of comparison, a base 150HP 520i with cloth upholstery goes for DM55K, a heavily dressed 523i is DM77K.
We move over to the café to use our 'free lunch' coupon. I order the tuna sandwich, Eva orders a Diet Coke. They're out of both, I order ham and cheese instead. We're about fourth in line. About forty minutes later Gunter came in, found us, and took us out to look at the car. All looks well; he dredges up some black plastic service-mats for the floor - they're ugly but better than nothing. One last trip back in to check the trinkets-and-accessories counter - we pick up a copy of the German accessories catalog, and Eva buys a couple key-rings as gifts for friends. As we drive out onto the streets of Munich we look at one another and realize that they just gave us the car without checking our ID. Oh well.
A few more observations on German cars in general: there are zillions of 5ers on the roads. Few have model badges, but they're obviously lower-end models - hubcaps, small wheels, cloth upholstery. Likewise, herds of low-end Benzes, Cs and Es, E200/E230 gas, E230D/E240D diesels, E290D turbodiesels.
The drive back to the hotel takes a whole ten minutes. We find a spot in the small parking lot and head back to the room. We can't decide what to do next, then once we come up with a few ideas we can't agree. Finally Eva wins, and we catch the tram back across town and shop for a while. We blunder into a Betten Rid shop and suddenly I know just what I'm doing: we're buying a big German pillow. A very helpful salesclerk walks us through all the different pillows available, then pillowcases, and half an hour later we're heading out the door with a big bag, wondering how we're going to get it in our luggage. The clerk comes sprinting out after us; I'd left my wallet on the counter. I sheepishly take the wallet back. Eva hits me.
Big, down-stuffed bag in hand, we halfheartedly start walking toward the Englischer Garten. Eva's getting tired and we soon start bickering; after a few more minutes we turn back toward the tram line but we keep walking in search of dinner. After a very long time we stumble into a kabob place on Schlierstrasse and enjoy a surprisingly good meal. Peace restored by a little rest, we catch the tram back to the hotel and quickly pass out.