Munich - Day 3

It took us forever to fall asleep last night. We thought we were all straightened out time-wise, but this turned out not to be the case. We got a couple games of Risk Express in though, so it worked out alright.

After amazing breakfast #2 (in which there were, incredibly, many meats that weren't there yesterday), we headed out to Deutsches Museum, which both the guidebook and Martin suggested we see. It was a really cool museum. My favorite exhibits were:

* The marine navigation exhibit, which included a German U-Boat and a ton of 1:50 models of ships throughout history.
* The computer exhibit, which had 18th century mechanical calculators and a counter built from water troughs and siphons (which I want to try to make into a decorative fountain).
* The technical toys exhibit, which was nearly everything I wanted the toy museum to be (sadly, there was no "history of boardgames").
* And most unexpectedly, the glass exhibit, which had lots of cool bottles and a bunch of fascinating information on how they stain, frost, etch, and otherwise manipulate glass.

Also, the view from the sundial garden at the top of the museum is awesome.

We spent nearly all day at the museum. At about 3pm we realized we hadn't eaten lunch yet, so we decided to hold out until dinner and get the buffet / "Bavarian Evening" at Hofbrauhaus for €10, which we heard about yesterday.

After leaving the museum, we still had a couple hours to kill. First, we rushed to the post office to buy stamps. It costs a whole €1 to send a postcard to the U.S! Then we went to check out St. Lukas Church, which we'd seen from the sundial garden and looked pretty cool. It turned out to be one of the best cathedrals we've seen yet. I rank its exterior 1st, and its interior 2nd out of cathedrals we've seen so far.

Next we caught a bus back to the main shopping district and went back to my new place of worship, the huge and wonderful toy store, Obletter. I bought Ingenious, as I promised yesterday, and resisted buying many more games, since I'm already over-budget. Chris caved to the smallest quantifiable amount of peer pressure ("you should get it") and bought Busen Memo, after much more giggling. The lady at the counter made the purchase even more memorable by actually tsk-tsking him as she rung it up.

After slouching about a bit more, it was finally time to head to Hofbrauhaus. When we got there, it took us about 15 minutes of going up and down the stairs to figure out where the thing was. When we did, we discovered that it cost €19 instead of €10 (we're guessing because it is Friday). After some hesitation, we decided to go for it, since we'd been reasonably thrifty on the day, how often are you in Munich?, and maybe the Bavarian Evening would be as amazing as expected.

When we got inside, we almost instantly thought that we had made a mistake. The entertainment was an oompah band almost exactly the one downstairs, and we were the youngest people in the huge room by at least 20 years. The other clientele were almost entirely large tour groups of sophisticated old people from other European countries. Fortunately, as we got closer to the main act, some younger folks and quite a few Germans started filtering in, easing our worries. The show ended up being really fun, with a dirndl-clad yodeler, an alphorn quartet, lots of lederhosen, and a couple of songs played entirely by shaking different sized cowbells. Basically, if you can think of a Bavarian stereotype, it was present, and it was all really impressive and fun.

Finally, as the "Recently Played" list to the right indicates, we wrapped up the day with a game of Busen Memo.