2023 Dolomites

Wednesday 9th August:  Weather: 12°C to 19°C: Drizzly rain and cool then overcast and warmer. 

Munich: 8.0k walk:  8hrs: 8.30am to 4.30pm: 1 x 4hr stop at Deutsches Museum 

Accommodation: Euro Youth Hotel Munich

Highlight of today was visiting the Deutsches Museum, an amazing collection of old and new science and technology.  Founded in 1903, it is the largest of its kind in the world with over 28,000 exhibits.

We’re awake at 6am after a few wakeups  through the night.  Our cosy twin room is a bit dishevelled but it suits us with a little table and chairs and a basin.  The shared bathroom  a few metres away in the corridor is spotless.  It’s drizzling rain but that’s OK as we’d seen the weather forecast and had planned to visit the Deutsches Museum.  After a leisurely breakfast of meusli and cream, we wander down to Aldi to buy 2 SIM cards, stopping on the way to buy two umbrellas at the reject shop.  Next door at Aldi, it was hard to catch the attention of the cashier, or she just ignored us standing there looking like tourists, but after flashing an Aldi brochure in front of her with a photo of the Aldi phone plan we wanted, she just repeated “finito, Morgen”.  We gathered that they’d sold out but there would be some in the morning.  

Not content to take a risk if there would or wouldn’t be any Sim cards in the morning, we googled (using the Aldi supermarket’s free Wi F)i another Aldi store closer to the Deutsches Museum where we would be heading.  An hour later, we’ve walked through the town, across the river and spy the Museum with streams of people lining up.  We opt to go to Aldi first, and yes they did have 2 Aldi Talk starter packs, then back to the river at 11am for a coffee sitting under a tree beside the Isar River. It’s still a light drizzle.

By the time we’ve gone back to the Deutsches Museum across the river, the queue is 300 metres long and it’s more than drizzling, it’s raining.  Up go the umbrellas while we stand in the line which has now grown by another 100 metres with people behind us.  The queue moves slowly, but we’re entertained by the flock of ducks paddling and flapping at full speed up stream against the rapid current.  An hour later at 11.30am, we’re at the entrance and buy 2 tickets.  First we need to go upstairs to the cloak room to stash our back pack in a locker which requires one euro to open so Ian joins another queue to get change.

At last we’re in and first up is a great hall with old aircraft from pre WW1 hanging from the roof.  I could spend an hour writing about all the amazing things we saw in the next three hours wandering from floor to floor.  It truly was a mind boggling collection of science and technology from old aircraft, to the latest in heart transplant gadgets. Outstanding was the famous Foucault’s Pendulum, a 30kg mass hanging 70 metres from the ceiling of a tower, moved only by the earth’s rotation. It’s 3.30 pm when we leave, having spent an hour in the queue to get in, then another 3 hours wandering around, yet still we probably only saw half of the 28,000 items on display. 

Wandering back through town, we stop at a small Rewe supermarket to pick up 2 x bread rolls, ham, tomato and cheese for dinner, before reaching our Euro Youth Hotel at 4.30pm. Just enough time to unpack the small back pack I had carried with rain gear and coffee stuff and go downstairs to the bar to trade our gift vouchers for 2 complimentary beers.  It’s noisy with young people playing cards at a table stacked with used beer glasses.  They’d obviously had a merry time for a long time. Back to our room to have a ham, cheese and tomato bread roll before an early night at 9pm.