So we had our two week visit home. I had to work the whole time and the family had various appointments to keep with doctors, pictures, and shopping so we were quite busy the whole time. Not to mention two football games and a Halloween party plus family to see. We kept very busy the entire time, no rest for the wicked.
We "smuggled" 16 beers back to the states. Actually, you can bring 6 L per person we read. So I got some friends together for a taste testing party. Krombacher Pils and Konig Ludwig were two favorites. Altenmunster was not, although it had a neat bottle.
The plane trip back was not too terrible. Three hops so we could come straight into Stuttgart this time, and the kids were really great on the plane. Some screaming in the airports, but not so much in the air. However, we had a rough time getting back on Europe time this week. A couple of days were were totally out of sorts, but now I think we are caught back up.
So we tried an "easy" weekend trip to Munich to see if we still had our touring legs. Nope, not really. Things started bad when we forgot the video camera and had no juice for the still. No pictures!
This time it was not rainy in Munich! It was actually sunny. We went to the Deutsches Museum, the world's biggest museum of science and technology. What a snoozer! Scale models of old dairys. Antique looms. Old scales and weight standards. They did have a V2 on disply: great if you want to bomb London. And they had a cool electricity exhibit with a man in a cage with 200,000 Volts. But overall, we rate it two snores. The museums in Speyer and Sinsheim were much more fun and not so focused on education.
We did a drive-by on the Hofbrau haus. But no beer! We had to replace a mug one of the kids broke, and I picked up my first German souvenier, a HB mug just like my dad got when he spent a summer in Germany forty years ago. In a few generations, my family may have a whole set.
We did made it to the BMW museum in Munich. It is very new and shiny, but we were a little under impressed. The coolest thing they have is a kinetic sculpture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVhVClFMg6Y
It is two sections. BMW World was just a big showroom with some exhibits. Neat architecture, but confusing to navigate. The BMW museum section was nice, but also hard to navigate. You wander down hallways into a basement touring rooms off to the sides. Some were not stroller friendly. At the end, they have you walk UP a spiral to see a couple of new cars then escalate down (the new cars were covered for us?). MB does a better job overall in Stuttgart IMHO. But the kinetic sculpture was amazing.
Then on Sunday we did our sixth trip to Legoland. Gotta love a year pass. This is the last day they are open until March, so we stuck around for fireworks (something rare in Germany unless they are hosting a world war).
One beer last week-
Erdinger Urweissen- This is a new erdinger and I think it is now one of my favorite wheat beers. Very tasty. Looking over my list, I have had Kristal, HefeWeizen, Dunkel Weisen but I don't think I have had their standard Urweissen...
