Day Five: BMW Welt
Brian and I found a little fun place called BMW Welt
Sheiße! We seem to have overslept. Or perhaps we subconsciously changed our minds. We had a Barcelona moment, but since we hadn’t purchased our tickets to Austria, it was no loss to us. Except the Augustiner Brewery!
When we did finally wake up, we decided that rather that trying to race to Austria, we should look for something “touristy” to do in Munich.
And we found it: BMW Welt.
An enormous tribute to Munich’s biggest auto-maker… or a multi-million dollar advertisement for BMW. You can even pick up your new car here at the factory and they make a weekend of the experience for you. Wow. The exhibits they had were mildly biased, but they spared no expense on the presentation. Entire three-story walls were made into fluid animations with rear-projection screens guided your way. 100-foot long touch-sensitive tables with interactive overhead projection laid out the history of BMW. Enormous picture books with visual recognition queued a recorded voice over, filling in the details the picture couldn’t convey. So much technology!
And of course, the cars. Every make and model that has ever bared the BMW emblem was here. The Bond cars, the first BMW production car, even the original aircraft engine that got the company started.
After spending most of the day there, we stopped on our way home again at Marien Platz for a snack and then… the Hofbrauhaus! That famous touristy trap that no touristy day would be complete without! Interestingly, though, the Haus was filled to the gills with Germans! Rick Steves must have got it wrong. It took over 10 minutes to find a bench to plop down on, but when we did, the consumption of large quantities of beer began, served, of course, in the traditional one-liter mas!
