Thursday, August 12, 2010

Road trip north, part 12

Munich: to some, it's the land of beer. To others, it's the home of the BMW museum and factory tour! Tip for visitors: try to book ahead for the tour in English. Otherwise you end up on the German tour and have no idea what the guide is saying. In our case, the tour guide wouldn't even give us the earphones so we didn't even get to try to hear what was said. Still, you can see factory workers and robots putting together the various parts of the cars and pretty much figure out what's going on.

No photos are allowed on the factory tour, alas, but we did take some in the museum. A classic motorcycle:



There were some real beauties on display.



What lines! Smooooooth.



And oh, yeah, we looked at the town as well. Here's the Town Hall (Neues Rathaus).



We were lucky to catch some great chamber music on the street. Ever seen buskers with a piano before? Not exactly the usual instrument of choice of street musicians.



Here in Bavaria and also in the Tyrol (Austria and parts of northern Italy), we noticed many shops that sell traditional clothing, like lederhosen, caps with a jaunty feather, and sort of peasant girl/milkmaid outfits. In Munich, non-traditional colors are available, as shown below.

4 comments:

Melissa V said...

*siiiiigh* My Mom had a '73 3.0 CS for a while (I got to drive it when she got sick of the stick shift). It's soooooo nice to see one that's in mint condition.

Corbie said...

The costumes look like a bad American caricature of Tyrolean costume. I guess the irony doesn't translate well or something.

peripatetic said...

Melissa, lucky you and your mom.

Mara, this place was a clothing shop with racks full of variations on these outfits. We chose to take the photo of the strangest combos, but there were plenty of others that looked more traditional. People wear these as everyday clothes, still in 2010.

Vidi Bonnardeaux said...

i kid you not Dan, I am 90% certain I saw a vietnamese guy carelessly merge (as they do!) in front of me driving one of those gorgeous old-school BMW motorcycles. I was baffled!