Munich Day 3

Continued from Munich Day 2, Oktoberfest!

After a whole day of heavy drinking, I woke up with surprisingly little hangover. I’ll count my lucky stars. First business of the day was to pack everything up and move to a new hotel. We didn’t want to pay high premium prices to spend all 4 days in the city center of Munich during Oktoberfest so we decided to move to the suburbs after 2 nights in the city center.

Saw them during breakfast in our hotel. There were more of them, probably 15 or so all together. Let me guess, they are going to Oktoberfest.

At the crosswalk to the main train station. Most of them will be heading to Oktoberfest.

Here comes the train. 20 minutes later, and we were in the burbs.

Definitely in the suburbs. It’s nothing like the rest of Munich that we’ve been seeing for the past two days.

Our new temporary home. The walk turned out to be a 15 minute walk from the train station. Damn you sprawl!

The benefit of moving to the suburbs, aside from the cheaper price, is a huge room. We had our own suite with a couch and everything. All that was nice except the actual shower itself is still tiny! We all kept on hitting our elbows into the wall while taking showers. I don’t know how these tall big built Germans could take showers in such small confined spaces.

Scissors!?

Lunch at the local beer garden.

We flipped through our phrasebook while waiting for our food to show up and found some humorous pages. Our favorite one being “I think this was a mistake.” Hah.

This was my dish. Pork with mushroom gravy. Awesome.

Back on the subway to our first destination today. Munich has a pretty extensive train system.

As expected, German trains are on time and very clean.

Field trip, lucky kids. One of the best things about being a kid.

We’ve reached our first destination for the day. BMW World and BMW Museum.

We really came here to see BMW Museum, but walked through BMW world just to see what’s inside. They had these self motoring drones that wandered around the lobby area. If they run into you, they’ll turn red and stop. Not sure what purpose they serve other than just pure entertainment.

The museum is that toilet bowl looking thing on the right. The bowl structure is actually quite small, I hope this museum doesn’t suck.

The ticket. Fortunately, most of the museum is actually set underground, so it’s a decent sized museum. I wasn’t that excited about the BMW museum because I am an Audi and Porsche guy. It’s considered heresy to visit this museum…

Pimpin’

Sidecar racer. Sweet.

Crazy stuff. Why anyone would do this, I do not know. Actually, I bet they get all the girls for doing stupid dangerous stuff.

I want!

There is a room that has a giant flat surface in the middle with the room with these projected lights. You can touch the different parts of the light on the menu and the display will change. I think everyone was more intrigued by the interactive display than what was actually displayed.

Beautiful 507. The Z8 coupe is inspired by the 507. I know what a Z8 looks like, so I didn’t take a photo of it.

Z1. First time for me to see this.

I’ve always only seen rust bucket 2002s, so it’s nice to see a museum quality piece.

Isetta, also known as the Urkel car.

Yes, everyone and their mother would like to have an E30 M3. Yes, that includes me.

M1.

AHHHHH, my favorite BMW. 3.0 CSL. It’s so beautiful.

They had some really simple roll cages back in the day. I’ve made cages myself that are just as good as this one. Crazy how little they can get away with in the good ol’ days of racing.

Beautiful from this end too.

The street car version of the 3.0CSL. Still beautiful.

We’ve got some really loose manikins around here.

The next section contains the BMW Art Cars. BMW for a long time now has asked famous artists to use their cars as canvases for art. I think it’s an awesome concept.

3.0 CSL again. Love it!

Yet another 3.0 CSL. Love it!

I think Any Warhol did this one.

This was an unusual Art Car.

On the headrest it says “What urge will save us now that sex won’t?”.

Going through BMW museum, I realized how few cars they made that really got my heart going. BMW makes many good cars, but very few cars that I was just dying to see. This was not the case at Porsche and even Mercedes edged out BMW in this regard. BMW needs to make more halo cars.

How tiring after the museum, time to eat some ice cream.

Back inside BMW World. I believe this is either the test drive center or the European delivery center.

Saw this on the ground inside BMW World. No idea what it is, but looked cool to me.

Enough of BMW, we walked over to Olympia Park which is adjacent to BMW World. Olympia Park was built to host the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.

Part of the lawn at Olympia Park under construction. They used Styrofoam as the base layer on top of the base concrete layer. Intersting…

The park must be having a tough time booking events if this is what they are willing to accept.

Olympiaturm. There’s an observation deck on top of Olympiaturm. It’s always great to get a vantage view of the city.

At the observation deck, they had a photo studio that will superimpose your photo.

Great view of Munich from the top of the tower. It was quite windy and cold. I also saw a small spider crawling on the railing. How did that thing get up here? I hate spiders.

Olympic Village. This is where the Munich Massacre took place where members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and killed.

View of some of the sporting venues seen from the tower.

Oktoberfest fairgrounds are somewhere in the center of the photo.

BMW complex. BMW world is on the bottom, the museum to the right of it and the rest are the manufacturing plants.

Saw these from the tower. I had no idea what they were and it was explained to me that they were hobby gardens. People buy or rent these plots of land with a small storage shed on them and they plant flowers, fruit trees or whatnot as hobby. Seemed kind of odd to me but I guess if you lived in the city in a flat, this was the closest you could get to a yard.

They had these plaques with famous hand prints on them.

Done with Olympic Park. Time to chill out for a while, rest our tired bodies in preparation for more partying tonight.

How cool is it that you can just drink anywhere?

Germans and their heavy food.

Got introduced to Mezzo Mix. Half Fanta half Coke. It’s growing on me.

Yup, more Kebabs. I can’t get enough of this stuff. We need one in Austin.

I’ve seen several cars over here now with matte vinyl wrap.

After resting our feet, we headed back on the town again. First stop will be dinner.

Original Mini with duct tape repair job. Duct tape fixes everything!

After surfacing from our subway, we were greeted with New Town Hall in Marienplatz.

Dinner.

Of course, more beer.

And more meat heavy German cuisine.

Time to hit up the bars after dinner.

They love to eat swine over here in Bavaria.

Munich at night. It’s not too crowded due to everyone still being at Oktoberfest.

We shall drink here. Really bustling local bar. Some may even call it a hipster bar. The German hipsters here were pretty low key though.

Tequila shots? Yes please.

Everyone, and I mean everyone drank Beck’s here. If this is indeed a hipster bar, is this the equivalent of PBR? If it isn’t a hipster bar, is it Bud Light?

The girls wanted to go clubbing. What the girls want, the girls get.

Coat check.

This DJ was the funniest. She’s this Asian woman in her late 30s with a bowl cut and a very conservative dress. She looks like some 10 year old kid’s mother.

LED behind the eyes on top of the urinals. Fortunately, I was the only one in the restroom at the time so I could snap this shot without anyone else looking at me funny.

Smoke break right outside the club. Germans love to smoke.

Time for another bar. This one had a plethora of nipple images on the wall as part of the decor.

I’ve never seen so many broken glasses before in my life. Some shit would break, and people just kept on dancing away. No one came by to clean up the glass.

Abandoned purse? Notice the broken glass sitting next to it? If this was the US, someone would have gotten sued twice already.

Drunk ass guy fell on the stairs, and of course, broke his glass in the process. Nice.

Hipsters everywhere in this world.

I thought it was interesting how the cigarettes more or less lined up. It’s like they were trying to tell some sort of story.

Didn’t party until the wee hours this time. I think we stopped pretty early at 3AM or so. After all, it is the night right after going to Oktoberfest.

This is where the cab originally dropped us off from the first bar when we showed up earlier in the evening. I opened the door to get out of the cab, stood by the door for a second, then all of a sudden I felt this violent tug at my jeans. I look around and I see this cyclist who was booking it just wiping out completely into the nearby bike rack. He hooked my jeans with his handle bar. He fell on his hip and was in serious pain. It was also obvious that he was wasted from drinking and partying all day at Oktoberfest, hence, not slowing down or dodging around me. I apologized to him and was trying to help him up and didn’t quite know what to do. Then the two German girls who I was with started yelling at him for being a drunken idiot and that he should watch his way. So, I took no blame and he limped away in defeat. Love having locals batting for me!

Other things I learned from the Germans. They have a term for “big stick up the ass” which is pretty much the same as our “stick up his/her ass”. A girl getting primped up and slutted out to go out is called “getting bitched up”. I love this one. I may have to bring it back to Austin and try to propagate it.

Now the best for last, for me at least. More of an inside joke at this point. It was three in the morning and all of the cabs already had passengers. Finally when we saw a taxi coming down the street with the vacancy sign still on, we frantically tried to wave it down. The taxi stopped, only to have another group of people pop out of no where and hijack it. At this point, one of the girl screamed out “Nein!!!!!!” Which is the equivalent of us saying “NNNNNNOOOOOOooooooo!!” It really sounded more like “NNNNNEEEEEIIIIINNNNNNNNnnnnn!!!!!!” I thought it was the funniest thing in the world to hear the same exasperation in a different language.

We all did eventually catch our cabs. I made a detour before heading back to hotel.