Pete's Log: Lange Nacht der Münchner Museen

Entry #1403, (Music)
(posted when I was 28 years old.)

I cleaned my apartment some more yesterday. It's been an ongoing process for much of this week, though never for long stretches. It's finally to the point that having visitors wouldn't be embarrassing. It's still not really suitable for hosting guests, though. I have a table and two chairs. And that's pretty much it for furniture.

I did buy an inflatable mattress when I first got here, but it quit holding air about two weeks ago. I bought it at a Wal-Mart here in Munich. I can take joy in knowing that Wal-Mart is closing down their German operations. The market was competitive enough as it was, and Wal-Mart just didn't do their research. Germans like to bag their own grocery (usually in their own bags), and Wal-Mart was bagging grocery for people. Their employee manual was leaked to the press, causing much embarrassment. And from what I've read, they had Americans in charge of chosing the inventory to stock.

So I've been sleeping on the floor ever since the mattress gave up its ghost. I've actually been sleeping well, surprisingly. I spent this month's furniture budget on plane tickets to London, so I'll have to stick to the status quo for the moment. But that's alright. Gandhi and I are enjoying ourselves.

Saturday night I went to the Lange Nacht der Münchner Museen with David and Sara. For fifteen Euro, you get a ticket which lets you into all participating museums. Those museums all stayed open until 2 am. The MVV even provided shuttle buses between museums.

We made it to five stops: the Deutsches Museum Verkehrszentrum, the Munich Fire Department Museum, a gallery called the Artothek, the Stadtmuseum München, and the Museum Mensch und Natur at Schloss Nymphenburg.

The highlight of the night was at the Fire Department Museum, where I found a fire alarm device which had a warning label which read (in German) that if you pull the alarm, expect to have your arm captured. The device was a sort of tube that had an alarm button inside. You had to put your hand into the tube to set off the alarm. There was a mechanism to grab your arm once you hit the button. I guess this was to discourage prankers. I just hope they didn't put these alarms inside buildings. So David decided he had to test this mechanism. And sure enough, his arm got caught and he had to be rescued by one of the fire fighters staffing the museum. Too funny.

My favorite museum that we saw was probably the Stadtmuseum. They have a nice exhibit on the history and future of the city, in terms of city planning and such.

A close tie to highlight of the night was at the Museum Mensch und Natur. They had an exhibit on the history of the earth, and it started with a display titled "earth 4 billion years ago" which featured a large painting of a volcano dumping ash and lava into the sea, some rocks and such in front of the painting to convey depth or something, and some bizarre heavy metal sort of music playing. I can't even describe it or give it justice. It was delightfully surreal.

So this log entry brings the 2006 count up high enough to make 2006 my most productive blogging year since 2002. While that isn't saying much, I'm still pleased by this.

Oh, and I can highly recommend the foot of the Walking Man in Schwabing as a place to sit and watch the world go by.