A Cousin, some Beamers & some Biers Day

Sunday 6/8

Kev and I picked up a 10a.m. train from Salzburg to Munich--pretty classy one too, leather first class seats! Short trip, only anhour and a half. We met our cousin Joe in the Munich train station, who will be with us for a week and a half, departing in Florence. I had managed to get a hotel in the Old Town district booked and we headed straight for it to check-in. For $109euro we received a triple room with bath. Not bad split three ways, but certainly one of the higher prices we've had yet. There weren't really any cheap hotels close to the train station that could fit all of us. The place was called Hotel Munchner Kindl, and was a clean & friendly pension. We got situated and debated what to do for the day. Kev and I still had some pent up frustration after the previous day's "failed" sightseeing, and also a little burnt out on the Nazi history, so we decided to skip Dachau (which would have been a short day trip) and stay in town. Instead of touring more art museums or palaces, we all thought it would be better to do something unique to Munich, so we went to one of the main squares with the glockenspiel and then went to Olympic Park (1972) and the BMW musuem. It was a good call. The architecture of Olympic park still struck me as being fairly modern, which is saying a lot considering its age. After a quick walk through, we went into the Beamer museum. Open for free to the public was a showroom of sorts that had many, and maybe all, of the latest models on the floor, some examples of upcoming alternative fuel vehicles, and tons of clever displays displaying BMW's cutting edge technology & class. Extremely well done...I think the museum opened in 2006, so everything was pretty modern.

Then we paid the $14 euro to do the museum tour. The first display was an artsy display -- hundreds of ball bearings suspended by wires from the ceiling that moved up and down on programmed sequences, such that they formed the outline of a car, waves, etc. Pretty neat. Then the next few displays showed BMW's history starting with aircraft engines, then motorcycles, and finally cars starting in the 1930s. Their motorcycles seemed pretty unique to me -- using direct shaft drive to the rear wheel as opposed to chain drive. I'm no expert on bikes, but it seems to me that most bikes are chain driven. BMW started using the shaft drive due to the poor road conditions back in the day. Today, only their bottom line bikes use chains. Guess they stuck with what they knew best. Throughout the museum, they continued to show the evolution of their bikes --addition of suspension in the fork and seat, incorporation of their in-line 4 cylinder, and my favorite: how they adapted to the changing market in the 80's with a cruiser bike.

But...most of us know BMW more for their cars, so I'll get back to that. There were many displays showing how they've been pushing the envelope with incorporation of new/lighter materials, how the design process for new models evolves, how their employees are important, how the dark chapter in their history was when they had forced labor in their factories during WWII, etc etc. The coolest displays though, were the ones that held pristine Beamers from all years. Looked like they came out of the plant the year they were built and went straight into the musuem. One room showed the evolution of the 7series (which they often use as a springboard for new technology). They had a 1987 7-series that looked like it could pass as a 1997 vehicle. Definitely ahead of the curve. Had a big fat car phone in the center console. Ha, remember those? Right next to the 87 was a model from the late 90s. You'd be amazed how little it changed, both interior and exterior. Another room held all sorts of M-version Beamers, including an M1 --whose design was collaborated on with Lamborghini and Ital Design. Looked alot like a Countach. They also had the engines from each on display in the back corner. More impressive was an entire room that had their racing engines out on display -- huge 10 and 12 cylinders...some of the metalwork on the headers looked like a work of art. Maybe one of the engineers had too many beers at the Hofbrauhaus, starting eating the huge pretzels and then decided to design the headers as a crazy tangled mess.

One of the lobby areas contained an impressive '53 roadster, the actual Z3 and Z8 that Pierce Brosnan drove in the Bond movies, a Z1 with the vertically moving doors and some new convertible hardtop Z4s. The last display we looked at was sort of the "future vehicle" display. A 3 series with a futuristic interior that was supposed to change based on the drivers current needs, a pretty radically designed X-coupe, and the 2-seater convertible that has the stretched fabric shell thats been written about in Car & Driver and Motortrend. Pretty cool to see it up-close. And that was it!

When we got back outside, the skies looked pretty angry. We quickly dropped back into the trams and headed back towards town. We were all pretty wiped out -- Joe from jet-lag, and Kev and I just being travel weary. When we re-surfaced, it was pouring down rain. We decided if we went to the hotel we would never make it back out, so we waited a minute for it to slow down, and then headed straight for the Hofbrauhaus. It might have been 7 or 8 o'clock (sunday night) when we got there, and it was packed. We ended up in a back corner where we each had a liter of Haufbrau Orig (kev), Dunkel (kris), and Radler (joe). Halfway through, we grabbed a huge pretzel from one of the beer maids. After finishing the beers, we decided to move closer to the action where a band was intermittently playing oompah music. People dressed in classic German garb (lederhosen, green hats, etc) were sitting at some of the central tables. We sat down next to two Brazilian guys who were just beginning a 2 week tour of Europe...which turned out to be pretty much the same as ours but in the opposite direction! Prague, Amsterdam, Bruges.... crazy. One spoke English pretty well, the other not so much. Fun guys though. We had a few more rounds as well as dinner. Our waitress was working her tail off...she was practically jogging everywhere...at one point carrying 7 full liter mugs at once. I thought she was going to drop all of them all over our table, but she did not. We ended up staying until the place was closing down around 11:30, at which point we wandered back to the hotel for some much needed rest. Come to find out, oompah music inspires you to drink alot.