Another day, Another Castle -- Schloß Schleißheim

Schloß Schleißheim

Schloß Schleißheim was built in the early 1700's and is located just north of Munich.  It was intended to resemble Versailles and was to be a monumental complex consisting of four wings, but only this main wing was completed.

The interior of this schloß is my favorite of the castles we have seen so far.

The Vestibule

The Grand Staircase - and it is indeed grand!

The beautiful room below is accessed from the Grand Staircase and is now used as a concert hall - how nice that it is used rather than just being a museum piece.
 

The Large Hall

The ceiling of the Large Hall

 

The Hall of Portraits with five recently restored
chandeliers, each containing 2400 pieces of glass.

Royal apartments are all designed similarly in a "row" fashion with the anti-chamber, followed by the audience chamber, then the bedroom, then one or two private rooms.

This is looking from the
private rooms back through to
the anti-chamber, the first
public room.

The Queen's Bedroom

The Rear Gardens --
completely restored a couple of years ago 

BMW

On Tuesday, we toured the BMW Welt (World), Museum and Factory.  It was a guided tour of each, and very informative.  It started and ended in the Welt area. The building is magnificent with a very open structure, only supported in three places with a roof that represents a huge cloud.  To impress visitors, there is a motorcycle exhibition twice a day where a rider goes up and down the stairways sometimes balancing on the front wheel when coming down.  Impressive and loud inside the rather hard surfaced walls of glass and steel.

Inside the Welt with "Cloud Roof"

Motorcycle "Exhibitionist"

From the Welt we entered the Museum that was filled with motorcycles and autos from the very earliest to the most recent models produced.  BMW started as an airplane engine manufacturer, however at the end of the first world war Germany was not allowed to produce any aircraft or aircraft equipment.  Therefore they started producing motorcycles and eventually automobiles.  All BMW Motorcycles except for the most modern racing versions are shaft driven rear wheels with Boxter (horizontally opposed) engines.

First BMW Airplane Engine 1917

First BMW Motorcycle 1923

First BMW Auto 1928 Dixi

Early BMW Delivery Vehicle 1930

The Museum building itself was interesting.  It is three levels connected by ramps taking you between themed exhibition rooms.  The walls are lit entirely by computer controlled LED lights behind frosted glass.  The patterns in some rooms are constantly in motion, sometimes presenting pictures.  Very interesting.  
A computer controlled set of steel balls presented a dynamic sculpture of the outline of a car that is where concepts start.  From there a clay model is produced, and finally a complete car.  
There were several rooms devoted to racing cars and their history.  Ben, Bill and Steve will know more about these cars than I ever will, but it was still interesting.  The guide was very clear that the whole philosophy of BMW is to produce Aircraft Engines, Motorcycles and Automobiles that are innovative and leaders in technology.

Some of the racing cars:

1938 the 328 sport coup Winner of the 1938  Mille Miglia 2000 litre class    

1997 McLaren F1 GTR

Then there were some cars that weren't named BMW, but were manufactured with BMW components such as engines:

 

And lastly, of course there is the funniest car of all, the Isetta.

1955 Isetta

 

The tour of the Welt, Museum and Factory took over three hours but was well worth it.  In the factory, it was impressive with the cleanliness, number of robots and few workers to produce the cars.  Everything was shown from the stamping of the body parts to outfitting and engine assembly.  At this plant around 1600 cars are produced daily with 25% sold in Germany, 25% sold in Europe, 25% sold in the US, and 25% sold to the rest of the world, mostly to China.  The US has the most restrictions and regulations of any country, probably for safety and emissions related issues.  Unfortunately, there were no photos allowed in the factory.  (Gary)

The Famous Haufbräuhaus

One Sunday after church on our way home we decided to have a beer and pretzel at the famous Hofbräuhaus.  It was our first time in and was fairly crowded, but we found a table near the small band that was playing.  The waiter, not buxom waitress in traditional dress, came and took our order.  We said two beers and a pretzel.  When he came back, this is what we got:

 

Obviously we forgot to say a "halb bier".  Very important because the default size is the Maß.

Also of note, you don't sit at a table under a sign which has Stammtisch.  This is reserved for regulars.

All in all a nice day, just one of many here in our home city away from home.

Starnberger See

Starnberger See on a lovely sunny day
with the Alps in the background

After many days of rain, we had a beautiful day last Friday, so we hopped on a train and went south to another of Munich's nearby lakes, in what is called the "Five Lakes Region".  Starnberger is the largest of the five lakes, is considered more elegant and is known as the Lake of Princes", whereas Ammersee that we visited a month or so ago, is called the "Farmer's Lake".  The water in Starnberg is beautifully clear, not the cloudy and murky water of Ammersee.

Historically, the Munich royal family of Wittlesbach had a castle or two here, and it was at Lake Starnberg that "mad" King Ludwig ll met his still unexplained death.

We walked about seven miles along the west shore from the village of Starnberg to Tutzing, enjoying a picnic and the sun along the way.

Boat houses along the shore in Starnberg

Idyllic setting

The view during our picnic of bread, cheese, salami, cherries --
and beer, of course!

On the way back to the train station, we happened on some multi-family homes with interesting architecture and details.

This one doesn't quite fit, does it? 

The end of another great day - and our train back to Munich.

Linderhof Castle

Last Tuesday, June 5, we visited Linderhof Castle, built in 1874-78, one of "Mad" King Ludwig's three major castles.  My sister and Ginny were here, so we all boarded a train for Oberammergau.  We used the Bavarian train pass that allows up to 5 travelling together to go anywhere in Bavaria on any form of D-Bahn transportation for one day.  This for 29 Euros!  We had a few unexpected glitches with the train and bus schedules, but it all worked out.  The train took about two hours to get to Oberammergau, and because it was a school holiday, the buses out to the castle were on a reduced schedule, so we spent some time having lunch and walked around the town of Oberammergau, which is famous for it's Passion Play that it produces once every ten years.  It is also known for the "Luftmalerei" painting on its buildings, which you will see in the following pictures.

Luftmalerei (painting) on a building

Another example of Luftmalerei

Denise, Mary Ellen, and Ginny in front of one of a well known chain of
 Christmas stores found in many German tourist areas

Linderhoff Castle is the most "cozy" of Ludwig's castle.  It is actually quite small, by castle standards, and did not even have guest rooms - it was just his retreat in the country, opulent, yes, but he was the King after all!  Unfortunately, we were unable to take pictures, but all the gold might have been too bright to photograph anyway!

Schloss Linderhoff 

That's us

Looking south from the front entrance

One of the side gardens

The grounds were beautiful and a highlight was the "Grotto", a totally manufactured subterranean environment that Ludwig modeled after Wagner's scenery for his opera Tannhaeuser.  He would have the opera performed just for himself and even had his servants row him around the lake.

Entrance to the Grotto

The Underground Lake in the Grotto

It was fun to have Mary Ellen and Ginny visit us here in Munich before they headed off to Switzerland and Italy.  We all enjoyed a dinner at Gary's favorite restaurant, Haxenbauer, where the roasted pork knuckle is a specialty.

Laundry Day

We finally got our dryer (no more clothes dryer rack) and since we haven't heard from the electrician again, Bernhard from Mr Lodge came over and brought an extension cord that looks like a computer surge protector and plugged the washer and dryer into the same outlet.  Should work if we don't use both at the same time.  That was the easy part.  Now we are ready to wash and dry clothes.  The controls for the washer and dryer are below (click on image for larger view):

Dryer Control Panel

Washer Control Panel

Not exactly what we are used to at home.  We did get manuals, the washer had a poorly translated English version, but the Dryer was all in German.  After some searching on the internet, we were able to find an English version of the manual for a similar unit available in Australia.  That helped a lot.  We still haven't figured out how to get some loads of clothes completely dry.  All in all it works pretty well.  The washer takes about 2 hours for a load and the dryer takes over 2 and a half hours.  Not speedy like we are used to, and there are miscellaneous filters to clean and water tray to empty, but we are happy to not have our living room be a drying room.

We found the English language Cinema near the Hauptbahnhof, and went to a movie,  The price for the ticket and popcorn are about the same as in the states.  The theater is very comfortable and larger than we had thought it would be.  We saw The Dictator with Sasha Beren Cohen.  Predictable Cohen.  We had a nice time.  Also it is near the Loewenbrau Brewery, so next time if the weather is nice we may stop off to prepare for the long walk home.

Denise's sister and Ginny are coming today for a few days.  The weather doesn't look too good, all of our sunnny warm days got used up in May.  Guess we will have to spend more time in the Biergartens, museums, palaces, Biergartens, and shopping. (Sat June 2)