The Residenz and the Greeks

We stopped at Theatine Church first. Very beautiful place fit for a king... and though the royal palace is across the street, I'm not sure any rulers actually went to this church.

The Residenz was the palace of Bavarian kings for many years until around the early 20th century. It's a huge place with many rooms full of lots of treasures, silk, and gold. You don't really need to go to the other German palaces if you visit this one.

There are jewels, crowns, gold dining, and other expensive things here, too, but there isn't photography allowed. We walked around here for about 2 hours.

This was a good little place for Greek food, but it was very busy...

Staatliche Antikensammlungen was next. Lots of Greek pottery, and not a single person was here the entire time we looked around! It was pretty hard to believe.

Across a construction site was the Glyptothek. Much like the other antiquity museum, this place was mostly empty, save for some art students. 

Dinner at Mariannhof. Stuffed schnitzel and spoon fries. Really yummy, served of course with ketchup and mayonnaise. 

Finished off the night at a jazz club. We didn't know who was performing when we walked through the door, but they were great. They're an Icelandic band called Sunna Gunnlaugs Trio.

To Neuschwanstein

This nutella-pretzel thing was really good.

The trip to the castle and back to Munich took 6+ hours between the trains and the buses. It was a long day.

There was this cool shop of just vending machines. We got drinks and a Snickers.

The scenery and homes are often picturesque. I was wondering why the rolling hills were often grass, and mowed grass at that, and found out that the government pays the owners to keep it that way.

There are no pictures allowed inside, and that's a shame since it was an amazing place. There's lots of paintings and artworks commemorating medieval Germany. After all that traveling and waiting, the tour was around 20 minutes long and there were tourists everywhere.

A "Bavarian" sandwich we brought along from the train station. Not bad.

 The beauty of Bavaria.

Some delicious ice cream, chocolate and spaghetti eis. The spaghetti was definitely way better.

From Berlin to Munich

Time to leave Berlin... and wait in line at the train station for breakfast. The trip took about 5 hours.

Sounds like a pleasant place.

Cool train. We felt bad, because we reserved seats that a family of four had squatted on. Having public transportation everywhere is great, but there's often some uncomfortable element to sharing an enclosed space with so many people.

Nymphenburg wasn't far from the hotel, so we walked over. It's a huge estate, though the tour only included a percentage of the rooms. There was a 'hall of beauties' that featured pretty portraits of women from the time. A little creepy, yeah. There were a lot of cool swans. 

I made a kitty.

East Berlin

We visited the DDR Museum. Life during communism was simple, polluted, and everybody had a lot of protected sex.

Next, the Illusion Museum. Nothing in that place made sense.

Checkpoint Charlie had A LOT of tourists and tour bus companies. There was even a film crew there for some kind of documentary. I don't really get it, because there wasn't much to the place.

Brandenberg Gate also had a lot of tourists. They blocked my shot. Also, the Special Olympics was close by.

We attended a classical concert of LOTR and GOT songs. It was in an old theater by 'candlelight', but because the room had no AC (and a lot of bodies), we were all sweating in what felt like a tropical heatwave. Some people even left before the end. The performances were great despite the climate change.

Currwurst 36 for dinner. Also, some urban art.

Goodnight, Berlin.

Museum Island

We visited a lot of museums today! We started at the Pergamon Museum. Nice to see the statues in person.

We had to check in to the Neues Museum and wait for an hour, so we headed nextdoor to the Alte Nationalgalerie. There was a ton of beautiful art there! Their statues and paintings were gorgeous.

 Lots of artifacts from the Middle East are located here. The Ishtar Gate was a pile of bricks in Iraq before being hauled back to Germany to be assembled.

The Altes Museum was next for ancient artifacts, a lot of which were Egyptian. 

The last museum was mostly Greek objects, and if we knew, we might have showed up earlier in the day. I saw a lot of stuff that isn't commonly floating around out there in books or websites.

We dined at Hofbrau Brauhaus for dinner. Everything was very good! German comfort food. Bread dumplings, laberkäse, and kaiserschmarrn.