Day 2: München - Deutsches Museum and Altstadt

The kids saw pictures of Deutsches Museum in our guidebook, and told us that they really wanted to go there today. They loved this science and technology museum so much that we practically stayed there from late morning to the museum's closing time at 17:00.

After visiting the navigation and aviation sections on the ground floor, the kids spent some time at the Kinderreich (Kids' Kingdom) on the basement floor where displays on sound and art are plenty. Here is Jocelyn playing on a piano in the Kinderreich.

The museum has changed quite a bit since my last visit in 2002. A lot of the displays have received new facelifts. Here are two prime examples. In the physics section, we saw the 50-cm diameter photomultiplier tube (a sensitive light sensor that shapes like a giant light bulb) that is being used at the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan. Then we saw a section of the Large Hadron Collider ring. Gabriel took a picture with this real model and I explained to him how two proton beams circulate in the real 27-km ring across the Swiss and French border. Of course, he said he already knew all these from reading the PhD comics last week.



We went all the way to the top floor. The view of Munich's old town (Altstadt) is magnificent.


So magnificent that we decided to go there after the museum visit. Since we did not get much time to look around the old town yesterday, we strolled around Marienplatz for an hour before the kids yearning for food.

Other pictures from today can be found here.