Moving On

I've moved this blog over to a new site (same name) but hosted by Wordpress.
Click picture to head over there to see the latest Munich post.

I'm still working on it, but yep, we're moving on.

Surf's Up in Munich

Surf's up in Munich! (See earlier post for more information.)

Monday, Monday in Munich

Monday we begin a wild-goose chase for some wood carvings. All I'll say about that is we had a nice bus ride in the middle of the day which brought us to the Deutsches Museum, Munich's equivalent of the Exploratorium and Smithsonian's Science and Industry Museums mashed together. The guidebook says it's the largest museum of its kind in the world. It IS big.

The front door.
(Take a look at that room with the tall windows on the second floor. We came back to that on Thursday for our final reception of the conference.)

The main hall is filled with an exhibit about flying, beginning with this model of a hot air balloon.

The Red Baron's plane? (He fought Snoopy.)

There was an exhibit on how to fly a plane, so Dave and I took our turns at this jetliner. It's way tougher than it seems.

Next stop, Endoplasmic Reticulum.
Really this swirling aqua mass was inside the Pharmaceuticals Exhibit which shows a human cell model which is magnified 350, 000 times. That purple eyeball is really the nucleus. Dave explained it all to me, as the Biology class I had was also erased from my memory banks some time ago.

And I'm standing near the Golgi Bodies. I wanted to photograph the mitochondria and hang the resultant photograph in my study because they're the energy powerhouses of the cell and I'm in desperate need of more.

Bayer Aspirin began here in Germany, and the museum has an old pharmacy taken from an early monastery. Click here to go the museum website for a panoramic view. Incidentally, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry was modeled on the Deutsches Museum.

Drawers in the old pharmacy.

Since it was now getting later and later in the afternoon (the clock shows 3:10), I'm thinking LUNCH, but where to find it? We decide to head back up to our neighborhood.

Later on we found out that the yellow building is an Art Nouveau bathing temple. To get in the mood, the dude on the rocks in the middle of the river is sunbathing in his birthday suit. Dave didn't believe me at first (I'd read about this Munich experience somewhere), but as we walked up the street to the right of this scene, it was confirmed. There were a few others that you can't see, behind the bushes.

Where we ate last night, at the HofbrauKeller. About that point, I was pretty much ready to eat the stoplights, the trees, anything. So Dave wisely found us a small place to grab a bit to eat.

We had green salads, drinks and a pretzel. A Bavarian pretzel.

The view across the street (Wienerplatz). We walk home, noticing this small church (below) in this area of Munich named Haidhausen.

We walk past the Klinikum, a hospital, where Dave's conference is held. At least I think this building is part of that enterprise.

Home to our hotel.
Later that night we went over to the Opening Reception, tucked in the back of the Klinikum. It's a bit odd to walk past people in wheelchairs and with casts and bandages on your way to a nice party.
Most people were there already and had found their tall glasses of Munich beer. They served us little open face sandwiches of all varieties, fruit salad, turkey and pineapple skewers and any number of warm drinks (they don't really believe in ice here and instead chill the drinks first--which sometimes works). We decided against the water-with-gas and went for the apple juice. It's less sweet here in Germany.
We'd decided earlier that if the refreshments were half-decent, we'd count that for dinner and just come home afterwards. That's what we did.

Theatine Church (Theatinerkirche)

The Theatine Church, or Theatinerkirche St. Kajetan, is a glowing yellow church with black accents just across from The Residenz. Royal Ferdinand built it in 1662 as an honor and thanks because his wife produced an heir to the Bavarian Crown. Most men would have just brought a bouquet of flowers and her favorite chocolates, but I'm glad he was a man of the grand gesture.

Like I mentioned before, it has an all-white interior in stucco, with the exception of some side chapel pictures and a great black wooden pulpit. I've seen many many churches in my travels with Dave, so the churches that keep my attention are the interesting, unusual churches. This one qualifies with its yellow exterior (with black details on the towers) and the nearly all-white interior. Most of these pictures below are taken on Monday just before we headed down into the U-Bahn. We were drawn in because the sun was really shining brightly, more so than the day before.

We took many photographs, so just scroll through them at your own speed. Don't worry, I didn't put them all up, just enough to give you an idea.

I think the putti is where the sense of humor resides in this church. Much of religious decoration can be so somber, but not these little cherubs. A couple of them are playing hide and seek, with the leaves from the vine over their faces.

I searched in vain for more information about this memorial, but all I could find was that it was for Princess Maximiliane Caroline, born 21 July 1810 in Nymphenburg (a local palace on the outskirts of Munich) who died on the 4th of February 1821 in Munich. Some say she took ill after viewing a theater performance.

Her parents were Maximilian I Joseph, King of Bavaria and Karoline, Princess von Baden and the child's nickname was "Ni." All of this information has different spellings in different places, but the salient fact was the young princess was eleven and judging from the carving above, her mother was heartbroken.

An alcove with a doorway that reflects the sunny yellow exterior color.

Dave and I play dueling cameras.

When the sun would strike directly on the stucco decorations, the contrast between the shadows and the brilliant light was startling.

The dome, with its yellow highlights, fascinates.

I suppose this is a confessional. I loved the contrast of the warm wood against the stark white.

The yellow from outside leaks in and casts a golden hue. I assume it's a reflection off the exterior color.

One of my favorite shots. It's as if the putti is saying hello (good-bye?) from its place on high.

The Residenz

The Residenz was the Royal Family's residence, the place where they hung out for hundreds of years until the Allies (that was us--sad faces, please) bombed it to smithereens in a few hours one day, in order to Do What We Had To Do. The German pamphlets are very nice about this fact, and never mention the complete loss of this amazing palace. Truthfully, the stats are that 23,000 square meters of roof was reduced to 50. Much of the artwork and many of the treasures had been moved to a safe location

But don't worry. The Nazis, in all their tidiness, photographed this place ad nauseam, so with the fragments of this palace that were left, the archived artwork and treasures, all those photographs (and I'm sure some war reparations money), they rebuilt the thing. Dave and I both agree it's one of the most impressive royal houses we've seen, perhaps because it's a highly edited collection.

The Shell Grotto. I'm going to get Dave busy on the weekends building me one of these.

We call this the Dripping Medusa statue. What you can't see is that the rest of Medusa's body is at this guy's feet and water is squirting out of her neck, too. Very inventive.

The next room is called the Antiquarium because they keep antiquities in there. This guy is not one of them.

The scale and shape and size of this hall is so harmonious. It's a pleasure to walk in and be in, and perhaps you can see from the people in the picture, it's very large, but full of light and interesting things to look at.

Because this is a blog post, I'm going to give you the edited verion, the highlights according to Elizabeth. One is the ceiling corner of the next room (below). I have three more corners, but won't post them, because you get the idea from just this one.

I liked the old-fashioned bee hive (looks like a hut of straw) and all the gilt bees attached to this ceiling. Money was no object, if you were a king, and so much of the ornamentation attests to this fact. But when I think that much of this is a reconstruction, I was amazed at the skill of the twentieth-century artisans who were able to put this decoration onto the walls, ceilings, doorways, hallways, everywhere. In the other four corners, they had a ship, and a palm tree, and a dragon on fire, not to mention the scenes in between the corners, with full-scale people lounging around showing the times of the day (didn't photograph those as I was enamored with the bees).

More gilt.

The door to the Four Horses Salon and adjoining Kaisersaal (Emperor's Hall). Last time we were in Munich, our conference had a reception here in the Residenz with the Deputy Secretary (equivalent to our Secretary of State). The conference organizers put in to the Secretary's office for a reception and that office chooses the place and provides the food and hor d'ouvres on their budget. We lucked out and were here.

Detail of a door jamb.

Here's the big hall, with its pieced marble floors, huge paintings and chandeliers. This is the one place you can linger, as it has chairs you can sit in. The reason why the call the adjoining room the Four Horses room is that it used to have a painting of Four White Horses on the ceiling, but no longer. Damaged in the war. This sort of thing happened over and over--referring to what was there, but is no longer. I can think of many instances of this in my own life, where the perception and memory are stronger than what exists now. And then there are the other times, where I'm madly scrambling just to keep up with "what is." Sometimes it's tiring to relearn.

This room is tiny, a small chapel just for the King not too far from the larger family chapel. It has a silver-encrusted altar, and piedra dura scenes around on the wall. Using Albrecht Durer as a model, craftsmen from Italy pieces together depictions of Mary's life in stone--kind of like paint by number but with rocks and glue. So there's silver and black on the altar, stone all over the walls, and the ceilings are painted a brilliant blue with gilt decorations. Amazingly, it all works together.

Looking up into the cupola. We were prevented from entering by a velvet rope, so the angle is skewed (the stone floors are original and they're trying to protect them).

Stone on the left, a glimpse of ceiling, then the altar.

I like photographing mailboxes when I travel, and this little slot above the putti's head and wings, tied with ribbons, reminds me of a mailbox slot. If you could post a letter to Heaven, what would you say? (Putti is the high-tech generic name for Cupid.)

Coming out of the chapel, is this Stag Hallway. Even the plain spare walls become beautiful with the shiny marble floors and the sun shining in.

This is the Green room section, repete with mirrors. Apparently having a plate glass mirror was a real sign of wealth in the 17 and 1800s and this room (and some of the next) showed that off. This fireplace is at the end of a cross-shaped arrangement of rooms, and while the photograph doesn't really show this, it reflects back two galleries just like it.

At the other part of the "cross" what's reflected back, five galleries away, is this exquisite little mirrored room, with gilt framing holding little jars of blue and white porcelein. While Dave likes the Four White Horses area, I'm crazy for this room and the Red Cabinet (next).

Many rooms are kept curtained and dimmed (like the Stone Rooms, which didn't photograph well), but as soon as we arrived here, the sun came out again from behind a cloud and lit up the place. If I were a King, or his Queen, I'd spend most of my day here. This was right off of the Royal Bedroom.

(I'm pretending to live here.)

This is the Red Cabinet, a tiny room with miniature scenes covering the walls. The website states that "With the exception of the two sets of doors and the miniatures, the Miniaturenkabinett was completely destroyed in the Second World War. It took many years of painstaking work to reconstruct the stucco, the carving and the red japanning."
It's stunning.

The chandelier is made from ivory.

The last hall of the Residenz is the Family Portait Hall (my name for it). Stacked three high in gilded frames are portraits of the Wittelsbach family.

We were happy to have the chance to come here again, and went out into the day, heading over to the Yellow Church (look later for a post).