Deutsches Museum & Neue Pinakothek

Saturday we decided to go somewhere we thought Austin would particularly enjoy, so we visited the Deutsches Museum in München (Munich). They have a large variety of scientific exhibits there. Austin definitely enjoyed it. Not only did he get to see all sorts of plans, cars, helicopters, boats, and the like, he also got to go down to the "Kids' Kingdom" to spend a good deal of time playing with the various things there.

Nate especially enjoyed this cut away of a passenger airplane

 In the Kids' Kingdom, Austin played with giant legos:

There was a whole section of various water toys. There was a pump, various waterwheels including watermills, and plastic boats. There were cranes to lift the boats in and out of the water as well, and a waterway with a slight current to set the boats on and let them go. 

Of course Austin loved anything with keys and buttons to push.

There were several rooms sectioned off that were full of musical instruments to try.

And there was even a firetruck to explore.

Austin has been funny about taking pictures lately. When he sees we are going to take a picture of him, he starts counting "one, two, three, one, two, three" over and over. Only, Saturday he would turn his head away from the camera the moment he started saying "one." This made it much more difficult to get any pictures of him actually facing the camera.

After leaving the Deutsches Museum, we headed over to the Neue Pinakothek, which is an art museum. There are actually a number of art museums in this area, but I knew the Neue Pinakothek would contain the work I was most interested in. I wasn't disappointed either. I loved studying the various landscapes, portraits, and other painted scenes it contained. There was a beautiful portrait by Jacques-Louis David of Anne Marie Louise Thelusson from 1790. I love David's work, so it was really nice to see that. I also especially liked the portraits of Joseph Karl Stieler, who I wasn't familiar with previously. And of course there were so many beautifully composed and rendered landscapes! I could have spent a lot longer studying it all if I had had time.

This painting was enormous! There were 2 others just as big in the same room.

You may also notice we have a stroller in this picture. That is because someone from church in the ward here kindly lent us a stroller that their family is not currently using.

We spent pretty much all our time in the first half of the museum's rooms. The second half contained a lot of impressionist paintings, most of which I had relatively little interest in. I was disappointed in the museum's shop. I was hoping to find some nice pictures or postcards there of the paintings that I had liked so much, but nearly all the postcards and pictures offered were from the impressionist paintings that I wasn't interested in buying pictures of. 

The tragedy of the day occurred as we were gathering our things to leave the museum. I was trying to pull our coats out of our lockers and watch Austin while Nate had run to the bathroom.  Austin started to run off with the stroller on his own, and I was distracted trying to keep him with me while I took our stuff out. As I pulled things out, my camera fell onto the tile floor. The lens was damaged. A plastic piece that holds the lens onto the camera body broke off, so I can't even attach it to the camera unless we figure out how to re-attach the piece. The plastic casing on the front of the lens is also damaged. I am not sure what we are going to do about this problem yet, but I am pretty upset about it. At least the camera body wasn't damaged.

Dinner was interesting just because we went to one place and tried to order about four different dishes that the waiter told us they were out of before we left for another restaurant. The second restaurant worked out much better. After dinner we drove back to our apartment.