Hannah does Munich (BMW and Sauna 30.12)

The original plan was to get up early and go off somewhere outside of Munich for the day but I woke up too late so we had a relaxing morning having breakfast in bed and watching Green Wing. Neither of us had watched the series for years, not since we first followed it devoutly in 2^nd year of Uni. We only ever watch it together because everyone else finds it too warped/surreal/bizarre, but it makes us laugh, a lot and we are suckers for a good love story, and because we love Mac. After dragging ourselves out of bed we decided to go to BMW Welt. I hadn’t been there and it seemed like a nice idea. It was brilliant! I can thoroughly recommend it, even if you’re not too into cars, which I’m not. But it’s free and they’ve got loads of hands-on stuff you can play with, including an area where you can design your own BMW. Hannah and I designed our perfect car and now we both REALLY want a BMW, which is the whole point of the place I guess, great marketing! We also got to play racing games (and annoy the 10 year old boys by hogging the consoles), look cool on the motorbikes, pretend to wind a sail (I was a weakling, surprise, surprise) and make fuel. Even the loos are brilliant. But the high point was definitely the marble run. This was a huge, complex metal affair with lots of different runs in a huge sphere. You could race marbles as well as make them run obstacle courses. It would have kept Hannah entertained all day.

We decided not to go into the BMW museum itself because we had already spent many hours looking at car-related things and the prospect of 7 exhibitions on more cars was a bit overwhelming. So instead we wandered round the Olympiapark and up the hill to have a view over the city. It was a beautiful clear, frosty day but the weather was wrong for a view as it was also slightly hazy. The weather had been so cold that the lake was mostly frozen over so we had fun in a very childlike manner poking at the ice and breaking bits off.

That evening, in order to warm up a bit we went to the Volksbad sauna. Tuesday is women only and it’s open until 11pm so we went for a relaxing evening. It’s REALLY nice in there. It’s all art deco style and has 2 pools with different temperatures. Then, in the sauna area there is a steam room, a traditional sauna and a series of warm rooms which go from 45 degrees to 80. Next time I’m going to take my flipflops because we couldn’t go into the warm rooms as the floors burned. There is a cold plunge pool and a torture instrument-like cold power shower which spurts horizontal sprays of cold water all up your body. I was too much of a wimp for that and just went through the cold plunge pool. Finally, there was a warm pool where you could just flob out, exhausted from all the sweating and plunging. There were lots of women in 2s and 3s and a fair few with books who had clearly just come for a relaxing evening on their own. I can really recommend this too!