In the afternoon, we were going to go to the Alte Pinakothek (old art gallery) but Kate's shoulders hurt from our silly pillows at home. Germans have a bizarre notion of bedclothes. On our first day we slept with the bedsheets as given---if you could call them that. The bed had an ordinary fitted sheet, but on top it had no sheet, only two polyester quilts with corduroy/flannelette style quilt covers, and two huge square pillows, also with corduroy covers, which were extremely thin and pliable---not at all springy or supportive. The main problem on the first night was the heat of the quilts, which we solved by removing the polyester quilts and using the quilt covers, turned inside out, as bedsheets. I had planned to go to a shop and buy an ordinary sheet, but of the four or five shops I tried, all had this same strange combination of an 80x80cm pillowslip with a 200x130cm quilt cover, described as a set of bedsheets! So there was no advantage to us buying a new copy of the same silly sheet arrangement.
Our workaround worked tolerably well until Sunday night, after which Kate had a terrible neck ache from the unsupportiveness of the pillows. This as well as the rain caused us to postpone the art gallery by a day. Instead, we ambled around for a bit and on the way home went via Kik Textil-Diskont, a clothes shop near our apartment. And when I say discount, I mean discount! I got new long jeans for 5 euros and a woollen jumper for 6 euros, which was good as I had been getting pretty cold in the rain. More importantly, Kate got a springy pillow for 2 euros, which has solved the neck problem, and I got a set of watch batteries for 1 euro, which was good as the 5 euro watch Kate had bought me from the Turkish district had stopped working. I thought I had broken the watch in trying to replace the battery but Kate managed to fix it. Success!
Here is the beer garden we visited on Sunday night (I seem to have muddled my place in the photo stream). Pretty, no? It had a statue of somebody von Paula, the founder of the Paulaner Braeuerei some time in the seventeenth century.
Here is Kate the elite watch repairer, fixing the watch I had broken with a pair of tweezers.
On Tuesday we finally made it to the Alte Pinakothek, which was worth it for the collection of Rubens paintings alone. Here is "The Last Judgement" (or some such), a six metre tall painting which has pride of place in the gallery's central room (which was built especially for it).
They had some wonderful paintings by Raphael, Leonardo, Rubens and Rembrandt, but after that it went down a bit, and also I tired a bit of all the religion; perhaps a religious education would have made some of the pictures more interesting to me. Still definitely worth a visit if you're in Munich, and it's mercifully not like the Met where you feel you can only properly see 1% of the museum at once. Oh, there was a (temporary) exhibit by some modern German dude downstairs, which we walked into and beheld about three entirely black paintings. We were about to leave anyway but the nice man at the door informed us we needed to buy an extra ticket on top of the museum entry fee in order to see these black paintings. I felt a little sorry for him, as it was not at all signposted that you needed to buy an extra ticket, and I expect of the people who stumbled into the temporary exhibition very few would have realised or intended to buy the extra ticket, especially once they saw the first few paintings. We went home early to try to make up for some poor sleeps earlier; also the joys of home cooked food only increase in a city such as Munich.
No comments:
Post a Comment