Our bad weather continued today.  Today was another cold (<10°C) and rainy day, actually rainier than yesterday.   We had gotten quite lucky with the weather on the Italian and Austrian segments of the trip.

Also, today was Good Friday.  In Bavaria, that means most places, including most museums and shops are closed.  Even some restaurants are closed.  Knowing this ahead of time, we decided today would be more relaxing, in advance of our flight home tomorrow.  Our original plan was to check out the Olympic Park (from the 1972 summer games), and the BMW museum, as they are close to each other.  However, with the cold, wind, and rain, we decided that walking around Olympic Park would not be a pleasant experience.  So we stayed in until lunchtime.  We went back to Rotkreutzplatz and found a restaurant open for lunch.  I got Wiener schnitzel, as I wanted it one more time before leaving.

We tried to visit a couple of museums after lunch; the Duetches Museum and the Oktoberfest and Beer museum.  The Duetches Museum looked really cool, a lot of science stuff, and I wish we had visited it on one of the days it was open.  However, both museums were closed.  So, we went back to the hotel, played cards and watched movies.  The hotel offers this English language movie channel called SkyTV.  However, for some reason, they mostly show straight to DVD movies.  But we don’t know German, so we watched mostly this channel and CNN England.  Last night they showed this Mandy Moore movie called “Love, Wedding, Marriage”.  I could not watch more than 30 minutes of it.  Abby looked it up; it got a 0 rating on Rotten Tomatoes- yes a zero!

We’ve still yet to watch an entire movie on this channel.  This afternoon we watched part of this Cinderella movie (also a straight to TV ABC Family movie), and some movie about ultimate fighting.  Neither of these movies was as bad as Love Wedding Marriage, but they were not great either.

I am okay with not doing much today.  There are some things I still wish to see in Munich, but none of our stays on this trip were long enough to do everything.  I did not expect that, and have no desire to wear myself out on a vacation.

One thing I will certainly remember about Munich is the amount of green space in the city.  The first place we went to on Tuesday was Nymphenburg Garden, which is huge.  Dotting the city landscape, even in the central part of the city, there are tons of gardens like Hofgarten.  Down by the river, which we finally saw today, there are also tons of gardens and green space.  I wonder how this came to be, and whether it was like this before World War II.

Reflecting on my time in Germany I observe that there are much fewer German flags here compared with the number of Italian flags in Italy.  I had previously heard that due to recent history Germans had been somewhat more hesitant to show National pride.  This I find to be a shame, especially considering that many of the people living here now were born after the end of World War II.  They really had nothing to do with any of these events, and I am sure that over 99% of them view what occurred with absolute horror- the way I did yesterday.  Since then, Germany has done well for itself.  They handled the cold war and unification with East Germany without the bloodshed that raged other Soviet Bloc countries in the 1990s.  Nowadays, they have a strong economy, which is kind of holding the European Union afloat.  From what I hear, they have also done a good job of achieving life-work balance.  If you ask me this is worthy of pride.  However, I realized two other things:  Italy was also on the wrong side of World War II (until September 1943).  In fact, given their weakness and side switching in both World Wars, they come off quite possibly as the lamest country of them all.  There were also more EU flags flying in Italy.  So, there is a strong possibility that the observed differences are mostly cultural.