Trying to make you a happy post as we leave Munich

I was determined to put up a more lighthearted post and so – to make sure that things went wrong – we took the U-Bahn over to the BMW museum. Although I really tried to remember to validate our tickets, we somehow got down to the bottom of this escalator before I realized my error so we rode up and down a few times:

And then found our hallway:

We could not take a BMW factory tour because today is Easter. But here’s the exterior of the museum and the BMW headquarters, shaped like a 4-cylinder engine:

The interior of the museum did not have the sharp layout of the Mercedes museum nor the world historical tracking next to the car development, but there were still a few nice cars:

And this one:

Across the street from the museum, there is the BMW Welt, which is a showroom for modern and high end cars. This place was way more to our liking. In the background, you can see the Olympic Tower – built for the 1972 Olympics. The roof of the Welt is a massive power plant – 16,000 solar panels – enough to power 560 apartments.

The environmentally-conscious roof apparently does not preclude gluttonous extravagance inside. We came across this matte blue Rolls Royce SUV – selling for over 500,000 Euros:

Ron liked this purple sports convertible:

From BMW, we wandered off onto the grounds of the 1972 Munich Olympics and saw a few of the old buildings. The Olympic Pool, interior and exterior:

Finally, we sought out a site that Taff mentioned to us: a memorial for the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics that opened in 2017.(Note: I really did try to make the entire day lighthearted, but this memorial is worth seeing.)

You get there by wandering past the old Olympic Village housing, which is called Olympiadorf. It’s some pretty interesting architecture and is private housing now (both the low rises and the high rises behind them were part of the Olympic site):

The memorial tells the story of the terrorist break in at the housing area of the Jewish athletes in the early morning hours of September 5th. 8 members of an offshoot of the PLO entered two apartments, killed two athletes, and then took 9 hostages, none of whom survived. The memorial has a background story on each athlete and all of them were Holocaust survivors or from families of survivors. Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Slaughterhouse-5, which I am reading right now in preparation for our upcoming visit to Dresden, remarks So it Goes at moments like these but this is really really not how it should go.

This is the apartment building where the break-in occurred:

And here are the athletes:

That’s it for Munich. We’re headed to Nuremberg and I’ll talk with you all in a day or two. I’ll leave you with this shot of the Olympic Park and BMW in the background: