Swarovski Museum and Munich - Germany part 2

After our weekend in Issing Christel took the day off on monday and drove with us to Innsbruck (in Austria) where the Swarovski factory is located and they built a huge Crystal World - a huge exhibition and 'adventure' world. The whole thing is inside an artifical hill with a face on the front as per the photo. Once inside there a many things to experience and lots of crystals to see. They have the biggest crystal in the world - a 300000 carat crystal! - as well as lots of exhibits made out of crystals or covered in crystals. It was amazing and definately worth the long drive. Beck even got some earrings as a little memory of her visit to the Swarovski crystal worlds museum. The photos are of the biggest crystal, a crystal christmas tree and a crystal and fibreoptic jellyfish.


Christel then dropped us off in Munich after the visit to Innsbruck. We spent another few days in Munich however spent two days sightseeing rather than shopping! The first day we went with Wad-wad oma and opa into the city centre. Visited the usual tourist sights as well as some less common ones probably. We walked past the National theatre, a couple of churches as well as the Frauenkirche, the city centre markets and of course poked our noses into the Hofbrauhaus - a big beer hall. Because it was a nice sunny day (like most we had actually!) we went up one of the Frauenkirche towers and had a really good few of the city and as far as the Alps (which isn't always the case). Quite close to the Frauenkirche is the old Rathaus (council building) of which there are a couple of photos below, which two times a day plays bells and has 'puppets' or figures that dance in the tower. By coincidence we managed to just arrive as they played even though they weren't supposed to (they usually do at 11am and midday whereas we were there at 5pm!). They were created to represent the celebration of the end of the plague.

Because of the soccer world cup earlier in the year there were lions everywhere (a Munich/Bavarian symbol) some of which were pretty funny so we had to take a couple of photos of those too, including one with grandma and granddad.

The next day Beck and I went sightseeing on our own in the greater Munich area. we started off by heading into the city centre again for a walk through the english gardens (like the domain in Auckland but heaps bigger) where we had lunch in the beer garden by the chinese tower. Then took a little trip out to the soccer stadium which turned out to be a fair walk from the S-Bahn station and so was more than just a 5 minute look. Again the weather was perfect and so we went up the TV tower in the olympic park from where we had a nice view again of the city but from a different angle - the Frauenkirche is in the city centre whereas the tower looks back to the city centre. Got a nice view of the olympic stadium and events halls as well as the olympic village. The BMW headoffices are nearby too in the shape of 3 cylinders.