Family Visit To Munich, Day Three, Morning

While we knew the castle tour would be hard to top, we expected another great day in Munich before the New Year’s Eve celebration. We decided to get up pretty early again, and catch the first city bus tour of the day. Unfortunately, the bus tour was not the greatest. The double-decker bus was freezing, and not all of the headsets worked. But, we did get to see a lot of the city. As we neared the Marienplatz, we decided to get off of the tour and visit the famous Viktualienmarkt. The open air market is full of stalls, all selling fresh bread, fruits, vegetables, meats, and cheeses, as well as the occasional shop selling beer and gifts. It was packed with people, even on a winter’s day. While the market was neat to check out, we only walked through shortly, as we headed off to see the Glockenspiel come to life in the Marienplatz at 11:00. We made it back to the clock tower with a couple of minutes to spare, and found a nice spot among the crowd. We were all shocked by how many people were waiting. As soon as the clock struck 11:00, the life-sized knights on their horses in the clock tower began circling around, and the character on the bottom row began dancing. While I’m glad that we got to see the much talked about Glockenspiel, I think that we all thought it was definitely very highly overrated.

After watching the Glockenspiel in action, we decided to hop on the U-Bahn and head to Olympiapark. We got off at our stop, and headed towards the BMW tower, where we found BMW Welt, the new BMW Museum. The museum looked awesome, but unfortunately, it was closed until the day we had to leave Munich. So, we made our way to the Olympic stadium, passing by the Olympic Tower. We walked through much of the park, before looking into the stadium itself, as well as going into the Olympic poolroom. As we walked a bit further, a band was playing and we could hear loud music coming from up ahead. Apparently, a huge race was scheduled through the park on that day. Within minutes, the empty park was filled with thousands of runners and onlookers, and we stayed and watched for a while before heading back to our hotel.