The largest technical museum in the world

There were snow flurries when we arrived in Munich after an excellent train trip. We rode through some picturesque countryside, with church steeples suddenly changing from the steep spires of the North to the onion domes of the South.

We came to Munich partly to break the trip to Budapest and partly to see the Deutsches Museum – the largest science and technology museum in the World. Before I go any further I should say that a wiser person might have read the review from eight years ago, the last time we visited the same museum. I didn’t and was lured in for the same wrong reasons – size isn’t everything.

There’s no question that the Deutsches Museum is big and has some cool things. But it’s like a confusing warehouse where it’s difficult to seperate the important from the mildly interesting. It was hard to see that anything had been changed or upgraded in the last eight years. The technology exhibits were particularly poor, touting the coolest new tech from 2000 or 2005. Things like GPS and microchips seemed to have stopped dead somewhere between 1990 and 2005; although that did serve as a salutary reminder of how much things in technology had changed in the last eight years.

I wouldn’t say “don’t visit”, but I would say “don’t go out of your way to visit”.

Back at the hotel we checked in and started unpacking when Callum’s face turned ashen and he let out a heart-wrenching moan. He had left his tablet on the train. We dashed back to the station and found the lost and found office after some faffing around. A moment of hope when we saw a tablet on the desk was dashed when it was clear it was someone else’s. Now we’ve filled in the forms and will have to wait a day or two to see if Cal’s turns up. Poor Cal, it so deeply out of character for him to leave a piece of the tech behind – just shows he must be tired.