Part 2 of Adventures in Chicagoland will come later... meaning that it will take longer to blog about them than it actually took to have them.
In any case, Johnny was talking about museums and airplanes and Germans and stuff, and it reminded me of something weird and wondrous and cool so I'm going to blog about that instead.
I love museums. I believe I've mentioned before that I'm a geek, so this should come as no surprise. So it transpired that when I went to Munich, I found myself in the Deutsches Museum. My German was, as they say in Deutschland, ganz rostig... (Do they really say that? I don't know. I said it there. Because I'm a geek.) ...still, given time, I could puzzle out some of the descriptions. I rarely got the time, because my colleague was less of a museum fan than I was, but we shambled through the museum admiring the displays and sometimes stopping to figure out half of what the display was about.
Now, in retrospect, the weird and wondrous thing should have come as no surprise, but I have been in so many museums that I have come to expect to see all the usual suspects. And so, when I turned the corner into the aerospace section of the museum, I was totally taken by surprise. I was in the 1940s part of the aerospace collection.
In Germany.
Instead of the usual Mustangs and Corsairs and B-17s on display, there were Junkers and Messerschmitts and Heinkels, oh my. There was an Me 262, the first jet fighter. There was a stubby little rocket-powered Komet, one of only ten left in the world (and now I'd seen 2 of them). The whole museum display paradigm that I was used to was tossed on its head because, of course, this was German aviation history, not American aviation history.
I was exhausted and jet-lagged and filled with wonder.
My coworker was ready to go to the giftshop.
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5 comments:
Awesome. I love going to foreign places that turn my head upside down. I'm trying to think of one...oh yeah...pharmacies in Mexico. Quite a trip.
Don't you love finding the weird and wonderful in museums?
Where in Mexico were you, Flan? I've gone a couple of times, once down through Mexico City to Oaxaca, and once down the Baja. I loved Oaxaca.
Museums are great, beth. There's always something weird and wonderful if you look. I wish I'd had more time to explore the Deutsches Museum. It's kind of the Munich version of the Museum of Science and Industry, so it didn't really focus on history, but it would have been interesting to have had more time to figure out what they said and didn't say in that particular section.
I was in Puerto Penasco...Rocky Point. It was on the Baja.
Sigh. Just thinking about it makes me feel relaxed. I can almost taste the Tecate.
Yeah... those were good trips. We went down to La Paz on that trip. We mostly drank Carta Blanca when we could find it.
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