Munich

This is a picture of the ceiling of the conference room used by the government of Bayern.
19-23, January 2009

Our Parlementarisches Patenschafts-Programm had a Mid-Year Seminar in Munich for a week. I rented a car and hit the road super early Monday morning to pick up three friends on the way south. With every rental comes a car review and I’m happy to report on the 2008 Mercedes-Benz C-class wagon. Alloy wheels, winter tires, six speeds, and a clutch pedal. The interior was adorned with more buttons than a legion of Her Majesty’s royal guards but they all were easy to find and use and controlled all sorts of neat stuff. Most of the 800km I put on the car were Autobahn and this car was perfect for that. It was very comfortable and quiet, visibility was great, and without getting into specifics, I’ll say this car was capable of sustained Autobahn speeds. The engine wasn’t big, somewhere between two and three liters, and it felt underpowered for what my notion of Mercedes is. It was surprisingly easy to feel what the tires were doing on sweeping turns but the general feel of the car didn’t feel as Mercedes as the others I’ve been lucky to drive.

Utilizing the sunroof and extra gummy bears for entertainment while listening to the two GPS system ladies’ instructions, we dropped off the car and walked around for a bit before the seminar started. The seminar was attended by twenty-five program participants I had met and befriended in Köln six months earlier. Through the week we discussed our experiences but we also had the opportunity to see other cool things like the BMW factory.


Big palace. It was a summer home.

Amazing. BMW Munich produces the 3-series sedans and wagons from sheet metal to headlight adjustment and we got to see it all. The bodies were all steel and smashed out of sheet steel with 600 ton presses in a room with probably twice the volume of my entire high school. The robots took over in a mechanical symphony of hydraulic, pneumatic, and electric spot welding that I could have watched for hours. A half dozen robots worked in a pod, accepting part from people, welding, and then passing to each other to add parts and complete panels. Imagine six bright orange robot arms swing car parts around, spot welding, re-positioning, and grabbing more parts, missing each other by mere centimeters. We saw the paint baths, the interior finishing, the engine manufacture, the final finishing, the “marriage” of chassis and body, and the engine startup with cars literally rolling off the assembly line. The entire facility had parts swinging on carts suspended from the ceiling on tracks that had intersections that changed to divert parts to various divisions. All of the components arrived on the assembly lines at the exact time and at the exact car. It was mind-bogglingly complicated yet smooth and I couldn’t stop smiling the entire time.


This is what my friends look like when they ride escalators in winter.


The group, all familiar from our time in Köln spent a lot of time together roaming the streets and figuring out split checks in breweries and bars. We also went to an opera – a Russian fairytale translated to German and performed in five centimeters of standing water on the stage. The water played only a little role but the most of the time, it was just there. Splashing, stomping, and ballet-ing through the water gave a cool effect with the lighting and sound of it all. This was an example of a modern flair on opera that worked (unlike Leipzig’s Flying Dutchman).



This is the ceiling of the DOM in Munich.

Cool city. Nice friends. Munich.