More Weekend Palace Visits and Update on School Stuff

We ventured out Saturday morning with a errand to the drogerie and a visit to our neighborhood palace complex. Schleissheim is the name of the complex that consists of an old palace, new palace, and a hunting lodge named Lustheim on the far side of the land. We stumbled across this palace and posted some pictures outside of it earlier this year, before we were even sure what area of greater Munich that we were going to reside. Our house is on the southern end of Unterschleissheim "Under Schleissheim", the name of the palace, get it? And we are very close to the town of Oberschleissheim "Top Schleissheim". It turned out we live close enough to ride bicycles (Fahrrader) to the palace. In this case with our errand, plus the rain and the mid thirty degree temperatures a car ride was in order. As you might imagine this is not the heavy tourist season. We almost had the place to ourselves going early in the morning.

The ticket desk was in the entrance of the new castle. We used our annual castle pass, again, to get our free tickets. That thing has really paid off. We went ahead and did the tour of the new palace first. The "new" palace started construction in 1700 under the direction of the Max Emanuel who ruled until 1726. The common theme/story line that we have noticed on almost all of these palaces is that they never seem to get finished. The ruler that starts the project is either dead or out of money before it is ever finished and the project is scaled down at some point. This was again the case here as this new palace was supposed to be four wings that joined up with the old palace, only two of them were ever started.

Above is the first room that we walked into. This place was a different experience than the other palaces that we have seen. It was very empty, not just from lack of people but also furniture and decor. This ground floor level was just a huge open space. The walls and ceilings were decorated and the architecture was very nice and a little different than what we had seen before. There was also no audio guide, just a small amount of information was offered in each room on a small stand with text.

In the room above with the kids they had rows of chairs set up that led me to believe they have events here.

This is a wood model showing the old and new palace complex as it was originally designed. A good portion was never built. This is where we picked up our first friend of the day. I got a kick out of the employees following us around to each room, once we left their area of responsibility we picked up another friend. I would blame it on the kids being there but they were escorting the other people around too. For about two seconds I thought, hhmm I could work here and still get the kids to and from school each day. Then I thought about how bored I would be and how quickly I would go insane.

These two pictures above were from the main grand staircase. I didn't understand the architecture from a functional perspective. The main entry to the palace was in the first rooms that we saw, this staircase was down at the end of the hall. It was very beautiful but you really don't get to see it from a distance to take it all in. I had to use the panorama feature on my phone to capture both sides of the staircase. The mural above was at the very top above the staircase.

This was the main room at the top of the stairs with huge paintings on the walls and what was once the largest ceiling mural in the world. 

That led into this large hall that was the buffer between the Elector and Electress apartment rooms.

His bed

Her bed.

There were a couple of side rooms with these exquisite marble walls. The text said that they were designed for "The Residenz", the main palace in central Munich where the elected officials reside, but at some point were transferred to Schleissheim. I should mention that is was very dark in most of the palace and also very cold. Cindy and the kids were freezing and the pictures did not turn out great. 

I still cannot get over how much land is claimed by these palace complexes. It is about 1.5km to get from the new palace, in the middle of the grounds, to Lustheim on the other end of the grounds pictured above. 

At this point we were done with the new palace and Cindy and David were done in general. They wanted to get warmed up so they headed to the store. I managed to talk Katherine into checking out the old palace with me. 

The old palace was heavily damaged in WWII and was not re-created until the 1970's. The inside was plain and "modern" mostly built to house displays of religious artifacts and museum pieces from different ages. I took a couple of pictures of some manger scenes. These were some of the more detailed versions out of the dozens that were there. 

Again there was no tour and this palace only had information posted in German. One employee tried to describe a basement area that was original to the building from the late 16th century, but all we found was the WC area. Katherine and I were done about the time Cindy and David returned from the store.

We jumped in the car and drove to the other side of the grounds to take a look at Lustheim. Above the kids are in front of Lustheim looking back across the grounds to the new palace through the mist.

This is a relatively small building compared to the other structures. It had a nice grand room and then smaller rooms. On display is a porcelain collection that is said to be impressive and important. I believe them.

After touring all three palaces in one day the family was done. We headed back home to stay warm.

Sunday was not a lazy day this week. Katherine had been invited to another birthday party. It was the day of the party before we realized it was located at a museum in central Munich. The State Museum of Egyptian Art in fact. It was not an ideal trip to say the least. You would think it would be pretty calm on a cold rainy Sunday. After all not much is open, right? It was a mess, I don't know how people live in that area. We had to circle the building a couple of times before I could get into a spot to just let Cindy and Katherine out of the car. Cindy dropped Katherine off and came back to the car where I was currently blocking a driveway. There is no parking anywhere. Cindy, David and I decided to drive a couple of kilometers to see yet another palace while Katherine was at the party. We arrived at Nymphenburg Palace a few minutes later. It is a massive conglomeration of buildings and land just west of central Munich. We were thinking we would have a similar crowd like the day before at Scleissheim, nope. There were hundreds of cars here. We decided most of the people were there exercising/running around the grounds. I really think rainy and 38 degrees in late November is exciting to the locals. It is like they are celebrating it not being freezing cold yet. There were not very many parking places but we did manage to find one. Here is another panorama from in front.

The only place that we were able to tour indoors was the large tallest structure just left of center in the above pic. It had a very pretty grand room at the beginning, but was rather disappointing otherwise.

I really thought we were going to be pushing it to go here and get back to Katherine in time. It turns out we had plenty of time. We made it back to the museum and tried to find a parking place. Now it was starting to get dark outside and it was raining. We looked and looked for anywhere to park up and down blocks in every direction around the area. I finally made it to the same driveway area and parked there to let Cindy out. Within a few minutes of her leaving I was being honked at by someone wanting to get into that area, so I moved and made another round thinking by now the traffic should be dying down. After another round I was turning on the street in front of the museum when me and about four other cars saw brake lights and a car looking like it was about to pull out. People actually sped up to pass me but I had none of it. I boxed them out like a center in basketball until the car cleared. I barely left enough room for the person to get out of the space. A quick parallel park later I finally had a spot and a stress headache to go with it. Finally Katherine and Cindy arrived back at the car and we were off towards home. As soon as I turned on the car I had a line of cars waiting for me to move. This place is nuts, no more birthday parties in central Munich. If I am going to go down there again it is going to be for more than a couple of hours and I think we will take the public transportation or park and walk.

I have been trying to get this blog post done for a while. We have had computer drama here for the past several days. The computer that I built right before we moved here has been doing great. I decided to upgrade to Windows 8.1 from Windows 8, sounds harmless right? Days later I think I have figured out what was causing the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) every twenty minutes for the past couple of days. I think it was a certain software program that caused the appearance of a hardware conflict. Time will tell if we are done with all of that. I can't tell you how many hours I have wasted trying to figure it out. I ever agreed to pay Microsoft to figure it out, stayed online with them past 4am Sunday night. The next afternoon they had a senior tech call me and he was unsuccessful too. I got my money back and I hope it is fixed now.

The kids are out of school on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. We are having 3-way conferences with the child, parent, and teacher. The four of us had back to back sessions this afternoon where the kid got to tell us about the work they have been doing so far this school year and we got to get feedback from the teacher. It was good. David had to get together a representation of his work in a folder and write reflections to present to us. He had a rough start to the year, as he usually does, but is getting it together. All of his teachers are seeing much improvement in his behavior in class and they all tell us how smart he is, when he applies himself. David learned a hard lesson that I think will stick with him for a while. The topic was culture and he was to put a research map together and present it to the class about the culture he is from in the US. He wasted all of his research time in class doing nothing and waited until the last minute to finish. Here is where it got bad. His teacher filmed his presentation as he did it in front of the whole class. His research map was filled with inaccurate facts about the US and generalizations about other things that were false. He confidently presented the work to the class. His teacher had some questions for him as he started to try and finish up. She called him out on it on camera during class pointing out his mistakes and making it clear that he did not do the research. At the end he was almost in tears. She let up at the end after seeing him get upset. I think it was still embarrassing enough for him to remember for a while. We watched it during our meeting today and he started to get upset again. He was quick to let us know that he has set a personal goal to get better at researching topics. It was a goal sheet that he thought out and put steps down to make it happen. It was a tough lesson and as parents hard to watch. In the end I am glad it happened the way it did and hopefully it will lead to better work in the future.

We enjoyed meeting with his German teacher. David is doing great and seems to be picking up a lot of German. His teacher was asking him things in German that he was understanding and replying back. Soon he will be talking for the family when we are out and about.

Katherine got all great reviews from her teachers. She is doing really good in all categories. She is reading and doing math above her grade level and by all accounts is well behaved in class. I think it comes pretty natural to her, but she has also seen her brother getting griped at by his parents for years too.

I enjoyed getting to meet with the teachers with the kids present. Most of it was very positive and we learned a lot about the daily work and activities the kids are doing at school. They are excited because they got most of today off and are out all day Wednesday too.

Well so far so good on the computer. I was able to finish this up with no BSOD interruptions. Thanks for checking in on us. Let me know if you are tired of seeing pictures of palaces, the kids are starting to ask questions about how many of these places they have to see. Don't you feel sorry for them?