Lo and behold, it's the champions league final today, being hosted in Munich, and Munich is in the champions league final!
Perfect day to go see Macbeth!
Once again, we brave German theater students grabbed out backpacks, improvised new plans, pushed through the crowds of blues and reds (BAYYYYEEEEERRRRNNN!!!) and came out on top. We managed to eat, to watch our shows, and most surprisingly, to catch the end of the game. Prima!
Rewind to the beginning of the day, where we decided to check out the flea market at the Olympic Center. Built for the 1972 Olympics, the sports facilities, and surrounding parks and villages, go as far as the eye can see. On any normal day it's where you can expect to find Munich's jogger culture, and the occasional obscure sports group meet-up (parkour!). However, today it was the consolation prize for the huge masses of soccer pilgrims. We got there and followed the crowd. We couldn't find the flea market, but we did hit upon the public viewing of the match, a.k.a. the place where the party was at. Anyone who couldn't make it to the game and still wanted to paint their face red - or heaven forbid, blue - was going to be there, starting to gather even before noon.
Our friends Sony and Adidas were sure to make an appearance, and who could forget Mr. Champions League Trophy himself. Unfortunately the line to be able to take a High School Musical jump photo with the giant cup was a little too long for our busy schedules; but we did find the time to rest upon a beautiful hillside overlooking a lake, which was covered by a fifteen by six PERSON screen, with an overcrowded amateur soccer match going on below. Actually, I think the most striking thing about the event was the particularly calming music they were playing over the loud speakers. Clearly they wanted to pacify the soccer fans as much as possible.
After chatting with some Germans, some Poles, some Brits, and even some Michiganders (kudos to Sam for wearing his Michigan M hat), some of us made a detour before going home - to the BMW museum. Let's talk about the marvels that auto industry money can buy. We entered into BMW Welt ("world"), and quickly found out that it was connected to a BMW factory, the BMW museum, and BMW headquarters. We went on the tour of the museum. Basically, keeping in mind the obnoxious necessity to see through the constant BMW propaganda, this museum was what you might wish that all museums looked like. We went through interweaving corridors of exhibits that kept a straight path, and every once in a while opened up to a glance of the whole complex museum without making us wish we had left a trail of breadcrumbs. Everything was straight-forward, but still interesting in the architecture and presentation. DESIGN, DESIGN, DESIGN was what the building was trying to convey. In fact, I'll give it to them, it was a pretty good design feat, that being the whole BMW complex. The pros and cons of private museums, ladies and gentleman - very one-sided, but very cool.
I'd prefer not to go into details about the rendition of Macbeth that we saw. After all, some of us absolutely loved it, but I personally put it at the bottom of my list of the shows we have seen so far. The real show was standing at the back of a large crowd, trying to watch the end of the champions league final on a relatively small . Two halves of overtime, a penalty shoot, and.... sorry for the spoiler... Bayern Munich lost to Chelsea. It was actually interesting to see the community's reaction. As soon as Chelsea shot the winning penalty, people just started filling away. No uproar, not crying. People just left. Clearly we weren't in the mainstream area, we happened to catch the crowd that just wanted to know the score finally, I think.
We didn't try to find the drama that night. We headed to bed, because the next day we had an early morning museum tour.
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