The Technik Museum
27 April 2009, 1:04 p.m.
49° 18' 45.84" N, 8° 26' 42.12" E
Well, Henry was right—on the way out of Speyer, heading back to the A6 autobahn, you go right past the big Technik Museum. And if you’ve got a 3-year-old boy in the front passenger seat, you don’t have much choice but to stop, especially when Conrad starts shouting “aereo! aereo!” and pointing like crazy at the big Lufthansa jet, frozen in takeoff, that's mounted right on the museum's roof.
Is that legal over here? Not the airplane, I'm sure that's okay, I mean having a squirmy little kid on his mother’s lap in the front seat of your rented minivan? I gotta check into that.
Anyway, here’s the budget for this stop: so Henry gave me 20 euros to take little Conrad to the Technik Museum. (I know, I know—it was really my money, and Henry was just giving me a kickback from the payment he had extorted out of me, but the weird thing is, it feels like something else—like I have these special Imperial funds in my pocket.) And now it turns out that kids under 5 get free admission to the museum, so even with the 7 euro ticket to the Imax, you might think I’d be ahead 13 euros, right? Hah! That would be because you forgot about the four adults in the Opel! Adult admission is 13 euros, plus the Imax tickets at 9 euros each, and nobody but yours truly makes the slightest move to pay. (I’m beginning to understand what it means to go on vacation with two monks and a royal family.)
So basically we’re talking 95 euros, 20 of which were “given” me by Henry, so even if I accept the fiction of Henry’s beneficence, and deduct the charges for my own tickets (I did enjoy myself), I’m still down 53 euros, plus the 200 (or should it be 180?—this feudal finance is getting confusing) that I’ve already given Henry.
But I gotta admit it's a fun museum. It even has an old Soviet Space Shuttle, which they floated up the Rhine. Yep, that’s how they got it there, on a barge.
Next episode: The Funeral Visit
(available when published)
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