Alte Pinakothek

Today was a cold damp day thus an ideal day to visit an Art Gallery. Sunday is 1 Euro day and we definitely got our moneys worth.  The building alone did that. The rooms were large and well designed with a customised hall to display Rubens 6 metre high "Last Judgement". This room and many others had plenty of Rubens as well as van Dycks, Rembrandt, Rafael, Botticelli, Canaletto, Durer and many more.
Here are some pictures of the interior and of some of the paintings.

Canaletto

Rubens 6 metre high "Last Judgement"

Rembrandt's self potrait

After a couple of hours we found somewhere for lunch before driving home along the canals from Schloss Nymphenburg where we stopped to look inside church that despite its facade has a modern and simple interior.

Hamburg

I had been invited to be a guest speaker at the annual Hamburg International Yacht Forum this weekend. There was an audience of about 300 from Germany, Holland and all of the Scandinavian countries. It was held in the magnificent Rathaus (great name, meaning town hall) and began on Friday evening with a presentation and reception and then a dinner in the restaurant in the enormous vaulted cellars. Inevitably, it ended up in an Irish pub over the road. Normally when travelling to these sorts of events I am sponsored by the organisers. However, this was not the case, hence I was staying in a cupboard opposite the main train station. It was so small that the most convenient surface on which to iron a shirt was the toilet lid (leading to an obvious description of my ironing efforts). The main event took all of Saturday. The lunch was supplied by a company specialising in freeze-dried meals for mountaineers and around-the-world sailors. A few of us snuck out to a nearby sandwich shop to have something edible instead. It was gratifying to realise that my professional name is better known than I had suspected and that a number of the other designers were particularly complimentary of my work. Below is the backdrop to my presentation.

The day ended with another reception, meet and greet and spectacular buffet dinner followed by the inevitable descent into the Irish pub. The walk back to my cupboard was under a very pretty, heavy flurry of snow. The highlight of the trip home was being stuck as the only passenger on a train stopped in a siding. I had not understood that because of line works, I should have changed over to a temporary bus service for part of the normally half hour trip to the airport. After a (confused) exchange over the emergency telephone, the train was driven back into a station where I descended in ignominy.