Today's munich weather will be bloody freezing followed by snow.

Took a while to got Flick out of bed. Apparently some jerk was keeping her awake by snoring. Ooops.

But I needed to get her out of bed because we were off to Munich for the Bavarian film studios. Had trouble working out the best ticket. €74 each seemed a little much. As it turned out there was a cheaper option; €30. Return. For both of us. Including Munich public transport. We had to get the slower train but since that was 1h 50 rather than 1h 30 it seemed worth the saving. And the train to Munich has a pretty view of the mountains and of picturesque Bavarian villages.

Since yesterday was so warm, I decided I'd just borrow a hoodie from flickums. By the time we got to the studios, it was sleeting and my coat was in another country. Still, we made it there. And we appeared to be in a fairly non-descript set of studio buildings. Was this even the right place? Eventually we found the entrance. Turns out that the tour is in German only. The English language tour is a summer only thing.

Worried that it might be a bit of a washout, we decided to sign up for the tour anyway. We'd come this far after all. As it turned out it was really good. Our guide - Michi was the guide for the Enlgish tour as well, so he spoke English and was kind enough to give us an English summary of what he said. The studios are used for a range of different show types, incuding the 24 hour shopping channel. So we saw part of that being filmed. More interesting was the set for some German soap opera (Sturm Der Liebe). The tour involved one of the guests being the receptionist reading from the autocue, and cutting between filmed footage I gather in reality, the filmed footage would also be recorded live.

Another section had a bunch of movie props from Big Game (a fairly obscure Finnish movie, but it did star Samual L Jackson), and I got a photo of myself in Air Force One. We also saw the set for Das Boot. A lot of it was fitting from a real German submarine. The director apparently was very keen on realism so tried to make the actors as miserable as possible.

Other fun interactive elements were me giving a weather forecast, and a film on a train set, with a moving scenery background (I was the moving background operator).

Finished the day meeting with a German friend of Flick's. Nice chap. A lead programmer with BMW. We swapped horror stories about big companies and bad projects. We went to a German beer hall and had beer (well, I did; Flick doesn't drink) and tasty steak in pepper sauce.

Caught a train home and arrived back at a sensible time.

Modern Art is weird

Today I successfully woke up flickums. It was an easy going day so we strolled into town and went up in the lift to the modern art gallery. The gallery is at the top of the cliff that Salzburg juts against.

It is very nice up there. Away from the traffic and bustle of the city (although Salzburg is small so not too noisy or bustly). The old fortifications are up there and some nice paths to stroll along. Weather was chilly, but clear and sunny and this time we remembered our coats.

Had a peek inside the art gallery because we'd paid for it. I wouldn't say it really caused an emotional reaction, unless bemused counts as the reaction the pieces were trying to elicit. I guess I'm just a philistine who doesn't understand art. So we went out again and wandered around the clifftop. The sun set behind the mountain as we were up there and it suddenly got very cold. We got some lovely photos though.

Decided we'd had enough traditional Austro-bavarian megafood for a while so went for Italian. Still had an Austrian beer though. Can't have too much of that.