Saturday Afternoons with Tobias

Several weeks ago, after much convincing from Mom and Tobias, I finally agreed to go to the Deutsches Museum with Tobias for the afternoon. The Deutsches Museum is a gargantuan science and technology museum. I have to hand it to the people who created the place: it's very thorough, informative (more so if you can read German), and well organized. I had just one problem: I dislike most science and almost all technology. It bores me to death. But, it's supposed to be one of the best science museums in the world and I was sick of Mom and Tobias telling me I had to go, so I went and regretted it almost immediately. I think Tobias also immediately regretted asking me to come because I was the worst museum traveling companion ever. I was chomping at the bit to get out of there as soon as we got in. Meanwhile, Tobias was trying to interest me in everything we passed: "Hannah, look at the turbo engine. How cool is that?! And, oh, look we can see the cross-section of a subway tunnel. Ooo, and here is a furnace that's used to make sheets of metal! Look at..." I refused to be interested in anything, but somehow we still managed to spend two agonizing hours in that place. When we finally made it out of the museum itself, there was the gift shop: everything from Bavarian memorabilia, to science books, over-priced gemstones and geodes and the general junk you find in museum gift shops that makes you wonder why you bought it as soon as you get it home. After wasting a half-hour in there, we got outside, by which time it was getting dark and the temperature was dropping significantly. A little background on this one: my brother has a weird infatuation with the public transportation system, especially the trolleys, which has been made apparent on more than one occasion. When we stepped out of the gift shop, Tobias spotted the trolley station and remembered a promise I had made before entering the museum: that we could take the trolley back to the subway station since I had refused to take it on the way into the museum. I immediately regretted this promise: how far was the trolley stop to the train station? One and a half blocks. And how long, you might ask, was it until the next trolley came? Ten minutes. I tried to talk Tobias out of this one, but he insisted, so I walked back to the train station and stood around waiting in the cold for eight minutes until my grinning brother stepped off the train and proceeded to tell me exactly what kind of vantage point he had had in the trolley: how he could see the street go by " and it was so cool, Hannah, I could see the track and..."



A few Saturdays later, Tobias and I decided that we would hunt up a new branch of the Munich City Library. I instructed Tobias to Google a new library while I got ready. He found one and said he knew exactly how to get there. We had to change trains once and about nine stops later, he said: "here we are." We got out of the subway and walked to the library, about a block away, only to find that it was closed on Saturdays. "Oops", Tobias said, grinning at me. I asked him how on earth he had managed to find a library, then completely ignore the hours. "Well you didn't tell me to look up the hours, Hannah, just the location." "Tobias, it was implied that you find out the hours. Now we've come all the way out here for nothing." "It wasn't for nothing, Hannah. We got to take an awesome subway ride. Hey, do you wanna take the subway to the end of the line just for the heck of it? Ooo, look, let's take the awesome glass elevator down to the subway. Let's..." Sigh.