Munich sightseeing highlight: BMW Welt
My favorite activity in Munich was visiting the BMW factory and museum. There's actually three parts to the BMW experience in Munich. The first is BMW Welt (world), essentially a huge showroom, but with science-museum-like interactive displays such as analyzing the efficiency of different fuels, or finding out how cylinders work by spinning a wheel.
They also had demonstration drives of the diminutive BMW Isetta (like the Guido character in cars), and also BMW racing bikes, up and down the stairs of the building.
I'm sure the rider was also specially cast for his bilingual abilities and dashing looks!
The second part of the experience is the BMW Museum, where you got to see the whole history of BMW cars, advertising, design, and even its history making aircraft for the German military.
The third part is a tour of the BMW factory, but this is by reservation and the tours are often full. We were really lucky to get standby tickets; the tour is totally worth it! Tour guide was very knowledgeable. The key differences with my tour of the Toyota plant was that here we walked through the whole plant vs. being driven with an electric cart, which meant that BMW was very trusting we wouldn't touch any of the parts we walked by. Unfortunately we couldn't see the assembly line because the route was being reconstructed I think.
Icing on the cake was very reasonably priced food in the cafe - just €1.90 for this leberkase roll. Leberkase is another specialty of the region; in Bavaria it's not made with liver as the name implies, but beef, pork, bacon, and onions and cooked in a pan so it has the shape of a meatloaf but the texture of hot dog.
