Things to Do in Germany

The oldest church in Munich, St. Peter's Church, or Peterskirche, is a Roman Catholic establishment built in the 12th century in the Bavarian Romanesque style. The interior of the church features the magnificent Mariahilf-Altar, Gothic paintings & sculptures, and a ceiling fresco. But even these beautiful works of art can't top the bizarre gem-studded skeleton of St. Mundita, who stares at visitors with false eyes and jeweled teeth.

From the spire of "Old Peter", as the church is known to the locals, are spectacular views of the oldest part of Munich. Remember to check the colored rings at the bottom, a white ring means the Alps are visible, making the hike to the top even more worthwhile. Although the spire was almost completely destroyed during World War II, it was fully restored with the traditional architechture.

The Main River’s south bank is lined with museums, the most impressive being the Städel Museum. The Städel was founded in 1815 by the Frankfurt banker and merchant Johann Friedrich Städel and has grown to contain one of Europe’s finest collections of art. It is also an important historical site; in 1937, many of the museum’s paintings and prints were confiscated after being classified as degenerate art. Nowadays, the Städel’s collection is so extensive that it can only display 600 of the 2,700 paintings it owns.

The museum has a broad and exceptional collection of art, featuring European paintings from seven centuries. The span of artwork begins at the early 14th century, moving into Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque periods and ending in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some notable artists include Botticelli, Dürer, Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rubens, Vermeer and Cézanne.

With its crenellated turrets, ornate gables and fortifications, Schloss Stolzenfels exudes the sentimental beauty for which the Romantic Rhine is famed. Originally built in the 13th century to impose illegal river tolls, it had all the necessary features: a drawbridge, a keep, an impressive gateway and a chapel.

A Prussian king rebuilt the castle, ruined by the French, as his summer residence in 1823. Today, the rooms largely remain as the king left them. There is an impressive exhibit of armor and weaponry.

The Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt is the second largest natural history museum in all of Germany. Senckenberg contains the most comprehensive exhibition of large dinosaurs in Europe. Outside, you are greeted by enormous life-size representations of dinosaurs. Inside, you can trace the tracks of a Titanosaurus towards its skeleton on a covered patio. One particularly fascinating attraction is a dinosaur fossil with its scaled skin preserved.  These dinosaur exhibits are exceptionally popular with children.

Although its dinosaurs are the major attraction, the Senckenberg Museum also has an expansive collection of animal exhibits from every era. The museum boasts the world's most expansive collection of stuffed birds, featuring over 2,000 species. Another remarkable exhibit is a cast of the famous Lucy, a skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis, a hominid from 3.2 million years ago.

Schwabing, as Munich’s traditionally bohemian neighborhood, is quite different from what is otherwise a rather glitzy, snob city. It bred a generation of counter‐culture German litterateurs and painters like Ludwig Ganghofer and Oskar Maria Graf and attracted household names like Kandinsky and Lenin in the 19th century – and although it is not so alternative anymore, it still has an  “outsider” atmosphere not unlike Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg or London’s Shoreditch that is undeniably attractive. Sprawling from the English Garden on  its southern end to the Allianz Arena far up north,  and through Germany’s largest university, this little quirky slice of Munich is now the cosmopolitan stomping grounds of art students and fashion bloggers. It is bursting at the seams with gentrified shops and condos, hip boutiques, and pop‐up restaurants that the cool kids all lust after, although it does retain a charming je‐ne‐sais‐quoi with its colorful facades and historic thoroughfares.

Sea Life Munich is Germany’s largest Sea Life center, taking visitors on an underwater journey through local rivers and tropical seas, from the comfort of its 2,200 square meter Olympic Park building. With over 8,000 weird and wonderful sea creatures swimming in over 700,000 liters of water, and 33 climate-controlled aquariums, the facts speak for themselves, and there’s no better place to stand face-to-face with the creatures of the deep.

The center’s star attraction is its 400,000-liter ocean aquarium, equipped with a 10-meter long glass-walled foot tunnel that burrows through the tank, beneath prowling sharks, sea turtles, slimy octopus and hundreds of colorful fish. Featuring interactive exhibits that are as entertaining as they are educational, the aquarium’s focus is on recreating and preserving the world’s natural habitats and themed tanks represent the natural ecosystems of the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Danube and the local River Isar, among others. An added twist is that many of the most famous Sea Life center inhabitants have names and biographies, so children can meet Gonzales the sea turtle and Nemo the Clownfish, as well as watching the daily feeding of the fish.  A small rock pool allows further interaction, where it’s possible to touch or hold small sea creatures like starfish, anemone and crabs.