When I was a kid my father wrote a book on the life of Rudolf Diesel and his engine. Diesel's papers in their spidery old-German longhand are in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. As an aside, if you ever find yourself in southern German and you don't visit Munich and the Deutsches Museum, you're wasting your life.

Anyhow, dad wrote this book and as a result I spent a lot of summers in Germany as a kid roaming around the museum. Someone thought it was a good idea to give an 8 year old unsupervised access to a giant building full of rockets, tesla coils, and exotic radio-chemicals.

My international Secret Santa, as it turns out, is from right around the same place. Now, this was my first experience with international secret santa and I kind of wimped out when I realized that my giftee and I shared a favorite author but he'd never read my favorite series by that author, so I just shipped him that series in his native tongue and called it solved. But this? This is the real deal complete with packaging that looks like its had a few adventures of its own.

So thank you, Secret Santa, for a taste of my childhood, a fascinating toy, and more than a little bit of nostalgia.

Fröhliche Weihnachten