Pile Dwelling Museum — Attraction in Verwaltungsverband Meersburg

We had the misfortune to have an inctedibly rude and unfriendly guide. From the beginning at the ticket office, when we said we only spoke engliEn, she only repeated : "It's in German. Without the tour you can not go into the houses", which at the time did not mean much to us. As we understood it was either the German tour with this lady, or no entry at all, we reluctantly agreed to join the German guided tour. Throughout the tour she continued to be very hostile. At one point, she shouted at us while pointing to show the exact spot we should stand and wait while giving a lengthy explaination to the rest of the group in German, instead of offering the courtesy for us to explore a little bit and learn on-site. Then when we were all ushered into a "house" in the same way you would load cattles onto a truck, she promptly locked the door behind us and continued her whole tour in German. While my two-year-old was understandably getting a little bored from not following the tour that was conducted entirely in German and asked me quietly questions about what he was seeing in the house, this lady guide shhed us very loudly a couple of times and as putting her finger on her lips to shut us up. I am sorry, our volume was so low if not for her shhinh it would not have bothered anyone, and this consequence was completely foreseeable, knowing that we did not understand a word of German. Straight after, we were rushed again out to move on to a different area of the site, with no other time allowed to learn about the central part of the museum. It is a shame, as we would have learnt a lot more if left out of the tour and out of the locked-up house to read ourselves what is written on the boards outside of each house in four languages. We also found the workshop we stumbled across very disorganised, with the demonstrater interrupting himself and looking for tools all over the place every couple of minutes. He was working with copper wires, but who in the Broze Age had access to copper wires?! We felt that the tour could factor in a bit of flexibility for people that do not understand German or with young children for it to be educational and enjoyable. After all, being educational is the whole point of setting an open museum like this up, isn't it? So be warned if you do not understand a word of German especially you are with young children - better time and money spent elsewhere than visiting...

I'm a history nerd, so I was really engaged in showing my 4 (she says nearly 5) year old daughter the way our early early ancestors lived. The museum has an outdoor area, an indoor exebition and 2 short movies playing constantly. Outdoor you can visit several pole houses dating back +-3000years in time, but our guide told us, not all houses are original and local. They gathered several cultures and rebuild the houses exactly as they did in the early days. Some parts of the tour are really nice but they also neglected a small area on the side where docu's where made about this era.

Our biggest issue appeared to be our small dog, because dogs are only allowed on the outdoor village and not welcome in the movies area and indoor exebition (mostly containing original tools made of stone, bronze or iron). This divided our small family into 2 teams during the visit.

The museum is located in a touristic area, where swimming in the lake, playing minigolf, playing in a outdoor wooden playing area for children, and even several eating options are located. It's located near Meersburg but for me it's worth the 5km travel outside this historic city and make a beautiful relaxing day full of playing, exploring and a bit of history.

Children and dogs are free...

The site itself seems to be nice. We had some trouble to deal with, though.

The parking lot right in front of the museum is blocked to visitors, a sign asks to park 200 meters further down the road, but after some back and forth we could find no parking lot for visitors anywhere nearby. Eventually I had to temporarily stop the car right on the road, let my family enter the exhibition and ask inside at the desk for where to park. There they knew of the problem and informed me that parking is only outside of town, a small walk away, "Parkplatz am See".

Driving there, it turns out that parking is metered by the minute. One meter machine was broken, the other accepted no card payment by default and refused to take bills. Turns out yet another machine is needed to change bills into coins in order to feed the parking meter, that second machine is inside a toilet building on the other side.

When I later walked all the way back and forth between exhibition and parking lot in order to feed more coins to the meter, on returning the same staff who told me to park outside of town now didn't want to allow me back into the exhibition, claiming that "re-entry is generally prohibited".

As a positive side effect to these measures, the exhibition is...