Munich day 1

In continuation with the blast from the past travels, I'll be writing about my travels to Munich in 2011. Munich for the record, is a very easy airport to fly into from the US, many of the flights arrive in the morning at 7am local time after a red eye flight from the east coast. I arrived bleary eyed as I cannot for the life of me sleep on long haul flights. After we dropped our bags off at the hotel (Hotel Adria am Englischen Garten, which I would recommend), we went to Dachau, to the concentration camp. To get there, you have to take a special bus, that comes at limited times of the day. With our luck of course, it started to rain, which was fitting with where we were going, bringing an even more somber atmosphere. As you enter the camp walls, you pass train tracks, written into the ground the tragedies it bespoke of the massacre of many people. Dachau was originally a camp for prisoners of war, where the barracks weren't originally the horrors that they became. The camp has a barrack recreation to illustrate how the barracks changed over the years when the population increased and it changed from a prisoner of war camp to a camp of true horrors. Several of the guard towers still stood, connected to the fence with razor wire on top, with a 'moat' separating the wall from the general walking area. That strip of land was a no-mans land, with some deciding to run towards the wall to end it all. To the back left, were the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens. The gas chambers were purportedly not used at this camp, but prisoners were forced to strip there, and you could see the vents where gas would enter. There were bullet holes in the walls, and stories of life and death on the walls. The ovens, I can't really talk about the ovens. There are various memorials around the buildings. I got chills walking around, as I knew quite a bit about WWII and the realities of camps such as this. We walked around the back of the camp, to a monastery, the Catholic Carmelite Convent at Dachau, built in 1963, before walking along the edges of the camp. In the main halls were the horrific exhibits of what occurred during WWII, the Holocaust, and at Dachau itself. This was the site of human experiments among other things. After walking through two of the buildings, we were sensory and emotionally wasted and couldn't make it further through the other two galleries. I suppose that's the point. Never forget, do not let these horrors happen again. So when we listen to the world news even now, not to ignore the plight of others around the world.

Guard tower

After being decimated by Dachau, which I do not recommend going to straight off a transatlantic flight (I do recommend going to one while visiting Germany though), we rested up and then got lunch at an Italian place where our waiter didn't really speak German or Italian, but did speak Spanish. The pizza was yummy after our last meal of plane food. We then wandered around for the afternoon, and landed at Hofbrauhaus in the evening. This is a congenial atmosphere, where you sit with random strangers and enjoy a good beer. Don't arrive too late, or the kitchen's closed, which we learned too late. I at least was smart enough to get an apple strudel, and the others got massive pretzels. I finally found a beer I liked, hefeweizens, for the very first time. Yum yum. We ended up spending many of our evenings here, where is was fun. Once full of beer, time for a little nap.... ok..... just plain sleep..... til the next day.

Massive pretzels