MmmmMunich

When we arrived in Munich we were pretty tired and our hostel was about a million miles away from the city center, so we did a little bit of wandering but nothing too major. That evening Sarah and I had our first of three fantastic German dinners. We both had traditional German sausage with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut. I didn’t particularly care for the sauerkraut but the meat and potatoes were divine.

The next day was when the Germany adventures began!

We did the New Munich Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Tour which was such an incredible experience I can’t really describe it properly. Dachau, if you don’t know, was opened in 1933 and was the only concentration camp to remain active during the entire Third Reich period, until 1945. More than 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 nations had been imprisoned there. We had a fantastic tour guide who took us on the underground and a bus, about an hours worth of travelling altogether, to the site. The tour included access to and information about Dachau, including the barracks, crematoriums, gas chamber, former SS training camp, Roll Call Square, Administration building, prisoner’s arrival at the camp and their living quarters, religious memorials, and the experiences that the prisoner’s lived through while kept there. I can’t say this was a fun or enjoyable tour, but I learned so much and I am very lucky to have had the chance to visit such an emotion-infused historical site. It was extremely overwhelming walking around the square where prisoners were forced to work without a reasonable amount of food or water and where they were endlessly tortured, and as my tour group entered the crematorium wherein stands the gas chamber, silence overtook us all and I know that at least one person there was quietly paying her respects to all those who died there. I believe that Dachau is one of the most important centers of remembrance, contemplation and learning in Germany today, as I was promised when I signed up for the tour.

That night for dinner we decided to have a repeat of the night before, only this time a little more exquisite. I ordered a sausage platter which had four different kinds of German sausage on it. There were a couple I have never heard of before, and I can’t remember the names of any of them, but one in particular stands out in my mind. It was kind of rectangular shaped and it was a white-grey colour. It was very yum! Not to mention the mountain of mashed potatoes on the plate. Needless to say, with the prices of food in Switzerland which resulted in Sarah and I embarking on a kind of famine, we were in heaven!

When we got back to our hostel we discovered that our pajamas were missing from our beds…and that is a whole other story that I’m sure you will enjoy and that I will write about later entitled Hostel Hell.

The next day we went on the Neuschwanstein Castle Tour; this is the castle that inspired Walt Disney’s famous castle that you see at the beginning of all his films. Naturally I was stoked to see it. It took two hours on train to arrive at the location, but it was definitely worth it. The scenery was breathtaking; as we walked off the train we were surrounded by the stunning Bavarian countryside and Alps (I may be dumb, but I didn’t have a clue that there were Alps in Germany…). Anyways, the castle towers over rocky cliffs at the foot of the German Alps and the tour really was a fairy-tale adventure. We had a very good tour guide again who supplied us with endless information about the epic story of “Mad” King Ludwig and his castle – in all its magic, romance, and absurdity. It was a great day, and we had wonderful weather for such an occasion too.

We met a few girls from LA on the tour and went out for dinner that night at a beer garden near our hostel. I had beef this time (wanted to try something other than sausage, hahaha), which came with roasted potatoes and spinach. It was very good, but I have to say I prefer their sausage.

The next day we went on the free walking tour but, for the first time on our trip, our tour guide was horrible. He talked a lot about himself actually, and was not very good at explaining the things I actually cared about learning. So Sarah and I ditched that tour and took it upon ourselves to visit everything in the city centre of Munich that we wanted to. We saw the Glockenspiel (apparently voted the second most disappointing tourist attraction in Europe – I don’t agree really, but whatever), the Church of Our Lady, the Old and New Town Halls, the New Synagogue, and much more. We both really liked Munich and didn’t really want to leave; we could have easily spent another day there, especially if it meant the opportunity to eat more cheap and delicious sausage. But we had to head back to our hostel in the early afternoon in order to catch our 3:30 train to Vienna. Onward we go!