MUNICH

I probably just had one of the best weekends of my life. Right up there with the weekend Mom and Dad picked Steve and I up from staying at Grandma & Grandpa's house, with the Beetle, and the weekend Jared and I visited Scott at Mich Tech right after I broke up with TJ.


:) :) :)

My study abroad buddies and I were big kids and planned our own excursion to Munich this past weekend!!!!!

That's right!! We showed our parents back at home and our international student coordinator how adult we can be, by booking a hotel room, buying a Eurail pass (to ride the high-speed trains that run all through Europe), and took off all on our own to pilot a city that has a gut-busting population of 1.3 million on a slow day.


The whole weekend was magical! I just...I just can't even try to type it here on my blog. It was like a Disney World for grown ups!!! Everything went perfectly: the group of 7 of us all traveled together and we all meshed so so well. Three girls, four guys, and I loved how the guys were so gentlemanly and watching out for us girls. In return, we girls ran head counts all weekend and helped get the boys all back to the hotel room, safe and sound, after they had a few too many beers while touring the city.

I mean WAH! Steve, one of the boys, was our GPS Man. He must have read some encyclopedia about Munich from cover to cover or something, because for never having been to that city, he knew how to navigate all of the vast public transportation: the subways, city busses, city trams, the downtown strip...geez!! We never once got on the wrong bus, or the wrong subway, or missed a subway. It was perfect, we totally grabbed that city by it's left butt cheek and showed it who was boss. The American kiddos. Yee haw!!



We left Kassel at about 8:30 AM on Saturday, and took a train down to Frankfurt, the city where I initially flew in to Germany. At Frankfurt, we hopped off the trains to the ticket booth, to buy these things called Eurail passes. Bascially, it is like a day-hopper pass to use on the trains, instead of buying a whole new $90 ticket each time you need to get on the train, on a one-way path. For $149 Euro, I bought a Youth Eurail Pass, which gives me any 5 days within a span of 20 consecutive days, to travel any train for the entire 24 hours in one of those 5 days. So, I have unlimited travel through all of Europe for 5 different days. This is highly effective, because I used it to go from Frankfurt to Munich, from Munich back to Kassel after this weekend, and now, I can use it to go from Kassel to Stuttgart (my second car pilgrimage, the plans are still up in the air though), from Stuttgart back to Kassel, and finally, from Kassel to Frankfurt, at the end of this month when I need to get back to the airport to fly back to the good ol' United States of America.

Anyway, we bought the tickets, grabbed some train station lunch, and then jumped on the train for a 3 hr, 30 minute ride down to the southern part of Germany, to the glorious city of Munich. Our ETA was 2:30 PM. Our first taste of Munich's public transit system was a big dose: we went from ICE train to subway, to bus, to sidewalk, to get to our hotel room to check in. (7 people all staying in one hotel room, it was a blast, one of those slumber parties you'll never forget.)

We spent the rest of the night out exploring the town, walking 3.4 km down the strip into primetime downtown Munich. I am not sure if I posted this before, but with German culture, every single town has a church at the center of it. So, if you are ever lost, you are supposed to walk towards the church steeple, to get back to the home base. Anyway, we did indeed get to the heart of the city.

And holy man!!! Man oh man oh man oh MAN!!!!! I took so many pictures that I chewed through 2 batteries in 6 hours!!! But the pictures...they do no justice. No justice to the beauty and charm and cleanliness and timeless feel of the city. I cannot post any on here since I have to wait to upload all of my photos from my digi camera to my computer back home in the States, but glory be!!! You look down the boulevard and see a replica model of the Brandenburg Gate, towering over a roundabout. Along the right-hand side of the street, it is all old, Gothic, traditional German architecture you picture in your head as a stereotype. But, on the left-hand side of the street, were all these totally new, funky, contemporary buildings!! The stores had so many bright and colorful and shining lights, and appetizing displays, and they were all so kept up well...everything was marketed so well, I wanted to walk into each and every store and buy something from it, just to see more of the insides of the stores!!!!! Plus, with it still being the holidays over here (there was a German holiday on the 6th, but I cannot remember what it was), there were sparkling white Christmas lights and boughs of holly and cheer everywhere. There was a woman wandering the streets, playing an accordion and wearing a black flowy skirt to match her black, long, curly hair. There were street vendors and families walking and window shopping. There were couples out walking their dogs on pretty leashes.

The best part of it all was the City Centre, the church at the center of the city. It was GORGEOUS!!! Zach, Jeni, and I all got pictures of it, but like I warned up above, the pictures we captured do NO JUSTICE to how much the sights can take your breath away!! The building was made during the Gothic period (1600s??? I don't know, I don't remember my Humanities with Mr. McAllister.) It was towering over you, like it could bend down and swallow you like a paper clip. It had to have stood 6 stories tall, with just the most ornate carvings and gargoyles and pillars and balconies and statues and hand-painted Leondaro DaVinci murals on the ceilings. The rooftops were symmetrical and peaked in all the right places. It really did take your breath away. And it DEFINITELY made me proud to be an engineer, among those that could create such a classic marvel and structure.

We actually found it on Saturday night, but then left it to beat feet all over the rest of the city. We ended up returning to this gorgeous castle-palace-church thing on Sunday night, only to walk through one of its archways and land inside its HUGE FREAKING COURT YARD.

It was even more breathtaking!!!! Zach got some killer photos for me, but wah!! On the inside, everywhere you turned, it was just beautiful. Winding balconies, intricate carvings, woodwork, sturdy stone. You could see inside the windows to find gorgeous chandeliers, winding staircases, you name it!! I LOVED it, and just like my buddy Jeni said, had it been a clear sky, it would have been THE place to sleep underneath the skies in a sleeping bag.

(By the way, it has been cloudy and it has rained every single day we have been here. Kassel definitely has a rainy season.)


Ahhhh, but to continue!! We left the City Centre on Saturday night to look at the rest of the window shops, were you could buy a stunning $300 brown vest that I did a double take on, right next door to a window display of such mouth-watering diamond necklaces and earrings and brooches, it would finally make that Richard Kessler guy shut up. Swarovski was the name of the store, I believe you might have heard of them??? If not, ask some of the most thrift-hungry thieves of the world, it is apparently the 5-star diamond dealer out of all diamond dealers.

:)

We continued on to find a Hard Rock Cafe!!!! In Munich, it was the coolest!!! Jeni and I went in and checked it out, and it put my ears at the ease they have been looking for since I got here: good, hard core, American rock music.

Guns 'Roses, Audioslave, A Perfect Circle...they were playing these songs in Germany!!! And not just songs that were released to FM radio...nope, songs on the CDs!! I felt so special. :)

Just as all Hard Rock Cafes are hip and chocked full of cool memorabilia, this one was too! Jeni got a picture of it for me, as my camera batteries were dead (I've charged them so many times already, ha ha!)

I also bought my first souvenir from Germany, too!! It was (also, a first) a Hard Rock Cafe tee shirt! (Yeah, my first one, I mean!) It is a black one, with quality brown leather screen-printed or adhered to the shirt, with the standard, globally-recognized Hard Rock Cafe logo circle on it. At the bottom lip of the circle, "MUNICH" was screen printed on it.

Hell yeah, I definitely wanted something as one of my souvenirs that said "Munich" on it, since Munich was my #2 goal to nail down with my trip to Germany. I've checked out this city so many times on the internet in the past!! And I've read about it in my World War 2 readings, too.



Jeni and I got pulled out of the Hard Rock Cafe, to go across the cobblestone street to the Haufbrauhaus, or HB for short. In English, it means "House of 100 Beers." It is basically one of the largest beer restaurants known in Europe, and all the other travel buddies wanted to check it out, so I went and sat there while I watched them chug these HUGE 1-Liter pitchers of beer, single-handedly.

The atmosphere there was buzzing!!! The main seating area had to have had well over 200 people there, in one big room with a cathedral ceiling all painted with 1800s murals. (Again, Jeni got pictures of this for me.) All of the tables were the long wooden picnic plank tables, with benches and people sitting at them, swinging their beer mugs back and forth and singing loudly while a band was playing folk music in the background, complete in the lederhosen and hunter green suspender straps and everything, in the traditional/historical German outfit.

And, apparently, if you looked closely enough, there were still swastikas painted on the ceiling in red, original from 1933, when Hitler made his first rally for the Nazi party there. Yes, I visited a building that Hitler was once at. It kind of makes me stop breathing for a second or two.

The waitors were pretty slick with wrapping their fingers around all the big 1-liter mug handles, too. When everyone else around me ordered their pitchers of beer, the guy showed up, holding on to a pyramid of beeer pitchers. He never even spilled an ounce, and it was quite a pyramid, like a stacked wedding cake!!

The boys (sadly) polished off quite a few pitchers and the night got pretty spontaneous from that point on. Let's just say I became Momma Bear (with the help of Jeni and slight help from Sara) for the rest of the night, including one passing out in a bar, one dropping his glass and shattering it all over that same bar's floor, and getting all those boys back to the hotel room and tucked into bed. Inside joke for my family: Jack Bauer would be proud of me. :) :) :)

Saturday night ended hilariously at the hotel room, just playing pranks on Ryan (one of the boys), but we got to bed at 2 AMish, and woke up on Sunday at 8:30 AM to get showered and head on out to Dachau, to the 2nd-most horrific concentration camp of World War 2.



We got there at about 1:30 in the afternoon (we got lunch and checked out of the hotel room and all that), and we rode to the actual town of Dachau (it is like a suburb of Munich), by subway. The subway actually led us to the trian station, and once we got to the train station, we headed up to above ground to catch a bus to the concentratoin camp.

It was eerie. I mean, I knew it would be, and I half-felt twisted for telling people that I was seeking out to go to this horrible place as a part of my tourism, but I also felt like it was something I needed to do. Like, I didn't believe it all, with reading all of those picture books or online articles or Mein Kampf, Hitler's biography, while I was in grade school.

But once the bus pulled up to the long pea gravel walkway to the concentration camp, everyone in the full bus fell silent. We all got off the bus, and the only sound was of the gravel crunching underneath our shoes.

The place was huge. I mean, there were bus loads and bus loads of people coming to visit, but once you got in to the place, everyone just seemed to disappear. There were so many different places or creepy thick woods or old original watch towers to crawl into, that you felt alone.

Add the clouds and cool biting breeze as effects, and you've got yourself one hell of a haunted house.

I, again, took so many pictures that I chewed through all three of my batteries. I had to recharge them all when I got back to Kassel on Sunday night. But, I got to see it all. There was no way in HELL I was going to walk the camp all by myself, but the group of us 7 split up, and I ended up walking with Ryan. He is such a sweetheart and genuine guy, that I felt safe with him.

GPS Man, Steve, was the only one that walked it alone. But, he has a valid valid reason: he is Jewish.







I think the whole walk was hard on him, especially since he told us his mom's side of the family is like 100% Austrian, and Austria was such a small, feeble country. It was actually the first one that Hitler invaded and took over in World War 2.




The whole camp was completed and memorialized in a very professional, respectful manner. It made me proud. There were plaques throughout the camp, with pictures and paragraphs in German and matching ones in English, basically explaining what you were looking at or what building you were standing in.

And we got to stand in it all. We walked through one of the last two standing barracks, where the bunk beds were, and the original lockers. We walked through the main road, where army truck loads of Jewish people would be brought in as prisoners. We walked through the wrought-iron entry gate that passes through an archway under the Nazi administration offices, with a message carved into the gate that is translated as "Work brings freedom."

We walked through the procession building that the Jews had to go through upon arrival: the first room where the clothes were stripped of them, the second room where there were gas chambers and the clothes piled in there to be "disinfected" with highly poisonous gas. I walked through one of the chambers and immediately felt claustrophobic, I quickened my pace and ran out of it, just freaked out about its small quarters or some spirit coming out of nowhere to slam the heavy steel aqua doors shut on me, trapping me in there.

We walked through the "Meeting room," where bodies of deceased Jews were piled up before they were sent to the incinerator. We walked through the "shower room," which was basically one big room with gas pipes disguised as shower heads. During the reign of the camp, the Nazis told the Jews to go in there to take a shower, but really, they were doused and suffocated with poisonous gas.


They were doused and suffocated 150 people at a time.


We walked through the two incinerators there at the camp: the original, small one, that was built with the camp, and then the larger, bigger one, built in 1942 because the first one was disgustingly "not big enough to meet its demands."


You could still see the ashes on the cots that were stuffed into the tubular-shaped ovens.



We walked the pathway through the woods, where a huge pit was dug into the ground and thousands of unknown, deceased Jews were tossed in as a mass grave. They were buried instead of burned, because the Nazis knew the Allies would invade their camp towards the end of the war, and were panicking to get rid of the bodies. The camp was built to hold 6,000 prisoners. At this time of panic, it was over-booked. To 32,000 prisoners.


There are still no trees growing over this now-filled grave. Just grass and moss.


We walked to a clearing just next to the mass grave, where the ashes of all of the burned bodies were piled up and used as fertilizer. Again, no trees grew there, just grass and moss...and a tiny little ivy vine with delicate leaves on it.

We walked along even more to a ditch, called the "Blood Ditch," with a stone wall about 4 feet along the bank on the other side of the ditch.

This was the firing wall, where the Nazis shot the Jews at the base of the back of their head. When the bodies would fall to the ground, the blood would drain into the as-mentioned ditch.


Only moss grows there now.


The whole place was haunting, sombering. It was hard to cheer up to visit the Olympiaplatz after that, where the 1972 Olympics were held. Even so, I am glad I went. It really showed me how to respect my life that much more, and to be so so grateful to the strong Allies and forces back in the 1940s that fought back the seemingly-inconquerable Nazi party.