Castles and a concentration camp

Yes, that title does describe our trip to Munich(München in German) this past weekend. They may seem like two very different places to visit, but we have to make it to diverse locales, right?

Anyway, we just got back from Munich a few hours ago and I decided to be nice and write this up tonight yet before I forget everything we did! (Thanks to my host family, who let me use their computer! Danke Familie Wölk!)

Ok, so after classes Friday afternoon we took a train from Marburg to Frankfurt, which lasted about an hour and then caught another one to Munich which was about 3 hours, so the trip was not too long. And we did not lose anyone this weekend! Yay for sticking together! We got to Munich in the early evening and checked into art hotel munich, out accomodations for the weekend. Apparently, they are redecorating and everything has this modern art feel to it, which I liked actually. Very simplistic with lots of bold colors... So we checked in with 2-3 students per room and we were very excited to have our own bathrooms this time(last weekend we had a communal one that the floor shared). It was also very convenient that our hotel was just a few blocks away from the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) so we did not need to rely on public transportation at all. But thankfully no bus or train strikes were occurring this weekend in Munich. . . We were all very hungry by this time and went as a group to the Augustiner Keller, which is the oldest biergarten in Munich! It was awesome! We unanimously decided as a group that this was by far our best meal in Germany. The food was AMAZING! They had delicious German specialties like wiener schnitzel, spätzle, knodeln, rotkohle, and I even tried duck for the first time. And in the words of a fellow classmate, " I am officially a duck fan." :) The atmosphere was cool, too. The place was HUGE, since it was outside and there are wooden tables everywhere with christmas lights in trees to set the mood. There were also two different levels since the ground sloped so we could actually see the tables below us. It was a great night! But if you ever visit it, which I highly recommend, be careful, because those scrumptious-looking pretzels on the table are not free, as we found out when it came time to pay the bill and the waitress asked us how many pretzels we ate... :)

After out traveling and very satisfying meal, we slept good that night only to wake up bright and early the next morning to get some museum visiting done. After breakfast at the hotel, (which was better than in Berlin as well because they had more options to choose from) we headed to the Fussgänger Zone. It is a place were they have many shops and only pedestrians can go through them as public traffic is not allowed. We walked and browsed the shops until the museums opened. We then had a choice to visit the Alte Pinakothek or the Neue Pinakothek (the old or new paining galleries). Three students went to the new one (paintings from the 1700s and 1800s), while the rest of us and Frau Losch went to the old one (1500s-1600s). There Frau Losch showed us two specific paintings by Albrecht Dürer (his portrayal of four of the apostles and a self-portrait) and did a brief presentation/explanation of them which helped us understand his style better. We then did a sprint through the museum, as we had to meet up with the rest of the group shortly thereafter to make it to our train to Dachau in time. The paintings were gorgeous and several of them were very large. We even saw a Da Vinci, several Raphael and Reubens, and one Velasquez painting!

We met up with the group and headed out to the concentration camp at Dachau, which is a little ways outside of Munich. Our tour guide through the camp was actually a young woman from the Ukraine that works through the Protestant Church here in Germany. She spoke English and is working on her German, so our tour was thus conducted in English, to the relief of several Wartburg students, who are still just beginning to learn German. We walked through the museum there which had lots of photographs and a short 22-min. film about the camp. We also went through a prison building, with many cells as well as barracks, that were reconstructed. It was a chilling experience as the whole camp is very open with gravel covering the ground so it almost looks like an abandoned gravel parking lot except with buildings here and there. What was very depressing to me was going through the crematorium and the gas chambers. Now, Dachau was not an extermination camp during World War II, meaning it did not kill its "prisioners". It was a work camp. It did, however, burn the dead bodies that came from other camps in its crematorium and sent people to be executed in other camps. The gas chamber that we went through was never used, apparently, but no one knows why. So. . . now that we were all depressed and feeling very burdened we headed back to Munich for supper at the Chinescher Turm (Chinese Tower), which is not chinese place, but another open-air restaurant type set-up. It only has a chinese-style tower on its grounds. They played typical Bavarian music (Munich is in the German state of Bavaria, which was its own country for many, many years), which lightened our mood a great deal. This restaurant is sort of like cafeteria-style where you go and get your food from people behind a counter and then you go up and pay for it at a cash register. It was also settled in the English Gardens portion of Munich, which we strolled through after our dinner. I suppose it could be compared to Central Park in NYC, but it looked so peaceful with lots of open spaces and people playing music and whatnot. After museums and a trip to Dachau, we were pretty beat and headed to bed, where we could dream of the castles we visited the following day. . .

. . .which I will finish explaining tomorrow since I am getting tired just reliving this weekend! I will retell our rainy adventures to "crazy" King Ludwig´s castles at Neuschwanstein and Linderhof as well as the gorgeous palace of the Residenz.

Bis später!