Life's an Adventure: Munich, Germany

Muenchen, as it's known in German.

We spent our time on the day we arrived at the Dachau concentration camp which is about a 20 minute train ride outside of Munich.

It was hot and we had (thankfully) locked our backpacks in a locker in the train station.

So, Jason acted as our camel. Note the water bottles in his pockets.

What a good sport!

Going to Dachau was by far the most educational part of our trip...and also the saddest. Seeing where thousands of people lived, worked and died made all those history classes seem so much more real than a textbook ever did.

This first set of pictures is pretty depressing...but I promise the next set is much happier. So, bear with me (or at least scroll down) and I promise it gets better.

At the entrance to the camp is the famous quote "arbeit macht frei"..."work will make you free".

Once inside the gate, there is a huge open space where the guards used to make the prisoners line up for a type of roll call every morning, in all weather conditions, sometimes for hours on end.

This building was kind of the "nerve center" of camp, it's where the guards would stay and it was through the gate on this building (the "arbeit macht frei" gate) that the prisoners would march when entering the camp.

This room was where the prisoners were forced to strip and shower upon entering the camp.

This was part of the wall surrounding the camp...obviously has not been maintained.

These foundations, filled with gravel, outline where the barracks used to be that housed the prisoners.

This is a guard tower, not that dissimilar from what you would see surrounding a prison today.

A ditch like this ran all the way around the camp and would have had at least some amount of water and sludge/mud in it. If a prisoner got too close, they would be shot. Reportedly, some prisoners would purposely run into this area to end their suffering.

This was an execution range. The small trench in the foreground was used for blood drainage.

The crematorium.

This is a bathroom inside the barracks prisoners would have lived in. So much for privacy.

Imagine sleeping in bunks like these...

This is Jason walking down a hallway...the doors off either side are small cells that would hold "special" prisoners or prisoners who were being punished with isolation for some reason.

Ok, enough with the sad concentration camp pictures. I'm incredibly glad we went, but I was grateful for the happier things we saw during the rest of our time in Munich.

We found our hotel, just a couple of blocks from the train station. This was where we learned not to stay near train stations...we had to walk past a couple casinos, strip clubs and...ahem...adult stores to get to our hotel.

This hotel was also the smallest we stayed in on our trip and the only one without a deadbolt lock.

It figures.

So this is me showing just how small the "closet" was in our room.

I'm not sure what you could fit in this closet...but it certainly wasn't a useful size.

The next day we went to see Munich's famous Glockenspiel that's built into the "new" city hall.

"New" in Munich meant that the building was over 150 years old. In the States, that might mean the building's on the National Registry of Historic Places! And we certainly wouldn't call it "new".

This is the Glockenspiel. The figures move around the music a couple of times a day. A huge crowd gathers and everyone oohs and aahs.

Next we went just down the street to the Frauenkirche where Jason, who has a thing for clocks, found a gigantic grandfather clock.

There's a black footprint in the church that's purportedly the devil's footprint. If you are standing in this footprint, you can't see any windows in the church other than the one in the front, which was covered with a screen at the time the footprint was made a couple of centuries ago. The devil was gleeful that there was no light in the church, but then took another step and realized there was light flooding into the church from windows he didn't see at his previous step. And he stormed out of the church with such force that he created a wind, and that's why there is always a wind whistling around the church towers.

So, this is probably the worst "important" picture that we took on the trip. Not only was I not smiling, Jason didn't zoom in very well and he got the camera strap in the picture.

Great.

Well, at least the story's good.

These are the towers of the church, the far one was under construction, so that's the shielding you see in the picture.

We walked to another outdoor food market, though it wasn't as big or as good as the one in Vienna.

And then we hopped on the subway and toured the Olympic Stadium. You can see it in the background of this picture...

This is a closer shot of it. Pretty cool, right?

And this is Jason and I standing under a random section of the structure. The picture above is the main stadium, but this little part we're standing under wasn't housing a stadium...it was just hanging out.

We went to the top of the Olympic Tower and had a great view of the city. We were right next door to BMW headquarters (the tall building) and the museum (with the giant logo on top).