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).

And this is us on the tower.

It was another hot day, so we shared a blueberry slushy. 

And promptly got brain freeze and blue tongues. 

We walked over the BMW World, where the company displays all its latest prototypes and technologies. 

May I just say, they have some pretty awesome stuff.

And the building that houses it all isn't bad either.

I got to sit in a Mini Cooper. Jason didn't want to because it wasn't a "guy" car.

But he was willing to pose with this one, a prototype they had on display.

To cap off our day, we went to the English Gardens. 

I had no idea Munich was such a surfing hot spot.

The surfers all hang out and wait for their turn on the rapids formed when this river goes under a bridge. 

They attracted quite a crowd.

We had to stop for one of our regular iPad map checks on our way back to finding the city center and our hotel.

 And this cool building (not sure what it is) was across the street from where we stopped to check the map.

And so ends our time in another city in Europe. Next up, Luxembourg!

Vienna, Austria

Or, as they say in German, Wien (with the "w" sounding like a "v" and then a long "e" sound).

When we arrived in Vienna, we immediately made our reservations to leave. After our first train experience, we were never going to risk traveling long distance without reservations. 

We figured out the subway system, much quicker this time. I believe Vienna has 6 subway lines, where Prague had only 3. We were moving up in the world of transportation!

We rode to Schoenbrunn Palace, home of the Habsburgs, the family who ruled Austria for hundreds of years until about the time of World War I. Marie Antoinette was a Habsburg, before she was sent to France to get married and beheaded.

The castle is huge, and the layout of it, with this giant courtyard, reminded me of Versailles in Paris.

We took a tour of it, but pictures aren't permitted, so I only have a few shots of the outside. The inside is even more impressive than the outside...so much original furniture, original paintings, fully restored rooms.

Jason got a Viennese classic for dinner...

 

 

We also chose to go to the top of a viewing tower that evening...

...and got the eagle eye view of Vienna.

And we could even see the Alps!

We had to walk through a park on our way back to the subway from the tower and were intrigued by this sign...

 

 

It was odd because it was in English and sad because if that sign is there, it must mean that someone at least got injured because of a golfer. I guess the lesson here is...don't golf in a park!

 

The other sign that made us laugh in Vienna was this one...

 

 

These signs were all over the city because people in Vienna take their dogs everywhere. Roughly translated, it means, "Men and women finally have to learn: take a bag for my poop". Except it's better in German because it rhymes.I especially enjoy the illustration at the bottom of the sign. Because if you're not sure what to do with the bag and your dog's poop...it's got you covered. Pun intended.

 

Dogs even ride escalators and subways in Vienna. I had to laugh as I watched it struggle to find its footing on the escalator.

 

 

The next day we toured St. Stephen's Cathedral.

I love the ceilings!

We toured the catacombs under St. Stephen's. We saw bones that prisoners had been forced to pick clean and stack like firewood. We saw where victims of the Black Plague had been buried...the only burial place inside the city walls at the time. We saw containers that held priests' intestines. We saw where they bury high ranking clergy members to this day. We had a great tour guide, which we had heard can make all the difference. Once again, no pictures were allowed.

St. Stephen's is particularly known for its very unique roof tiles.

If you walk around to the side of the church, you can see this one the roof. Pretty cool, right? 

We walked just around the corner and found Mozart's house.

I got a yummy smoothie. 

We also went to something called the Naschmarkt in Vienna...basically a big open air food and flea market. We picked up some fresh fruit and veggies to munch on as we walked, but I didn't think to take any pictures.

We ended our time in Vienna with finding a geocache near our hotel, and found these cement ping-pong tables. Very different from a typical park in the States.

And remember, for all those dog owners out there...

 

 

I just couldn't resist putting this in again.

 

Next up, Munich!

Prague, Czech Republic

Otherwise known as Praha, in Czech.

Prague turned out to be my (& Jason's) favorite city. How do you not love a city that looks like this? From the pictures I've included below, I think you'll see just why we loved it so much.

After conquering our jet lag with 15 hours of sleep, (impressive, I know), we boarded a train to Prague.

This train was made up of compartments. 6 seats to a compartment, each compartment closed off by a sliding glass door and a hallway about 2 feet wide runs the length of the train past all the compartments.

We had been advised to make reservations for any long distance trains; we were so thankful we took that advice!

When you make a reservation on a train, you're assigned to a specific car and specific seats in a specific compartment on that car.

We didn't know that. 

This train was filled beyond capacity. The people who had reservations found their seats. Those without reservations filled in the empty seats. And then the rest of us, who weren't exactly on the ball with either making reservations or not knowing how the system worked, were stuck in the aisle, crawling over each other, squeezing past each other, trying desperately to find empty seats. 

Did I mention everyone had their luggage with them? 

Ours were the smallest bags on the train (or so it seemed). We learned that a lot of people on trains don't travel light. They bring huge, hard-sided suitcases that in themselves can take up the entire aisle.

Jason eventually figured out what our reservations meant and so we traveled nearly the entire length of the train in this crawling, squeezing manner, because we had boarded the last car and our reservations were for one of the very first cars, and then kicked two people out of our seats who had taken up residence.

It was quite the ordeal. 

Once we got into the Prague train station, we made train reservations to leave in a couple of days (we now knew the value of reservations!), got some Czech currency (crowns) and figured out how to take the subway to our hotel. It was in Prague that we first learned how to take the subway, read the maps and stand on an escalator. 

In most European subway stations, but especially in Prague, you stand on the right hand side of the escalator and leave the left side open for people who want to scurry past you. Also, the escalators in Prague were some of the steepest and longest I've ever seen. We were a long, long way underground! 

Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures of the area our hotel was in, but the neighborhood we stayed in was probably one of the reasons I liked Prague so much. We got off the subway to find ourselves in a non-touristy part of town. There were locals hanging out at bars along the street, sitting at cafes on the sidewalk, shopping in the mall and grocery store that was right next to our hotel. It was such a fun and refreshing atmosphere, especially coming from Berlin. 

We really only had one day to spend in the city, and we made the most of it. 

We went to the Vysehrad, which is a big compound of ancient Czech buildings, including a church and cemetery where some of the more famous Czech people are buried. 

We also got a stellar view of  the city.

We visited the Old Town Square, saw LOTS of tourists and left pretty quickly to find Charles Bridge, which was equally packed with tourists. I guess that's what happens when you visit a popular tourist destination in the summer, on a weekend! 

This is the Old Town Square....

  And this is the beginning of the Charles Bridge...

 And this is one of many groups of statutes on the bridge...

After crossing the bridge, we hiked up a hill to Prague Castle. A BIG hill. A big STEEP hill. 

And we got this view...

 Gorgeous city, right? I would not have guessed that this city was under Communist rule for decades. It's so completely different from Berlin! 

This is the church that's part of the Prague Castle compound...

And this is one of the gargoyle guys that was guarding the top of the church. 

Cute, right? 

Then we climbed yet another hill, but thankfully, it was much shorter and not as steep, and got this view of Prague Castle and the church in the above pictures.

It doesn't get better than that!

Except, it does get better when you can cap off the evening with some chocolate chip cookies purchased at the Tesco (grocery store) located conveniently next door to the hotel.