Advertisement
Published: June 14th 2005
Häxe
God I love this food!What an interesting few days, and each was certainly very different from the other.
My first day was spent almost purely in transit from Venice to Munich. I got a quick haircut in Venice too before I took the train, my first since leaving Canada. The barber didnt speak English, but my passport photo is very recent, and was taken the same day as I got a haircut, perfect! I just showed him it and said "like this", he did a fantastic job.
The trainride from Venice to Munich....wow....speechless. That was easily the most beautiful trainride I have been on yet, right through Innsbruck and the Austrian Alps. Too beautiful.
I arrived in Munich around 2030, rather late. Luckily the hostel I had booked myself into was only 50 metres from the train station, a very short walk. Good because I had caught a rather nasty cold from sleeping in those damn tents in Venice, it got very cold at night, too cold for my weakened immune system apparently. I miss Tropicana orange juice...
Anyway, the hostel I had booked, it is a great place. I check in and they give me a coupon for a free
The gate into Dachau
The words mean "work makes you free". A rather sick and twisted lie.. beer, a map of the city and lots of info. I go up to my 6 bed dorm, spotlessly clean, I love it. I bumped into two guys in my dorm while storing my things, both were fellow Canadians from Alberta, good guys. We hit the bar downstairs for the free drinks and to see what was going on, nice way to roll in the night.
The next day we went to go see Dachau, the first concentration camp built, the prototype for all others if you will. It is also one of the few that still has a lot of the original buildings intact. We took a guided tour which was packed with shocking and interesting facts and information.
One of the interesting area's was the barrack building they have reconstructed, which shows the varying living conditions over the time Dachau was in operation. They had 3 bunk rooms, all seperated by different periods. The first had single cots for the inmates, the second packed a lot more beds into the room and the beds weren't as singular. The third was the worst though, it basically had long sheet of woods for people to sleep
on, like shelves. And the overcrowding here was horrific. Dachau was designed for a max capacity of 6000 people, at it's height it held 60000, cramped and scary. 200000 people passed through this camp, with approximately 30000 on the official deathtoll, and another 15000 thought to be off the records. Not as insane as the extermination camps like Birkenau, but still very evil.
The guide also gave us an outline of what a concentration camp really was, most people regard them as similar to a prison, but that is very far from the truth. In a prison people get to retain their identity, and they have rights. People in the concentration camps lost their identity, it was stolen from them upon entry by the SS. People in concentration camps had no rights whatsoever, they were people that were considered to have disappeared from society, they were doomed. The whole point of concentration camps was to supply the Nazi's with slave labour and to slowly, in a controlled fashion, kill the people whom they considered to be undesirables.
The tour ended with a walk through what might just be the only fully intact and original gas chamber and crematorium.
My buddies
John and Jeff from Alberta, a real sausage fest going on here, haha. This was a rectangular building which at the start the prisoners would enter, under the pretense that they were going to have their uniforms deloused, a major problem in the camps. People would strip off and then the guards would tell them to go and grab a shower while the delousing was being carried out. The prisoners would likely know what was up, but maybe not...you can't be sure I guess. They would be gassed in the showers, and within 30 minutes all would be dead. The corpses were taken to the next room, stripped of gold teeth and other valuables, then the final room was the incinerator room, 4 corpses in each of the 4 ovens. Scarily well thought out and efficient... In the shower room almost all of the shower heads have been removed, and behind them there was nothing but solid rock, no water ever hit this room, at least not from showers anyway.
It was a harrowing experience, seeing all this, it's a very sobering reality check... I am glad I saw it all.
Later that night me and my two Canadian buddies went out for dinner to a traditional Bavarian restaurant called Augustiner.
I ordered Häxe (spit roasted pork knuckle), with white cabbage, a bread dumpling, and a weissbier to polish it all off. Delicious! The best food I have had on my trip to date, and the coolest thing was the small Orchestra playing the pieces of all the old German masters while we ate. It couldn't have felt more authentic than it did, good stuff!
We ended the night by going to a local cinema to see Star Wars Episode III. The movie was brilliant, and even though I am not a huge star wars fan, I can honestly say I loved it. The cinema was impressive too, small like the one I worked in back in Kingston, but very very up to date with a fully certified THX sound system. It sounded incredible!
My last full day in Munich already, it was time for a daytrip to a place I just had to go see......Neuschwanstein Castle. Neuschwanstein translating into "new swan rock". This is the very castle Walt Disney based his at Disneyland on, and was built from 1869 to 1886 at the command of (Mad) King Ludwig II. The man loved the music of Wagner,
Neuschwanstein Castle
From a little further this time. so much that it inspired him to start building castles in the style of Germany circa 1200 AD. It really does look fairytale, and the location is stunning, incredibly scenic and beautiful. It was a two hour trainride to get there from Munich, and then a 30 minute hike up to it, but the rewards are plain to see. I also took the tour, a rather expensive one at 9€, but after coming all this way to see it, I had to. Only one third of the 90 rooms inside were completed before the mysterious death of Ludwig, after which all construction was ceased and within 6 months this castle was a tourist attraction. Ludwig was thought to be mad you see, and when the people told him so, and were set to strip him of his power, he was found the next day floating in a lake, dead. Oddly enough, the date that occured was the exact date I was there, but in 1886.
The interior of this castle is every bit as fantastic as the outside, perhaps even moreso. Years and years of woodcrafting, and practically everything in this Castle was carved from wood, very intricately at
that, I might add. Sadly they don't allow photography inside, or I would show you all. You will just have to go see it yourself I guess...
A fun day up in the mountains, taking in the sights. After taking the train back I got to see one area where German efficiency doesn't exist, the train station ticket line. I leave Munich and head east tomorrow, and needed to reserve my seat. I joined the line in fifth position, with 3 wickets serving, it took me a full hour to be served. It seems people don't THINK about what they want before they walk up to the counter, and then they take forever to decide, I was ready to rage! But oh well, I didn't cause a scene.
Not much was left of the night by this point, it being 2130, so I settled down to do some laundry and play with the internet a little while waiting.
My last day in Munich, wah! But thankfully my train didn't leave until 1630, and this gave me time for some rapid tourism.
What better a place to start than by walking into the heart of
The oven house
This is the frightening building whiches houses the production line of death that I mentioned. downtown Munich and seeing a trio of old churches, most importantly the Rathaus-Glockenspiel. What is the Glockenspiel? It's that famous clock that upon chiming 1100 each day re-enacts a jousting battle between a Knight of Bavaria and a Knight of Lothringen, guess who wins. While this fight is taking place and 32 lifesize figures spin around, there are bells sounding....horribly out of tune bells. Not an incredibly entertaining sight for the full ten minutes it lasts, but still worth a look.
After that I wandered about the downtown area a little more, seeing the Residenz Palace, Hofgarten, Englischer Garten, and a bunch of other buildings that my silly guidebook doesn't mention, and as such I have no idea what they are, or what history they have. The mysteries of life...
I made it until around 1430 when my right ankle, which has been bothering me for the last few days now, started bothering me a little too much. So I stopped my wanderings and just spent my last two hours relaxing and eating pastries before boarding the train out of town. Hopefully a day or two of rest will fix the problem, likely just a minor sprain or
The Unknown Prisoner
Memorial to all those who died at Dachau, and remain unknown. The man of the statue is disobeying many SS rules on the camp, hands in pockets, head raised high, etc. something, and with all my hiking lately, it hasn't had any rest. Time will tell.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.233s; Tpl: 0.026s; cc: 11; qc: 71; dbt: 0.0914s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
MunichResident
non-member comment
FYI
That "mysterious" place which doesn't show up in your guidebook is called "Max-Joseph-Platz"; the building in the background is the Bavarian State Opera.