Munich Day 2

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Travel Blog Day 9 Munich

Its actually the middle of day 10, but you blog when you can, and I have quite the backlog to upload. There is so much to do in Munich and so much to see, we could be here for several weeks and not see it all. Munich is a big tourist town though, and we meeting a ton of Americans… they do all the tours here with native American speakers in English, which is really nice.

Upon another basically sleepless night, Josh and I woke up and hung around for a while waiting for our tour to start… I found out why they don’t have AC. A guide from today told us quite simply they aren’t willing to pay for it. Its only hot here for 3 months, and they aren’t willing to pay to be comfortable (they also use old radiator heaters for everything)… so basically, I now think German’s are crazy. It was 100 degrees here yesterday (solstice) and they aren’t willing to pay for AC??? You’ve gotta be joking, people in Canada have AC and its only hot one month a year up there…. They may be ahead of the curve on certain things, but this is not one of them.

Anywho, back to our busy tour day. Josh and I were taking a tour of the Third Reich and how it happened and where in Munich, our guide was an ex-Army man (from the 60’s), and was very knowledgeable. Its not too often that I learn a lot of new things on my trips, but this one taught a lot… one other thing though, they don’t always get their facts right. It was a really good tour, and Josh definitely seemed to come away from it with his mind spinning, but there was no time for that because we had to book 6 blocks in 2 minutes to catch our next tour, a tour of German breweries and beerhouses. We hauled on down there and met the guy in time, it didn’t start for another 10 minutes, but we were worried… this is also where Kyle joined our trip, so the three of us went off with about 30 others for a tour of the breweries.

The first question he asked… “How old is beer, or basically when was the first beer made”… some guesses came out, around 1300AD, no no the Egyptians had beer, closer to 500BC or so, then Kyle said what he thought was the right answer, “in 3000BC by the Mesipotamiums.” Then I decided to give him the right answer, which is about 8000 BC by the Sumarians. He was shocked that we knew these two things, and said to us… ‘ok so now we know what you are here for’. Well, from that point on the tour guide and I shared duties. He knew the history of Munich beer really well, which I know to an extent, but the people in the tour when they found out that I made my own beer where very excited about the process. We went to one of Paulerner’s small breweries and got a tour through it. The guide was able to tell you the basic process that you’d get at any brewery in America, but the people wanted to know more, so they kept asking more and more about the brewing process. It was fun and the guide was ok with it. He says a lot of times some people will talk a lot in the tours but they talk BS, and he was glad to learn more about the beer facts. After touring several of them, having a meal, we ended up at the most famous beer house in all the world.. the HofBrauHaus. We went into the large hall and had a couple of MaSSes, as they call them. Well, it was also Josh’s birthday so he wanted to go out. The guide came with, but just showed us a good place to go and did not stay long… he was a good guy from Maine who was really good to talk with.

So some of the other people in the tour came with us and we got to know some good Minnesotans who go to St. Thomas that we may meet up with again tonight. But we knew that we had to be up a little early today for our tour, so we headed to bed kinda early. After another sleepless night, we got up for our 930 Dachau tour. We were a little slow going and had to sprint to the meeting place, which also meant we forgot to get some water… they don’t sell anything at Dachau (although they were building a visitor center where they will). So the 3 of us went the next 6 hours in heavy heat with nothing to eat or drink (we actually drank a little from the faucet in the bathroom… it was that bad).

Our guide this time was a Texan. Dachau is very different now than it used to be… at first it was meant to show the true horror of what happened and it basically would make you sick to your stomach. Now the large Museum part of the tour is much more about educating you on what did happen, but without the gory details… the other focus was to understand how the German people let this happen despite being regular people. It was very information around the museum, but there is a very serious attitude unlike many of our tours where they joke around with you. After the very large museum portion, we went outside to see the camp, and I have pretty good video of that part of the tour, some narrated by yours truly (when I wander away) and some by the tour guide. Unfortunately though, photos and videos will have to wait until Croatia to post (as well as possibly this) because internet is expensive to use here but we get it free there. In this way, Germany is missing out on a lot of the international business section, because lets say you offer free Wi-Fi every you go like in the states, then you have more people at your place using it and you sell them consumer goods… China, India, and Japan especially do this, and they are certainly among the leaders in the global markets… perhaps if more of these German companies went more wireless and video tech, then dad wouldn’t have to head over here every once in a while.

Anyone, back to Dachau. My dad said when he went, they showed a lot of the medical experiments that they did in the day there, because Dachau was not an extermination camp, but more of a political camp for people who resisted the Reich… they weren’t killed in mass numbers like the others, before the war most were retrained and sent back into the public. Now 30,000 did still die here, but it was more about the political prisoners and such. Medical experiments were also huge here, most of what we know of the brain and of what types of different things make the body work or not work come directly from Dachau, because they just did open experiments on people that were gruesome. Its actually amazing how much of what we know comes from the Reich. NASA, flight, nuclear weapons, so much was developed by the Nazis (now we got nukes first, but they were very close when we took their facility, and the Russians stole the plan to make theirs by 49). It makes you see how well they actually had built the state and how successful they could have been economically and with technology, but the race laws and the aggression to take back what was at one point German land is what lead to the insane behavior that we know them for… oh how different things might have been if not for those.

But these things were not highlighted at the museum… there was one poster about a medical experiment where they put a man in a box and kept adding and taking away pressure to see how much he could take until he died… they did this to learn how to make better jets and how to better prepare for paratroopers, and you better believe that we got that info and used it. Anywho, that was a little disappointing, but no biggie, it was just more about education than showing you some things that will gross you out, but come on, they killed 30,000 people here, maybe feeling a little sick isn’t a bad thing.

Then we did the outside tour, you’ll get this in video, but the crematorium is still there and it is very powerful. You could tell a change in people in the way that they were discussing things with themselves before and after they went in. Not sure how much will come through in the video, but hopefully it’ll work nice.

So we headed back out of the camp and back down to the trainstation. The 3 of us stayed for a little while in Dachau and went to a unique beer garden that is much smaller and very secluded. It was not the extreme excitement of the regular beer garden… good to see, a much more relaxed environment with some great food. Now we are back home and Josh went to try and find an internet café to reconnect to the world. We are getting ready to head down to the world largest beer garden to continue the birthday celebration. By the time you read this, it might be several more days. Talk with you soon.

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