As much as I loved Cinque Terre and Interlaken, Munich has taken over as my favorite stop thus far. Why? might you ask. Well, it's simple really and the answer is because of The Hofbräuhaus and I don't even drink beer. We got in to Munich yesterday afternoon and we walked around for a bit. We saw the glockenspiel and sat in a park. We did some window shopping and walking around to a lot of the buildings on our map. Tourist things really. Then it was on to the Hofbräuhaus around 5:15 pm and we left a little before 9. I forced myself to drink a beer and didn't enjoy one sip of it. I ate veal sausage and a pretzel and Leah and I had apfelstrudel. We played a lot of cards and all this sounds okay but why then, would I love it so much? WELL... there's a LIVE GERMAN POLKA BAND!!!!!!!! For any of you who know me you most likely know that I LOVE polka music. It was the best night of my life.
After that we went home and to bed. There was a HUGE group of high schoolers staying in our hostel and about a half hour after we laid down we heard some running and screaming down the hall and they burst in to our dorm room. After a while of them being young and immature thinking they were alone and in their own room they realized that in fact they were not so they ran out running and screaming and left our door open. Not too long after our real roommates moved in. I fell asleep after about a half hour of them drinking and being loud and obnoxious but Kendra and Leah ended up leaving the room for a while because they couldn't sleep.
This morning we got up and went to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site and took a tour there. It was really interesting and we even got to go in to the crematoriums. Dachau was actually a labor camp and not a death camp so the crematoriums were mainly used to get rid of the bodies that died by means other than the gas chamber. There was a small gas chamber there but to this day it's not known whether it was used for extermination in larger numbers or rather for one or a few prisoners at a time. An interesting thing we learned was about the pictures of the piles of dead bodies we so often see when reading about the concentration camps. This was not a common site until the very end of the war right before the liberation of the camps. The Germans ran out of fuel for the crematoriums so they would just pile the bodies up outside of them because they could not be burned. Many of the pictures we see came from soldiers who liberated the camps and therefore we see many of all the piles of bodies. I don't know about any of you, but I had always thought this was a common site throughout all the years.
When we got home we made our lunch in the kitchen here at our hostel and then headed to the Olympic park from the 1972 Olympics. We climbed a hill that overlooked that park and just sat there for a while. We walked along a wall that listed the winning competitors for the different sports and Mitsuo Tsukahara was on there for gymnastics. I enjoyed that because there's a vault named after him which I competed my last year in gymnastics. I knew it was named after him but never knew why.
This is an addendum to this post, Alyssa's internet time ran out so when she called home to wish me happy Mother's Day she asked me to post this for her. This was actually written by her on Friday. She says' sorry for the delay, but she is really having a good time. She will be home in less than a week!!! Hurray. I sure do miss her.
Submitted by her mom
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