Multi-emotional Munich

This morning was our orientation tour and walk of Munich - a beautiful city that Natalie and Rosslyn had visited in 2008 but that was in the middle of winter. It has wide streets and lots of trees and so is fresh and green. Of course there are old parts, but not as old and congested as other cities we have visited - this was only established in the 1100's and so is a "young" city. One of the highlights was the glockenspiel on the town hall clock which plays at 11am for 10 mins, the other was our visit to the Hofbrauhaus - the beer garden which opens at 11am also - what an experience - guyts in their traditional Bavarian outfits - leather shorts and braces, 1 lire pots of beer (they don't sell anything smaller) and the beer brass band filling the place with their drinking music. Wunderbar! When the 3 pots of lemonade finally arrived we were content, esepcially as we had prime seats at a restaurant in trhe Marianplatz with our coffee and pretzel to watch the clock.

The afternoon's visit was of completely different emotion - a visit to Dachau, the only concentration camp that existed for the full extent of Nazi reign. It's not large yet housed over 30,000 people. Much of it is still there as a museum along with a very moving Protestant Chapel, but the Bunker (rooms for "special prisoners") and the gas chambers and crematorium are all still in tact. Graeme found a very interesting sculpture in one of the rooms made of brass of two Jewish people, the other piece of sculpture dominates the open assembly sapce as an interntational meorial which also characterises the gruesome contorted shapes of human bodies one sees in many of the photos of dead bodies in the concentration camps. Most of the huts have been removed but two are left one of which is set up as it was. They may look like fun places for youth camps when we were young but as we know they were far from that. We can only echo the two words that dominate the place "NEVER AGAIN." Off now for our last part of travelling - Frankfurt by train tomorrow, Dresden, then Nuremberg, then backl to Munich on Friday and then home!!! Are we ready for this? Yes.