I got my German textbook!  So now I can learn German!  Hopefully this goes better than my attempt to learn french.

On Thursday, I went on a tour to the concentration camp in Dachau.  All kids in America grow up learning about WWII and concentration camps and how horrible it was, but nothing really drills that into your mind like actually going to a concentration camp.

I cannot explain in words the feelings I had as I walked through the buildings here.  To walk through the gate where they lost their rights, to be in the room where they lost their belongings, and to stand on the ground where so many people lost their lives, it’s surreal.

Many rooms in the concentration camp are section off to protect returning survivors from having to relive some of the worst parts of their time there.  There is also a walkway that was created after the war that goes around the front gate so survivors don’t have to walk through it again.

At the end of the tour, we had the chance to walk through the crematorium and the gas chamber.  I couldn’t do it.  I literally ran through the exhibit because I couldn’t handle being in there.  I took lots of pictures of the grounds, but I did not take a picture of that.

If any of you ever have the chance to visit a concentration camp, do it.  Please.  I think if more people were able to experience what I experienced, we would not have had so many genocides since then, and we most certainly would not let what’s happening in Darfur continue.

I forgot to mention that on the first day, I also did the Beer Challenge.  Now, that does not mean that the drunkest person wins.  It was quite the opposite.  This beer challenge was about remembering the most facts about Munich’s different beers and breweries.  The lack of beer in my life resulted in me not winning the challenge.  Oh well.  The group I was with was relatively small (only about twenty people) and we all bonded pretty well.  There were these five Scottish guys in my group whom I had met earlier in the day at the free tour.  I LOVE those guys.  At the end of the night, everyone was toasting and singing and just having an all-around great time.  No one was sloppy drunk.

On Wednesday (day two in Munich) I decided to go on the beer challenge again since I had so much fun the night before.  That was a poor decision.  Seventy people showed up, and a good-sized group of people from Texas were already drunk when they got there.  I think they were expecting a pub crawl, which the beer challenge is not.  I ended up hanging out with these really cool newlyweds from Boston and a few other people older than me.  People don’t believe I’m only twenty when I tell them.

Wednesday during the day was nice.  I wandered around the city trying to find the things I wanted to go back to.  One thing was the Tower of St. Peter’s Church.  So, I think I walked past this church at least six times.  I kept asking locals for directions and they all looked at me like an idiot because this church is huge and one of the symbols of the city.  Well, I found it, and I climbed up all 336 stairs to the top.  SO worth it.  That is the #1 best view of Munich.  I highly recommend it.

I also ran through traffic when I saw a gelato shop, took a picture of a Glockenspiel that actually works, went inside a church that was almost completely destroyed during the war and was rebuilt with the help of the whole community, saw some really creepy dolls at the toy museum, and contemplated stealing the Maypole.

Munich was awesome.  On my first day there, I decided to do the New Europe free tour (shocking, I know).  My tour guide Michael (from IRELAND of course) was really entertaining and knowledgeable.  He had all the answers to all the questions and showed us a lot of things we would never have known otherwise.

One cool thing about Munich is the way they do memorials.  In Berlin, the Holocaust memorial takes up basically an entire city block.  In Munich, memorials are small so they’re there for those who want them and out of the way for those who don’t.  The memorials are often small plaques with very few words like “Until 1946 here stood the Something Something Shopping Centre.”  What’s interesting about this is that it forces you to become actively involved with history, similar to the Jewish Museum in Berlin.  These plaques make you think “Hmm, what was this shopping centre, and what happened in 1946?” in hopes that you might go and do a little research of your own.

A spot you need to check out is where a memorial used to be.  Near Theatinerkirche, there’s a wall where you can faintly see the remains of two plaques and two wall hangings.  In 1923 Hitler and a group of Nazis marched down this street during the Beer Hall Putsch and were met by German police.  Shots were fired, Hitler hit the deck, twenty people died including fifteen Nazis, four police officers, and one innocent bystander.  When the Nazis came into power they placed a plaque and hung two wreaths to commemorate the twenty “Nazis” (they spun a story claiming that the other five were also Nazis), and everyone who passed by this memorial was forced to raise a Nazi salute to the guards on staff twenty four hours a day.  Many people passively resisted this gesture by turning down a nearby alley to avoid the memorial.  Eventually, Nazis caught on and began beating and killing people who went down the alley more than once.  After the war, the memorial was taken down, and a very subtle bronze trail of bricks was placed amongst the cobblestone in the alley in remembrance of all those who were willing to give their lives in order to protest the Nazi authority.  What did they put where Hitler fell?  A sewer.  Well played, Germany.  Haha

Another interesting fact about Munich is that almost all of the buildings are only about fifty years old.  Munich was a major city for the Nazis, and as such it was very heavily bombed during the Second World War to the point where practically the entire city had been destroyed.  Now, Germans are smart.  Munich knew what was coming, so prior to the bombing, the people of Munich took photographs and made extremely detailed sketches of the city so that after the war they could rebuild it.  And to this day, it looks exactly the same as pre-war Munich, thanks to the help of different parts of the community coming together.

So, I have, without fail, managed to get the time wrong for almost every tour I’ve tried to do.  Haha but that’s not a problem!!  Sometimes I get there early

Yesterday I did another New Europe free walking tour.  I will never cease to be amazed at how great these tours are.  I’ve been recommending them to everyone.  All of my guides have been extremely knowledgeable and nice and just genuinely love the cities they’re working in.

My guide, Michael, was great, and an Irishman!  Although those qualities usually go hand-in-hand.  The tour ended up being almost four hours, but it was so interesting that I didn’t even notice.  I got to see all of the “old” buildings (Munich was heavily bombed during WWII and most of the buildings you see now are concrete reconstructions of what the city looked like before the war) and Michael pointed out a bunch of really interesting memorials that I otherwise wouldn’t have even noticed.  I can’t get over how great the tour was.

I also did New Europe’s Beer Challenge last night!  No, it’s not what you’re thinking.  It was nothing like Beer Fest.  We went around to a bunch of different beer gardens and the beer museum and learned a lot about the history of beer in Munich, and we sampled all of the different kinds of beer brewed in Munich.  Everyone there was just there to have a good time, unlike pubcrawls where most people just want to get sloppy and embarrassingly drunk.  The challenge part of the Beer Challenge was actually to be the most knowledgeable person there.  I didn’t win, obviously, but I met some really great people, including some kilt-wearing Scotsmen and a Gaelic-speaking Irishman from Tipperary.

I’d like to apologize for the lack of photos lately.  The internet here takes freaking forever and a half, but I think I’m going to set aside some time tonight to upload my pictures from Salzburg and what I’ve seen so far in Munich.

Also, I’m thinking about reformatting the layout of my blog.  My posts are getting wayyy too long for the front page.  Expect changes in the near future!

Today I was on my own for the first time in a long time.  Stuart went to Dresden for the day, but hopefully he and I will meet back up in Prague.  I sat myself down in the hostel’s kitchen for some breakfast and blogging this morning and ended up meeting these really cool guys from Sweden.

Thomas and Mack are travelling the world filming a documentary about street performers and what it’s like being a street performer in different countries.  There’s a good chance they’ll be in St. Paul this Fall, so hopefully I’ll get to see them again.

After breakfast I made my way back to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis and went inside.  Lame.  The inside isn’t that great, and I kind of felt like it was a waste of time.  The outside is way more impressive.

Then I walked over to the War Memorial.  Why is everything under construction when I want to go see it?!?!  The memorial was boarded up because they’re doing construction on it, so instead of seeing the memorial itself, I got to see a very nice, giant wooden box with a painting of the memorial on the outside.  BUST!

Reichstag was next on my list, so I decided to wander through Tiergarten.  I got a little lost, but that was fine.  The Tiergarten was once a hunting ground, then it was bombed, and then it was heavily deforested during the hard times Germany had following the Second World War.  It has since been reforested and is now as beautiful as ever.  I highly recommend strolling through here if you have the time.

I underestimated how far Reichstag was from the War Memorial, so I ended up walking for a good… hour… but that’s fine.  When I finally made it to Reichstag, I only had to wait in line for forty-five minutes.  That might sound like forever, but it’s a relatively short wait for this particular place, and it’s TOTALLY worth it.

When you get to the dome, you have a bird’s eye view of all of Berlin.  You also get a free audio tour that explains everything you’re looking at as you walk up the dome.  I took a bunch of pictures from//of the dome and the observation deck.

I figured the Holocaust Memorial exhibit would be closed, and I’ve been pretty emotionally drained from all the other Holocaust exhibits I’ve seen, so I decided to save that for another day.  I also meant to go to a concentration camp, but I couldn’t find the time.  I’ll probably go to the one near Munich when I get there.

Falafel for dinner, blogging at the hostel, probably going to grab a beer and pack and go to bed.

Prague tomorrow!!!

I slept in a little bit yesterday which was absolutely woooonderful, and a little difficult since the sun comes up at like 5am here.  I walked around with my friend Stuart from New Zealand all day again, which was nice because he actually knows where he’s going.

We went to quite a few places.  We started back at the Topography of Terror so we could finish looking around and reading everything.  I highly recommend that exhibit to anyone visiting Berlin (and it’s FREE).  Then we made our way over to the Jewish Museum.

The Jewish Museum combines architecture and clever displays to force you to engage yourself.  It’s actually really interesting.  The way the main part of the museum is set up, when you walk in you become very disorientated because the hallways are set up in a zigzag formation and the floors are all slanted.  It’s very symbolic of the Jewish mindset at the beginning of the Second World War.  The displays are all inside the walls, and you have to almost press your face against the glass to be able to see them and read the captions, further engaging you.  Down one of the zigzags, you can enter the “Holocaust Tower.”  You have to open a large, thick metal door, and when it slams behind you, you find yourself along in a triangular, very tall, cement-walled room.  It’s very very dark with only a dim light from outside.  You can faintly hear the goings-on outside, but in the end you know you’re all alone.  It’s bone-chilling.  There’s also the Exile Garden.  Here, you have to walk on hazardous, uneven cobblestone through giant, slanted cement structures topped with willow trees.  It’s beautiful and significant.

After the main part of the museum, there’s a large exhibit on Judaism, which was interesting, but after the emotionally-draining first part of the museum, my attention span was at an all-time-low and I whizzed through the 150+ displays.

The next stop was the East Side Gallery.  Here, artists took over the last remaining strip of the Berlin Wall and reclaimed the space by painting beautiful murals signifying joy, remembrance, confusion, and the willingness to rebuild.  I think it’s amazing that most of the paintings have remained unmarred for so long.  My favorite portion had a caption which read, “Many small people who in many small places do many small things that can alter the face of the world.”  I included a LOT of pictures of the gallery so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

We ran over to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis, but it was closed.  I think I’m going to try to stop by again today.

The line for the Reichstag was absurdly long, so we skipped that and made our way back to the hostel to find everyone else.  On our way past the Brandenburg Gate, we got stuck in the party end of the giant Gay Pride Parade that had taken place earlier in the day.  It was so fun!  Lots of people were dressed up and dancing and just having a really great time.  Once we got through, we took the U-Bahn back to the hostel, met up with the rest of our group, and walked over to the nearby industrial beer garden.

The beer garden is actually in an old bombed-out train depot in the middle of nowhere near our hostel.  They turned one of the old bomb shelters into a giant rock climbing wall and most of the rest of the area was just full of chairs and tables and big screens playing the World Cup games.

Another great end to another great day :]

Oh, Berlin.

So, yesterday, it took me about ten hours to get here.  When I finally did arrive, I decided to go out for a beer before bed, but, about a third into my liter, I realized I hadn’t eaten all day and nearly fell asleep in my glass at the bar.  Bad decision.  I was a little concerned about the rest of my stay in Berlin.

Luckily!  This morning I talked to a guy from New Zealand who was staying in my hostel room. Coincidentally he was planning on going to the same tour as I was, so I paired up with him all day.  We did the free tour again for a bit, and then met up with his friend from Melbourne to go watch the Germany World Cup game from the top balcony in a packed theatre.  It would have been better had Germany won, but it was still really fun.  We wound up walking through a park and grabbing a beer at a beer garden there before leaving his friend to go to Checkpoint Charlie and Topography of Terror.  The Topography of Terror was one of the most unsettling and life-altering exhibits I’ve ever been to.  It goes through a detailed history of how the Nazis started and progressed and the terror they brought upon unsuspecting Europe.  I highly recommend that exhibit to anyone in the Berlin area.

After the exhibits, he and I took the train back to our hostel because on Friday nights, the U Inn Berlin hostel has a night where you can come and learn to make authentic German food, AND you can eat of for FREE.  Yes!!!  Our chef decided to be a little more international today and make shepherd’s pie instead, but it was great.  Fun fact for everyone who’s been following my blog:  I, by chance, found out he had use some pineapple juice in the meat, so I ended up just eating the mashed potato top with cooked tomatoes and some strange German sauce.

At the dinner, I met a few kids from Georgia and Australia, and we, along with my new friend from New Zealand, bought a few beers and played hackeysack in a park late into the night, retreating to the hostel to check email, add each other on facebook, and watch some strange German television show about hot girls playing pranks on unsuspecting men.  And that is where I will leave you.  Have a wonderful rest of your night :]