We got up mere hours after the pub crawl ended to do a walking tour of Munich. As opposed to other cities where we walked around and saw many buildings without learning much about them, Munich was made more awesome by this tour. Our Canadian tour guide was hilarious, and we got to hear very informative stories about Munich and its history. We heard stories about the devil helping speed up the construction of Fraunkirche, an opera house burning down when a human line from a beer hall drank all the beer before it could be used to put out the fire, and Hitlers bodyguard taking eleven bullets in a street shootout while diving on top of Hitler. Seriously. The tour was great.
After that we went to Dachau, home of the only concentration camp open all twelve years of the Nazi reign (1933-45). The original buildings were gone, but a few were reconstructed and the foundations were all there. It was a massive camp, and it is now home to several memorials. Very humbling.
We returned to Munich to pay tribute to the famous beer gardens - Englischer garten, maybe the most famous, and Augustiner garten, the biggest. If you dont know what a beer garden is... well, its basically a basketball court size area of picnic tables where people sit and drink one liter beers outside... and if you go anytime between noon and noon the following day, its full. When I say full, I mean it actually took us several minutes to find a place to sit in Augustiner garden. Seriously (the tourists only show up at night, but people are actually there 24-7). We had bratwurst and pretzels in Englischer... delicioso.
Then we took a night train to Berlin...
No comments:
Post a Comment