Jul

27

First Stop, Munich Germany

July 27, 2008 | | Comments Off

My flight left Denver at 2:00pm, and after 10 hours in the air I arrived in München (Munich) at 7:30am. I only got about an hour of sleep on the plane. Figuring out the train to downtown Munich was fairly easy. People there spoke English well enough and directed me to the ticket booth. One of the things I found was if you learn the basic greetings in the native language, people will be more receptive to you.

Garden CafeI spent most of the weekend in Munich, at the Alpen Hotel Munich. It is located a short walk from the Hackerbrücke S-Bahn train station. The hotel is very nice and clean. The rooms are quite small, but very clean and functional. The room was rather warm, and the hotel does not have air conditioning. It rarely gets very hot in Munich. The desk clerk gave me a fan to use in my room, which was sufficient to cool the room to a comfortable temperature. The hotel has a courtyard in back where the restaurant serves breakfast (included in the cost of the room) as well as lunch and dinner.

I took time to visit the Concentration Camp Memorial in Dachau. The camp is easy to get to using the S-Bahn (S-4) to the Dachau stop. I was dealing with quite a lot of jet lag, but decided to walk from the train station to the camp, which was about 3km away. This is the path that the prisoners were forced to march when they arrived at the camp. The main building has been turned into a museum. I walked through about half of it, which told the story about how the Third Reich came to power. Only two of the original prisoner barracks remain, but the pads that the other stood on remain as a memorial. The crematory still exists, but I was too tired to walk the distance to that area of the camp.

I only took a few pictures of the camp. There are many pictures already available on the internet, so I didn’t see any reason to duplicate them. There was one picture I wanted to get. It’s of the Jewish Memorial. It has two simple words in five languages. These words had the greatest impact on me.

Jewish Memorial

I took the shuttle back to the train station, then the S-Bahn train back to the station near my hotel. I had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel, then went back to my room to get some sleep. I had hoped to visit the Hofbraeu Haus and St. Michael’s Church, but needed to get some sleep after being awake for about 36 hours.

The next morning I took the regional train to Regensburg. There was much to see in Munich, the heart of Bavaria, but I needed to get to my next stop. I didn’t have nearly as much time as I wanted in any of the cities that I visited, but this was a business trip after all. My next blog will be about my visit to Regensburg.


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