Day 22; Munich

This morning I got back from my trip to Munich, but I was so exhausted that I slept almost all day so I am only writing this now. We left bright and early Friday morning for Munich, we took the TGV which was lots of fun, its so much nicer than flying and we got to see the French country side which is absolutely gorgeous. When we got into Germany it was love at first sight for me, it is so cute and lively, for some reason I was expecting cold, gray and industrial. Anyways, we got into Munich around 1:30 in the afternoon, and although we were super hungry we went to our hotel first, which turned out to be a good idea because we got kinda lost (the metro in Munich is not quite as fabulous as the metro in Paris, the train we needed only came once every half an hour!). When we finally found the hotel we got ourselves checked in and everything, it was suprisingly nice for being the cheapest hotel we could find. After we droped off our stuff in the room, we grabbed some lunch at a market close by. We decided to get some cheese and bread and just make a lunch out of that, unfortunatly neither of us spoke much german, so we managed to buy one thing of cheese and one thing of butter (that looked like cheese). Definatly a nasty shock when I cut off a piece of the butter and tried that. It was pretty gross, so we basically just ended up eating the one cheese and a pretzel (which was apparently invented in Germany and they are obsessed with them). After lunch we went to the city square which was absolutly gorgeous, its such a quaint little area. Unfortunatly there were some right wing politicians with slogans a long the lines of down with Islam, and stop Islam. There were a bunch of protesters around talking to people, and I overheard some people explaining it in french and english. They were equating this party to the Nazis and saying that they need to get them out of germany. There were a whole lot of police/swat looking people around so we decided that it was probably not the best place to be and continued walking. We explored the city for a while which was quite fun, and than we went over to Oktoberfest. It was definatly not what I had expected, it was basically a huge state fair with tuns of rides, games, food, shops and the like. In order to get beer you have to go to "tents" which are basically beergardens where you can sit down and order a liter of beer (that is the only size). They are really hard to get into and to grab a table at but we finally managed and ordered ourselves two beers. They came in these giant stiens, which you weren't technically supposed to bring home with you, but we managed to take them as souveniers :) I was very suprised that I liked the beer, but I guess Germany is not a bad place to go to try it for the first time. I only drank about 1/5th of my stien, and my friend didn't drink much more of his so we gave the rest of our beer to these german kids our age who spoke english that happened to be sitting at the same table as us. They definatly were shocked that we weren't goinig to finish our beers and made fun of us a little bit, but of course they were more than happy to get beer for free. After Oktoberfest we went back to the hotel and slept like babies because we were both so tired. Saturday morning we woke up early and went over to Dachau (the first concentration camp in Germany, it was established in 1933 and ran until 1945). It was a very emotional and difficult experience of course; its right in this cute little normal town, and the landscapeing outside the camp was done so that it looked really nice and peaceful, definatly not at all how it felt inside the camp. I don't want to talk about it a whole lot because I don't want to think about it a whole lot, I feel like its an experience that is going to take a few years for me to fully internalize and react to, its just too hard to do that all at once. While I was tearing up almost the whole time, I managed not to cry until we went into the gas chambers and than the crematorium. Those were by far the worst places I have ever been in my life, even though the gas chamber was never used in Dachau. The crematorium was, and I personaly think it smelled really bad in there, I felt like I was going to throw up and had to go outside for air, although my friend said he didn't smell anything. I am glad that we went there, it was important but I don't plan on ever going back. I thing this trip to Germany and Dachau will make next weekend's trip to Normandy very interesting. We spent about 3 hours in Dachau and at the end wanted to get out and back to Munich as quick as possible. When we got back to the city we were very hungry, so we had lunch at this little outdoor market which was really yummy. I had schnitzel (I am sure I didn't spell that correctly) which was really good and very German. After that we decided to do some shopping for souveniers, walked around the city some more, and than went back to Oktoberfest. It was funny, on the metro to Oktoberfest we saw these people that we had met on Friday because they were speaking french in the metro and we were as well. We ended up hanging out with them at Oktoberfest for around 45 mins which was cool because one of them was German and so he knew what to do and how to do it. Anyways, after a while we left Oktoberfest and went to the train station to grab our night train back to Paris. We were in a compartment with a Parisian, a Colombian who spoke french, a drunk TGV conductor (french obviously), and a german (who didnt get on the train until about an hour after us). So we were speaking a combination of french and english and having many very interesting conversations. The TGV conductor drank about 5 beers in an hour, so he was getting quite drunk and it got really difficult for us to understand his french because he was slurring it a lot, which just made it all the more funny. He kept interrupting our converstations with random stories about himself that had absolutly no relevency to our topic of disscusion. It was definatly an entertaining night, but we didn't get much sleep and what sleep we did get wasn't very good since it was on the train, so when we got in Sunday afternoon we decided not to go to Orleans this weekend (because we don't need to buy tickets in advance with our eurails) but to go next weekend or someother time. It was definatly a fun weekend, but I am very happy to be back in Paris. It was frustraing not being able to speak the language with anyone and not really knowing how it was culturally appropriate to act so its nice being back here where I do speak the language and understand the culture (at least a little bit)!