Awaiting Oktoberfest

Ben and I left Gimmelwald after three cozy nights in the Alps and headed east to Munich, Germany—the last stop on our pre-term adventure.  It was sad, in a way, to think that it was almost over—however, we still had a few days to enjoy ourselves in Munich before we left for London on September 20.

We had met a couple of Munich residents while at that fancy hostel in Florence named Thomas and Max.  Max offered us to let us stay at his family’s house when we came to Germany, and we had made plans to meet up.  Unfortunately, Ben and I couldn’t contact Max the night we arrived in Munich, so we stayed in a wonderfully cheap hostel a couple of blocks away from the train station for the night.

It was a fun, laid back night; we met a couple of Romanians in police training, and exchanged our native currencies.   The next day Ben and I got in touch with Max and Thomas and took the train into the wealthier suburbs of Munich, where they both live.  They showed us around the neighborhood for a couple of hours, then took us back downtown for a classic Bavarian dinner at a famous Munich restaurant called the Hofbrauhaus.  It was very delicious; it was also my first chance to drink beer from those famous liter-sized glass mugs.

The next morning, Max’s mother made a mouth-watering breakfast for us—including mint tea and fresh salted pretzels.  Then Ben and I went into downtown Munich for the day.  We visited the Deutsche Museum, which was only a couple of Euros with our student ID cards.  There were some cool relics there, though it was not quite as exciting as I had hoped for.  After leaving the museum, we wandered through the downtown area, looking at cool buildings that, sadly, we really didn’t know anything about.  I did not like Munich’s architectural style as much as that of Italy, at first—it is much sterner, more rigid, and uses less color.  In spite of this, it is still a very beautiful place—it seems more like an American city.

Our destination the following day was the concentration camp at Dachau, one of the largest in Nazi Germany and one of the last to be liberated.  The place was pale and somber and stark and eerie.  We walked around the desolate camp, saw the dual lines of barracks where thousands of prisoners were forced to sleep every night.  We crossed a white bridge over a sullen river to the crematorium, and tread over ground where thousands upon thousands of people died not so long ago.  I walked through all of this unable to shake a terrible feeling of dread, a feeling that wouldn’t leave me until we had crossed back over that quiet, awful river.

As we headed back into town, I forced all bitter thoughts from my mind and cheered up—for the opening ceremonies of Oktoberfest began the next day!