Germany/Austria Trip, Part 6: Munich and Dachau

Day 12
On Wednesday, September 28, we left Füssen and took the train to our next destination: Munich! Munich was the biggest city we visited in Germany, and it was during Oktoberfest, so we were extremely excited to be there!

We arrived at Munich's main rail station, the Hauptbahnhof, and from there rode the subway to our hotel. We stayed at the Hotel Uhland, the only real hotel of our entire trip. While it was pricey, we felt it was worth the cost because of its proximity to the Theresienwiese fairgrounds where Oktoberfest takes place (we wanted to make sure we could easily find our way home after a few beers!). It was a very nice place - we really enjoyed our stay there!

From our hotel, we could hear the happy sounds of the world's largest beer festival calling to us. So we quickly dropped off our bags in the room and raced off to join the fun!

Oktoberfest looks a lot like a fair. It has rides (some really crazy, enormous ones!), carnival games, and carts selling food. Of course, there are a few differences between Oktoberfest and your typical county fair.

For one, at least half the people are wearing the traditional Bavarian attire: lederhosen (for the men) and dirndl (for the ladies). Also, it's HUGE. It's the largest fair in the world, drawing in some 6.5 million people over 16 days.

There are carts everywhere with horses pulling beer keg displays.

Look, they're wearing hats!

These guys waved to me :)

And of course, there are 14 giant beer tents around the fairgrounds! Each tent is run by a different brewery, and each has its own style. Some are known for being rowdy, some are very traditional, some are most popular with the locals, other most popular with Americans and Australians (many, many Australians come to Oktoberfest; the Australian embassy moves from Berlin to Munich during Oktoberfest because so many Australian citizens lose their passports!).

We were somewhat surprised to find that the "beer tents" are not really tents at all. They are made of wood, and have electricity, plumbing, real bathrooms, giant kitchens, and some even have a second level. They are temporary set ups, but they're fairly sturdy structures - nothing like a tent.

After checking out a few tents, we settled on the Hofbräu tent, which is the Oktoberfest counterpart to the Hofbraeuhaus, a world famous beer hall in Munich. It was right around noon, so we decided to order lunch. Midday on a Wednesday, it wasn't too crowded so getting a table wasn't a problem.

We each ordered a beer. Each of the beer tents serves just one kind of beer - their Oktoberfest beer (of course). Although some also serve radlers - beer mixed with lemonade. Mike had regular beer, Carolyn decided to try the radler. It sounds weird but it was very tasty, and especially good on a hot day! Beer is served by the liter, which was fine with us.

We also ordered lunch. Mike had some meat and potatoes. Carolyn saw the ladies walking around with baskets of giant Bavarian pretzels and HAD to have one. It was bigger than her head! She also ordered some delicious cheese dip to go with it. You know, to make it a meal. ;)

After lunch, we headed out to see more of Munich. Our first stop was the Residenz - the palace of the King of Bavaria. There was no guided tour here, we just wandered around on our own, although we did get audio guides. The museum includes both the royal family's private apartments, some staterooms, and a treasury full of sparkly things. It was enormous and took us most of the afternoon to get through it.

Then we wandered through Munich's main square, Marienplatz (Mary's Square). We saw the impressive neo-gothic New Town Hall and it's gigantic glockenspiel.

For dinner, we went to Viktualienmarkt - a large, open air market where they sell a wide variety of food. You can order food and beer from any one of a large number of stands, and then sit and eat your meal in a the beer garden setting. Mike had some sausage, and Carolyn had seafood, and of course, we both had beer.

After dinner, we walked back to the subway via Maximilianstrasse, Munich's most exclusive shopping street.

Before heading back to our hotel for the night, we took a stroll through Oktoberfest to see what the party was like after dark. Wow, was it crazy! The Hofbräu tent where we'd enjoyed a relaxing lunch earlier that day was packed with people. Many were standing on the benches of their picnic tables, swaying back and forth together, singing along with the band. You could hardly find a place to stand against the wall, let alone sit down. We were content to watch the scene from the back of the room. It did look like fun though.

Day 13
On Thursday, September 29, we once again started our day with a stop at Oktoberfest. We chose a different beer tent this time, the Augustiner. Mmmm, beer for breakfast - only in Germany!

Then we went to the Deutsches Museum, which is basically the German version of our Smithsonian Institute. It is a massive place with 10 miles of science and technology exhibits! It had everything from planes to ships to windmills and a fun mining exhibit where you got to walk through tunnels. We spent most of the day there and still didn't see everything.

After the museum, we walked around the lovely English Gardens and had dinner at the pagoda beer garden. On our walk back to the hotel, we were treated to a gorgeous sunset!

Day 14
On Friday, September 30, we checked out of our room but asked the hotel to hold our bags so we could make one final trip to Oktoberfest. It was only about 10am, but being a Friday must have brought out the crowds earlier than usual. Some of the beer tents were already packed with people! We had a hard time finding anywhere to sit, but finally squeezed in on the end of a table in the Hacker-Festzelt tent. The theme of this tent is "Bavarian Heaven." I thought it was the prettiest one.

After our final Oktoberfest beers were gone, we picked up our bags from the hotel and headed back to the Hauptbahnhof. We stowed our bags in a locker at the train station (it took us awhile to find an available locker, and there are tons!) then took the train to Dachau. It's just 25 minutes outside Munich. From the Dachau train station, we rode a bus to the concentration camp memorial site. We both felt it was important to not overlook this dark chapter in German history and pay our respects to the millions of people killed in the Holocaust while we were here.

Admission to the memorial site is free, although we paid to get the English audio recording so we'd know what we were looking at. I'm glad we did, because they also included recordings of brief stories told by two camp survivors and three members of the Allied forces who liberated the camp. It was very interesting to hear first hand accounts of what the camp was like.

Dachau was the first concentration camp the Nazis built. It was a labor camp where inmates were used like slaves for the German war machine. Approximately 32,000 people died here between 1933 and 1945. The camp housed political activists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, gypsies, and later, Jews and Catholic priests.

You enter the camp just as the inmates did, through an iron gate that says, in German, "Work makes you free." The first building you see is the Jourhaus, where new arrivals were processed. Then you walk through the bunker, where "special prisoners" were held in confinement and often tortured or experimented on.

Next you see the cramped barracks and get an idea of the awful living conditions inmates endured. Then you walk across a huge, now empty field where row upon row of barracks once stood. It was stunning to look at that vast expanse of land and think about how many people were once imprisoned here.

At the back of the camp are several memorials: Jewish, Catholic and Protestant. A Russian Orthodox shrine is in the garden. Just outside the fence surrounding the camp is the crematorium. There's also a memorial garden with plaques marking important places, such as where the Nazis executed people, stored the ashes from the crematorium, and the location of the mass grave.

We saved the museum for last. A series of thoughtful exhibits detailing the history of the camp are housed in what used to be the camp maintenance building. When our visit was over, we departed Dachau, collected our bags from the Hauptbahnhof in Munich, and continued by train to Salzburg, Austria.

When we reached Salzburg, we were a bit confused as to which bus to take from the train station to our hostel. Then we just happened to run into a group of American girls studying abroad in Salzburg who were staying at our hostel (it's also a dorm)! So we followed them. They even helped us call ahead since we were cutting it pretty close to when the reception was going to close. What luck!