Munich and before

It has been a busy couple days, and then not so busy few days before then. A warning: The last portion of pictures on this post will be from Dachau, the concentration camp outside of Munich and those pictures are not easy to look at. View them and read the captions at your discretion. All of the camp was open to explore, and Dachau was a death camp as well. Moving on:

We toured Munich on friday morning, arriving by train and beginning a slow tour of 4 churches. They were very big and we were shooed out of two of them because of the mass which beginning. There was a tower on one of them. That's where the aerial pictures are from. It was beautiful.

After lunch I went with a few others to a baroque art museum. I saw a whole lot of Rembrandt and some others too. After that we went to the restaurant under the famous glockenspiel clock in the Marienplatz, the main square in Munich. It has existed for a very long time, and the glockenspiel plays (rather atonally) while the wheel of painted statues rotate to the music. It was a great restaurant and I got saurbraten, a roast beef with a special reduction. It was delish. They had special sauerkraut with a wine reduction of its own. It was amazing. Then we played frisbee in the field right next to the Munich Congress building, which had (apparently, though I gladly was not present earlier) previously housed nude old men, and went to our hostel. 

 5 other fellow american students and I stayed the night in a big hostel called "The Tent." it was just that. There was a big tent in which were 100 bunkbeds. There was also a private biergarten, ping pong, basketball, restaurant, and so on. It was a huge kind of hippie commune, oddly enough, with people from all over the world. I don't have pictures of it personally, but as I get them from others who were there, I will post them. The breakfast was very tasty the next morning, and it was a great experience. If you're ever in Munich and need a fun and cheap (12 euro a night) place to stay, look up The Tent. 

In the morning we went to Dachau. I think that the pictures will do enough, and I'll leave it at that.

We went to eat at the original Haufbrau Haus in Munich to get beer and sausage, and enjoyed both. Then we caught a train back. I planned to study for my classes, but a big group of bavarians celebrating their friend's bachelor party got on board right next to us with a whole crate of Austiner beer. They were loud and crazy, singing songs, and then Xenon, one of my friends started singing along. That's all it took, because they came and sat with us, shared their beer (trying to sell it for 2 euro a bottle-I passed), and taught us games. They were very interested in my last name (Yes Carpenters, I found out from them as well as you that the German pronunciation is Silver-schtine), because it was german-sounding, and they admired my beard, oddly enough. And they could not believe I was nineteen. They also tried to get me to play the game of see if you can knock this (admitttedly totally drunk) guy out with one punch. I also declined. It was a very eventful trip and actually a sort of fun one as well. They invited us to go with them to the place they were planning on going that night to watch the championsleague final, but we were too tired. We got a picture and got back to the hostel. We were planning on hiking another mountain, Untersberg the next day.

So that was the friday and saturday. I will get on again tomorrow, perhaps, to update on the hike and other stuff. Enjoy the pictures.

 This was probably wednesday of last week. Jellied beef. It was very good and weird.

 This is a view from the tower of the church. If you look really hard in the distance you can see the Alps. That is Munich.

 This is another church. It is not the same one, but one of the 4 that we toured. Very pretty.

 Oh, this is not from Munich. I believe this is from Thursday. There was the Salzburg Grand Prix, and they had a race. I missed the race, but I saw the processional of the old cars. It took place in the Domplatz, the square near the Dom in Salzburg.

 This is in munich. That's the tower with the Glockenspiel. It is not a church, nor do I think it ever was. I believe it's a station of some sort, perhaps a state building of some kind. The dancing figures are just above the center and to the right of the center of the picture.

 That's the view of the same tower from the church tower.

 This is the view of the odd, interesting church which on the inside, and most of the outside appeared gothic and romanesque, but had two byzantine towers.

Here's the gate of Dacau. On the iron gate is written Arbeit Macht Frei which translates to Work Makes Free. Satan had his way with this place and it feels like it but for the hope that God put into the people that were interned there.

 This is the memorial.

 These are bunks. Towards the Final Solution, they pushed all of them together to make more room.

 This is a line of what used to be the place they called the infirmary. It was actually a quarantine. This also housed some housing.

 This was the restricted strip nearing the fence. There were guard towers all around. Many purposely stepped into the zone to be put out of their misery.

 This was the crematorium and gas chamber. It's mindboggling how pretty the sky is here. One comment from a german man-you can't hear any birds in the camp. Outside of it you can hear them clearly, but there is a complete lack within the grounds.

 This is the actual gas chamber.