Not a Watery Grave, but Close

Our first day was an adventure in sleep depravity. We dropped our luggage off at the hotel. It was small, clean, and located about four blocks from the Central Train Station in Munich. We navigated our first day on the trains without any major mishaps. Our first stop was Dauchau Concentration Camp. It's a very quiet, somber tour. Some important historical facts to note were that it was actually the first of such camps and became the model for all the other camps. I'm not sure model is the right word since it implies a positive connotation. It was the only camp that operated for the entire 12 years of the Nazi reign. It held mainly political prisoners and was advertised as a "work camp" in local press at the time. It was made to hold around 6000 prisoners. By 1941-42 it held many more. When camps began being cleared as the Allies took more and more territory, other camps shipped some prisoners there. When the Americans got into Dachau there were over 35,000 prisoners. Dauchau was never used as a gassing station, but 1000's died there from overwork, disease, starvation, etc. It seems like a huge camp until you think about the larger number and then it's obvious that they must have been packed into barracks 3-4 to a bunk or more. The memorial has a large sculpture that looks like barbed wire, but seen at the right angle also looks like human appendages. There is one tomb, similar to the unknown soldier in D.C., with the remains of one political prisoner in honor of all who died in the camp. We walked around the whole camp, including the monuments erected by four main religious groups (Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and Russian Orthodox) done because so many of the political prisoners held in Dauchau were held on charges equivalent to "crimes against the state," or speaking out against the Nazi regime, many of them were religious leaders. I recommend you look at the website to see the camp and memorials. I also recommend it because the one phone we remembered to take with us was the one without an SD card - so there are no photos. If the camp were the Junior Prom and one of my staffers came back with that lame excuse, I'd tear into them! ;) "The prom only happens once a year! It's not like we can recreate it!"

When we got back to Munich, we went to Marienplatz which is the center of town and includes tons of shops, outdoor market, and plenty of places to get a stein of beer and a traditional German meal (sausage and potatoes). We went for a less coronary-causing meal of smoothies and sandwich/salad. I know, boring right? Rach doesn't even like hot dogs at home, were you really expecting she'd be gorging herself on bratwurst and sauerkraut for every meal in Germany? It is a really nice part of the city because the main areas are hemmed in by several historic churches and buildings. We were too late to hear/see the Rathaus clock toll, it has some moving figures and "animation" certain times of the day. Mostly, it's a great place to watch people - and there are tons of them. All the shops close around 7:00 and mainly restaurants and beer halls are open at night. We walked around for a couple of hours. We had to take a few small detours because Rach didn't like walking through the flocks of pigeons (flying rats). I think we were definitely in a sleep-depraved stupor most of the night. We were starving, but too lazy to figure out what to eat. I mentioned that we did pretty well on our train navigation all day, a success of nearly epic proportions. Our one failure was that when we came out for the last time, we were on the wrong street and got turned around and had to backtrack around the block before we recognized where we were going. That tiny mistake put us about three extra blocks in our walk back to the hotel, a delay that kept us four blocks from said hotel just as it started to rain. Not a light sprinkling either, it was a full-on down pour that hit fast and very, very wet. We were soaked through by time we got to the hotel. Anyone up for a wet t-shirt contest? Our hotel was on a street with at least three questionable establishments where that might have been appropriate. I'm pretty sure there was a clear winner. There's a song to go with that by The Beautiful South; an awesome Irish group, but you'd have to find the song for yourself. ;)We left a long, drippy trail all through the hotel. I had spent the whole day wishing I could take a shower, but that wasn't what I had in mind. (I realize how easy and obvious that joke was, but couldn't pass it up.)