Dachau

     While in Munich we had the opportunity to take a tour of Dachau. It was very powerful, and I would recommend everyone to visit a concentration camp if you ever get the chance. I'll try to give the stories behind the pictures, but I can't guarantee that everything I say will be accurate.

Arbeit macht Frei

 Arbeit macht Frei. In English, "Work makes free". At first, it was a message to prisoners meaning, if you work hard and change your ways, you will be allowed to leave. That was when the concentration camp was for political opponents of Nazi-ism. Later the phrase became a cruel joke implying that the prisoners would be worked to death, which would be their only freedom.

Dachau main grounds.

This is a memorial to those who would throw themselves at the electrified barbed wire fence to kill themselves. Considering they would be killed at some point, it was a way of taking back their freedom.

This is our tour guide Tom. The memorial behind him is a bit controversial. I believe it was put there in the 60's, and does not represent two of the persecuted groups, homosexuals and criminals.

This is a map of concentration camps. I was overwhelmed by the number of them.

Rauchen verboten, or "Smoking Forbidden"

 "Smoking Forbidden". This was one of the first things the prisoners would see after they had given up all of their possessions. It's one of many forms of psychological torture. Of course they can't smoke because they don't have any cigarettes.

These are the symbols prisoners had to wear to show what their offense was.

I'm unsure if prisoners lived in these rooms, or if they were just used for solitary confinement.

Barracks Phase 1

 At first, each person had his own bed with a shelf, another cruel reminder that they had no possessions. There were extremely high standards for cleaning this room, and punishment for everyone if there was a single flaw. As more prisoners came to the camp, the bed situation got worse.

Crowded Barracks

Bathroom

Barrack Phase 3

For some reason I didn't get a picture of phase 2, which was slightly wider beds on which about 5 people would sleep. As you can see in phase 3, there were no longer divisions between beds, just a large row of people side by side.

On each side of the trees, there was a long row of Barracks.

A plot where a Barracks would have been. I think there were two rows of 30.

There are no right angles in this memorial. It defies the uniform grid structure of Dachau.

The crematorium. As the death rate grew, this was no longer enough to cremate the bodies fast enough.

Gas chamber.

This is a gas chamber for killing. It is unknown how many people were killed here. While many people died at Dachau, it was not a death camp. It was a labor camp.

Grave of thousands unknown

München und Füssen

     We just got back from Germany this morning, and it was amazing. We took a tour of Dachau, hung out in a bar/restaurant in Munich, hopped a train to Füssen, and toured the castle Neuschwanstein. I decided I'm going to give Dachau its own post because I think it will be long and more serious than this post. For know I'll just talk about the rest of the weekend.

     We left GTL at about 7:30 Friday night, and got to Munich at 5 or 5:30am Saturday morning. I didn't sleep at all, and no one slept for very long, so we were all pretty tired.  Our tour of Dachau wouldn't be until 10, so we decided to just walk around and explore Munich.  After all, a guest speaker in our GTL seminar told us the best way to explore a city is to get lost. Turns out that advice is actually quite terrible. After a couple hours of walking around, here's my impression of Germany so far.

Beautiful Fountain outside of a train station.

Great empty lot, with plenty of room for walking and dirt.

Elevator on the sidewalk. It lead to some sketch underground tunnels.

Good luck finding this in the dictionary.

    By this point we're beginning to wonder why we haven't stumbled upon anything great. Spoiler Alert: We should have gone left instead of right out of the train station. We did end up seeing a few picture-worthy things while wandering, though.

St. Paul's Cathedral. Unfortunately we couldn't go inside, and there wasn't a good point from which to take a picture.

Paul's holding two swords. I don't remember him mentioning them in his letters, but I'm sure he's got his reasons for having them.

I don't remember what this statue is for, but it's looks cool.

     After going back to the train station and looking at some maps, we had about an hour before we had to be back for our tour. We decided to explore in the other direction. It was a much more successful journey.

I found a fountain.

There were two cathedrals near each other. One of them is St. Peter's and the other is unknown to me. 

This cathedral is huge. And it's kind of like a giant cuckoo clock. People crowded together in front of it to watch the display.

     At this time we went back to the train station and met our tour guide for Dachau. We got back to downtown Munich at about 4:30, and our train to Füssen would leave at seven. We went in search of the Hofbräuhaus, a beer hall recommended by the same guy that told us to get lost in a foreign country. Even with my ability to ask for directions in German, this place took quite a while to find, but we eventually made it.

     Unfortunately, it was extremely packed due to a huge soccer game that day, and we didn't think we'd have time to get a table and have a meal there, so we went to a smaller bar/restaurant and had our first full German meal. We'd been living on pastries all day. The food was fantastic. In my opinion, German food wins on cost and taste of the places we've been so far. I had the wiener schnitzel. The next day I had a bratwurst and a curry-wurst. I was very surprised to find that the curry-wurst tasted great. Why was I surprised? Once again, the guy who told us to get LOST IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY (why did we listen to this guy?) also went on a five minute rant about how terrible curry-wursts were. 

     After eating in Munich, we got on the train to Füssen and went to the hostel as soon as we got there. We were all pretty exhausted. We got up early the next morning to go see Neuschwanstein, the castle that the Disney castle is based on.

Every lake I've seen in Germany and Switzerland has been extremely clear.

View from the smaller castle near Neuschwanstein.

I'm on a rock.

Now I'm a lion.

I'm unsure of the exact translation, but it's something along the lines of "Drink and eat, should you not forget God."  I probably butchered it, but that's the best I can do.  I think some of the words are archaic because google translate couldn't even get them.

Neuschwanstein. It was about a 20 minute hike up a mountain.

We could have ridden a carriage up the hill, but we decided to just walk.

I guess this is my castle face.

I got on the ground to get a couple of pictures, and another guy thought it was hilarious. I couldn't communicate with him because he was Asian and spoke no English. Once I realized he was laughing at me, I was a good sport about it and posed for him to take a picture of me. I told him to put it on Facebook, so hopefully I'll have a new profile pic soon.

Everyone else decided to go to Neuschwanstein the same day as us.

We took a tour inside the castle, but we couldn't take pictures of the inside. We were, however, allowed to take pictures out the windows.

      I had to put my backpack in a locker for the tour, and of course I forgot about it until I was already back down the mountain. None of my "friends" wanted to go get it for me, so I had to walk 15 minutes back up to the castle to get it. When I got back, it was time walk back to the train station, get some dinner, and head back to Metz.

I saw a portable CD player for the first time in ten years. Get with the times, Germany!

     We had a sleeper car from about midnight to 5. The mattress was similar in quality to stale bread, but that was good enough for me. I slept the whole time, and even took a two hour nap this morning before class. 

     I think I'll post later this week about the Dachau tour. Until then, auf Wiedersehen!

Weekend 1: In die Schweiz

      To kick off the summer we took our first weekend trip to Switzerland. To avoid paying for an extra night in a hostel, we decided to leave early Saturday morning instead of Friday night. Our train was scheduled for 6:36am, so we thought it would be best to arrive at the train station at about 6. We looked up the bus schedule on line and decided to take the bus at 5:34. Again, to be safe, we decided to get to the bus stop at 5:15. That's when the fun began.

Waiting for the bus:

     We looked at the schedule at the bus stop, and it looked like a bus wouldn't come until 6:02, which would be bad because it takes about 30 minutes to get to the train station. 5:34 came and went with no bus. Eventually a bus came at 6:19. By this point we were prepared to just catch the next train and get to Switzerland a few hours later than anticipated. The trains here are very punctual, so we knew we had little chance of making it. In the morning, however, the bus is able to get to the train station much quicker, I guess due to low traffic and fewer stops. We pulled up to the station (really across the street and a large pedestrian zone) at 6:34. We sprinted into the station, figured out which platform our train was on, and hurried to it. When we reached the platform, I ran up and grabbed the door to the train as it was closing. An employee started yelling at me in French, but I couldn't move until I knew all five of us would be on the train. From there it was pretty much smooth sailing all the way to Switzerland. It took about 6 hours to get there because we swapped trains a few times.

     The first the we did when we got to Interlaken was drop our stuff off at the Hostel. It was pretty nice, but I think we all agreed it would have been nicer to stay in a hostel in the mountains rather than in Interlaken.

 Our co-ed bedroom was in the guys bathroom. Great building design, Balmer's.

     With our stuff dropped off we needed to get some food. So we walked back to the main area of town, taking some pictures along the way. Here's a few of them:

My pointing is homage to Uncle Lanier.

group photo:

     

After picture time, guess where the girls decided we should eat...

At least it wasn't McDonald's...

After eating, we went back to the Hostel to hang out and kill some time until dinner later (at a nicer restaurant). Ethan and I played chess.

For dinner I had all-you-can-eat fondue. It was awesome.

At the end of the first day, I was a little bit frustrated. After being in France for I week, I was surprised to learn that speaking English was pretty rare. Because of this, I was exited because I'd be able to use the small amount of German that I know to communicate in Switzerland. Turns out, everyone speaks English (at least in Interlaken, probably because it's a touristy town). The next day, though, I got to use it to order food and get directions from mountain people.

     We got up early Sunday morning to hike. We had to catch a bus and a train, so we didn't end up getting to the valley until about 9am. It was cold and raining, but we were prepared.

     We walked for about an hour until we saw a sign for something about waterfalls (there are about a hundred waterfalls in these mountains, and we heard they were really cool, especially in the rain). We kind of got sucked into a really touristy place where we paid ten franks to take some bad pictures of some waterfalls. I'm not sure if everyone agrees, but I don't think it was worth the money. By this point we were all ready to start hiking up a mountain. We walked for about another hour and reached a restaurant at the base of a mountain trail at about noon, so we stopped to eat. 

     I'll be the first to admit that I was extremely overconfident about how far up this mountain we would get. There's no way I could have done the route I traced on the map before we left. I was basically the weak link of the group. Ethan and I usually brought up the rear to "protect the group". After about two hours, we reached a small mountain town, Gimmelwald. Here's a panoramic view from Gimmelwald:

    It was about 3 o'clock, and our options were either hike back down the way we came, and walk about an hour and a half back to the train station, or hike across the mountain until we can hike down right over the train station. We chose the latter, thinking it would be about two hours. We were wrong. It took us four hours to get back. Along the way we saw a Georgia Tech student and her family (And she is not in GTL, they were just on vacation). Small world.

     Even though I was exhausted for most of the hike, it was a lot of fun. For an idea of how high we went, I took a picture of the sign in Gimmelwald:

We were almost 1400 meters above sea level, but we started at about 700, so we hiked up 700 meters. And we probably went a hundred or so higher as we hiked across the mountain.

You would think we'd be tired and ready for bed when we got back, but Heath, Ethan, and I went to the casino in Interlaken that night for some blackjack. We each won back a large chunk of the money we had spent in Switzerland, so fun times were had by all.

Monday morning we bought souvenirs and got on the train back to Metz. It took way longer than it should have because one of our trains got canceled. The last train in our route was a TGV, which we actually aren't supposed to get on without a reservation, but we wanted to get back, so we risked it. No one came to check for our passes so we made it back without any problems.

Here's some more pictures from the weekend:

Just chillin in Interlaken.

Ready for the rain.

Avalanche shelter

Getting in some good exercise before the hike.

The group at the beginning of the hike

The trail up the mountain

Heath helped me carry my backpack a lot of the way. Thanks Heath.

Found my way into a cabin on the mountain.

I accidentally ruined Christina's panorama. It's perfect.

Rainbow after some mid-hike rain. 

Snowball fight!

A guy was para-sailing in Interlaken. It looked fun, but was a bit too expensive for us.

Train antics

This looks like a pretty good movie. Found it at the train station.