Munich and Dachau

My initial plans today was to go to Dachau and then to some museums. Turns out tho that once I got to the train station, I could not easily figure out how to get there. It shouldn’t have been difficult, but I didn’t have much time to fool around. Instead, I checked out Alte and Neue Pinakothek first. They housed many European art works. There weren’t many I recognized, so I pretty much dashed through them so that I could catch the Glockenspiel (mechanical clock) play at 12. A silly thing of Bavarian jouster fighting a French one, followed by Coopers dance. But it attracted loads of people in front of the Marienplatz. I cannot believe how many people were actually out here waiting just to see it. (Nevermind that I was one of them.)

I grabbed a quick lunch after the clock finished playing and met up with the walking tour at Marienplatz for a guided tour of Dachau. Dachau is the first concentration camp in Germany, and was the one all others were modeled after. I’d heard and seen stories of the camp before – perhaps at the Holocaust museum, or at the Ann Frank house. But this was the first time I’d been to an actual camp, and it was a somber reminder of a terrible past. The tour lasted all afternoon, and our guide was actually an American, Eric, but he was quite knowledgeable.

At the end of the day, I grabbed some Indian food for dinner and chilled for couple hours until I caught the 22:40 train back to Holland.