Germany: Day 3

We woke up the morning of September 5^th sad to see the departure of Tom and Brian. It was also probably the best thing to happen to us on the trip thus far because it is quite possible that we would have been home in a week if we had spent money at the rate they encouraged us to. Thomas wanted a sobering experience and recommended a trip to Dachau, one of the first concentration camps in Germany. With a set plan for the day we set of to find an inexpensive way to eat. Now it is here, dear readers, that my life was changed. I found the greatest good in the world in the form of creamy gooey goodness of Nutella. For anyone that doesn’t know what Nutella is, I will try to describe it in a way to give it any justice. Imagine if heaven was mixed with hazelnuts, add a strand of Lothriel’s hair, and package it is a glass container (because obviously plastic cannot contain the goodness that is Nutella). I will never forget the LIDL, a grocery store that sells 1.5 L of water for 19 cents and bread for 59, it was very cheap, and Nutella was possibly the most expensive item at the store (for good reason), 1.99 euros. I spent the next half hour raving to strangers about the canned crack I carried with me as I left the store. Then, the unimaginable happened. For one minute I let my guard down then in slow motion I tried to switch my bag, a loaf of bread, a map, and my Nutella (which I refused to set down) to different hands, and some malevolent power pulled the Nutella towards Earth. I watched it plummet to the ground, my human reflexes unable to keep up with my mind, and the glass shattered. I can’t remember the next few minutes. I just know my vision went white with pain and fury and I woke up in a cold sweat on a train to Dachau hoping it was all just a dream. My Nutella was gone. In retrospect, this is a good thing because my Nutella addled mind was numbed by grief and I was able to come down from my high and be ready to experience Dachau.

The concentration camp was in a beautiful area outside of Munich, the trees were green and when we arrived, although overcast, it was a beautiful day. The landscape was at complete odds with the pain and atrocities that happened there all those years ago. Dachau was opened in 1933 as a place for mainly political prisoners against the Nazi movement, but was rebuilt in 1938 to house an ever increasing number of Jews who were imprisoned. The camp never became an extermination camp like Aushwitz, but there were still thousands of lives lost in the years that it was open, and most camps were modeled after the brutal regime that was “The Dachau Model.” As they say, pictures say a thousand words, and really I cannot say anything about the camp that is not better expressed with images (up when I get my computer in a few days).

After the emotional visit to Dachau we headed back to the hostel to await the arrival of a friend who was visiting from Salzberg. His name is Nick, but people affectionately refer to him as Salty. We found him by the Saint Michael’s Cathedral where he ambushed us, called us homos and demanded we show him a good time. After out experienced with Tom, we wanted nothing to do with pubs or shenanigans, so we went back to the hostel to relax (and hopefully keep Salty under control). We stopped at a grocery store on the way back to the hostel. I got a new jar of Nutella and some apples, Matt got some German chocolate, Thomas got some bread, and Salty got a bottle of wine (for himself) and a liter and a half of sprite. If it sounds like a recipe for disaster to you, you had more sense than we did. After a game of cribbage and Matt spending a significant amount of time napping Salty disappeared. He came back with a beautiful girl named Crissi who worked the front desk of the hostel. Thomas had repeatedly exclaimed how beautiful she was and Salty, in what the locals called “Mexican German”, told the lady to encourage us to go out and live it up the last night there. Thomas (an the rest of us) cannot say no to a pretty woman and went out to explore the night with Salty. Munich, luckily, closes down the entire city Saturday at midnight, so we did not have to deal with anything other than a street performer excited to have Americans to sing Beatles tunes with. We retired for the night happy to get some sleep and excited to head out to Prague (I finished this post on a train as we passed through Schwandorf)