Dining and Dirndls: Spring Break Stop #3: Munich!

We landed in Munich after a really nice hour and a half long train ride, found our hostel, and had checked in by about 2 PM. We pretty much instantly fell in love with the hostel. It was called Wombat’s. The staff was super friendly, funny, and helpful, especially this Australian guy, Tom. They also had signs up everywhere that were just really funny like one that was a comic of batman slapping someone who was asking for the wifi code without even saying “Hi” first. The rooms were nice and clean, sheets and towels were free, they had a really nice courtyard, cheap breakfast, laundry facilities, and so on. So, would also highly recommend it!…And now I’ll stop this little plug for them.

The Glockenspiel!

We spent the first afternoon walking around downtown. Munich actually reminded me a bit of LA because of the big city feel of it—except that I couldn’t understand any of the signs and the buildings are significantly cooler. We saw the Glockenspiel and one of the most beautiful churches I’ve seen. I loved it because it was SO different from the Gothic architecture that’s all over France. There were these beautiful little paper birds all flying towards the front. The colors were pastel pink and yellow and blue. And as usual, it was just incredibly ornate.

A huge highlight was walking into a dirndl shop (lederhosen are for men, dirndls are for women.) We had seen a ton in Austria but they were really expensive so we went into this store and ended up trying some on and they were too cute NOT to buy them. It was still a bit pricy for me but not bad in comparison. I suffered about 20 minutes of buyer’s remorse afterwards but had great girlfriends to help me justify it. And realistically, when would I be back in Germany buying one? Plus I now have a great Halloween costume and Oktoberfest outfit for when I’m 21!

Melinda, Emily, London and I posing in our dirdnls!

Emily, London, and myself.

We did have a lot of fun just trying them on, however. You wouldn’t believe just how many varieties of colors and patterns you can choose from. The little shirt and the apron are separate pieces so you can mix and match those. We also learned some pretty cool cultural things about them. For example, where you tie the apron basically tells people your relationship status! My friend London had walked out with it tied behind her back and the girl helping us with them told her not to do that because it means she’s widowed. So, left hip is single, right hip is taken/in a relationship, and the middle is for younger girls who shouldn’t really be identifying as any of the above options.

Also, we had sincerely wondered if they were just a tourist thing. But NO! People actually where them. We saw girls and guys in them not only during the day walking around, but also in clubs and bars at night!

We had a pretty relaxing night with some dinner and hanging out in the bar in the hostel. A few of us went and tried out a club later which was pretty fun but also a bit bizarre. I say that because people in Europe dance very differently than Americans, which I may have mentioned before, but in case I hadn’t—Europeans kind of… rock side to side (and not all of them, but the vast majority), whereas my friends and I just kind of goof around and dance like idiots which translates into us sticking out like sore thumbs. But we had fun, so that’s all that really counts right? Maybe? Oh well.

The next day we woke up early and caught a train to see the Neuschwanstein Castle! We literally walked up to the train station ten minutes before the next train left and hopped on one. It takes a while to get to the castle between the train, a bus, another bus, and then walking around once you’re there, but it was totally worth it. You could pay for tours to go inside but everyone I’d talked to about it said it wasn’t necessary. And thanks to London, our personal history major and tour guide, I got to learn about the king who built the castle and of his very mysterious death. We got lunch in the town below the castle and headed back.

Inside the courtyard of Neuschwanstein.

The view from a bridge that was incredibly high up and
therefore pretty scary for me, but worth it!

That night we had a blast checking out the beer gardens and meeting lots of people from our hostel who were from all over the place. It ended up being probably one of my favorite nights out for the break.

Our last day ended on a more somber note for sure, but also on a very powerful one. We went and took a tour of the Dachau Concentration Camp which was the first camp in existence. It was also one of the biggest and was used as the model for all of the following camps. We were informed that Auschwitz is the place to go to see the full extent of the Nazism and the camps, but Dachau was where it really all started.

We were very fortunate to take a tour with a great guide who approached everything from a very intellectual level. He didn’t want to glorify anything and said we weren’t there to re-enact events from that place, but that it was a historical site to be studied and to approach realistically. That approach was absolutely fascinating and I learned a lot.

However, the experience there really isn’t something you can put well into words. And I want to do it justice. So all I can really say, for me and my personal experience there, was that it was pretty surreal. To actually be in a place where something you’ve learned about over and over in history classes and in movies and even, for us, that we’d talked about in the previous countries we’d just been in, is pretty hard to wrap your head around. And I felt I was constantly in this weird place of not wanting to think about what had happened in the place I was standing, but having that be the reason I was there—to think about it.

There really is a lot I wish I could say but at this moment I’m struggling to figure out how to say it exactly…

…Because I really can’t fully express the heaviness that permeated the entire place, the overwhelming sadness and horror that came over me, personally, walking under the entry gates, or the almost numbness I had to feel standing in front of the crematoriums or walking through the gas chamber. Dachau actually hadn’t been a major extermination camp when The Final Solution was implemented. It started out as a sort of “reformation center” for all of Hitler’s enemies. However, the torture was present day in and day out—not just physically but mentally and emotionally. Those facilities were in fact used. And as our guide frequently reminded us, if one person had died there and a million had died elsewhere, that’s still 1,000,001 deaths and each and every single one is a tragedy.

So although I’m sure I’m depressing everyone taking the time to read this far, I think it’s important to share it. And on a maybe slightly better note, I’d like to add that what also hit me pretty hard was seeing this monument that was designed by survivors of the camp. It’s a monument of an unknown prisoner: “To Honor the Dead, to Warn the Living.”

Memorial to the Unknown Prisoner at Dachau.

So after a relatively somber day we went back to the hostel to get some rest. Because we had an early flight the next morning we had to wake up at about 3 AM to check out of the hostel, catch a subway to the airport at 3:48, and get checked in to our flight. We had a slight hiccup when we got downstairs with our keys and sheets and the reception desk was closed! So we woke up real fast thanks to the stress of searching for someone to check us out and give us our IDs (which they had behind the desk in exchange for the room keys). We ended up having to leave since the next subway wouldn’t be until 4:48 and we’d most likely miss our flight. So we put the sheets in a bin, shoved our keys through a little space in the desk, and left! They emailed us as soon as they could apologizing—apparently one girl had been on duty and had to help an extremely intoxicated man find his room and get taken care of, so she had had to close everything down. They mailed us the IDs without a problem which was nice.

Then after a lot of free time in the airport, some face-timing, a short flight, an hour and a half bus, and a 20 minute walk to the college, we made it back just in time for brunch followed by pretty much an entire day of sleep.

SO: in conclusion to my spring break posts—it was a BLAST. I was so happy I found friends who wanted to do something besides the beach for the break. I was thrilled to have taken advantage of the 9 day break. And on top of that I was very happy with how much we were able to cram into those 9 days (if you’ve read all of the blog posts, I’m sure you can tell) without completely wearing ourselves out! In 9 days we conquered 3 countries, tons of new experiences, so much incredible food, a lot of laughter, and a ton of stories and memories that I will definitely be keeping with me forever.