Travelogue: Munich

We were hoping to leave the rain behind in Paris, but it followed us to Munich and made the first two days fairly soggy. It’s tough to learn a new city from under an umbrella and just about impossible to take pictures, but we made the best of it.  Despite the rain, I loved seeing the spring flowers and the fruit/veg stands loaded with delicious goodies. I bought two packets of strawberries that were so good!

I’m not a big fan of German food in general, but I fell in love with their chunky, white asparagus (spargel). This salmon with asparagus was out of this world!

We stayed near the train station and just a block from the old town area where most of what we wanted to do was within walking distance so both ended up getting 15-20k steps per day.

Yes, we did. We went to the Hard Rock Cafe in Berlin. It was definitely fun!

We started by visiting the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, which is a museum that documents the rise of the Nazi party in Munich. The museum was excellent, free, and again full of high school age kids.

Next we visited the Dachau concentration camp, which was incredibly moving. It’s one thing to read about these places, but visiting them enables you to get a deeper understanding and respect for what people endured and how they suffered. I ended up not feeling like taking any photos but just walked around, listened to the audio guide, and read the placards.

We also took a walking tour entitled Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party—again, excellent. The tour guide was terrific, and it was great to see the sites of events like Hitler’s first major speech, the route of the Beer Hall Putsch March and where it was crushed, the house where Hitler learned how to rub elbows properly with the upper crust who were crucial in his early fundraising years, and the various monuments that the German people have erected to commemorate the victims of the Nazi regime.

This is where some of the participants in the Beer Hall Putsch were killed. The Nazis made it sacred ground and required everyone who passed to give the Nazi salute.

The golden cobblestones mark the path that people who wanted to avoid giving the Nazi salute would take —it marks a detour around the “sacred ground.” Like any form of resistance during the Nazi control of Germany, taking this detour required courage.

Apart from the WWII excursions, we enjoyed shopping in Marienplatz, walking through the Englisher garden, watching the foolhardy surfing on the river rapids, and getting lost even with GPS on our phones. 

Now it’s time to leave the urban bustle for awhile and head for the hills. Next stop — Berchtesgaden in the German Alps near the Austrian border.