More than I bargained for...

Hello Everybody!

Ok, so after all that sex in Hamburg, I moved to Munich (or München, here). Here in Munich, I havent had all too much to do, though the things I did do eneded up giving me way more than I bargained for.

Firts off, I went on a guided tour of the Dachau (pronounced Da-weird throaty/spitty noise-ow)Concentration Camp Memorial Site. Dachau was the first Concentration Camp ever started in 1933. It was not an extermination camp, though over 30 000 people lost their lives there. The memorial site on the actual site where the Dachau Concentration Camp used to be and many of the buildings that are there are still the original ones. We started out tour outisde, facing the buildings hwich were once used as training grounds for the SS (secret police)... they are big white buildings that don't really look like much, but when you consider that they were once used to train 16 to 24 year old men to torture people, they become somewhat scarier. When we entered the camp, we were taken to the registration area, as the prisoners were. It's a tiny little room, but it is the room in which prisoners had to surrender their personal belonging, identity and any sense of human dignigty. Not pleasant.

After that, we saw the special prisoners' cells... Speacial prisoners were political prisoners, priests and others that they wanted to keep a close eye on. Actually, each cell was divided into six cells, so that the prisoners did not have room to sit, lie down or move around, really. Scary stuff. We were then shown a short movie documented the rise and fall of the Nazi regime. It included some extremely gruesome footage of victims of the camps and torture and things like that. Again, not so pleasant. After that, it was off to the crematorium and the gas chambers. Though the gas chambers at Dachau were never used, it is the absloute creepiest feeling in the world walking through them, just knowing what they were built for. I cannot possibly imagine walking into a room, being told I'm about to take a nice, hot shower (a rather pleasant feeling, no?) and then being gassed 10 to 15 minutes later. All I can say is that walking through that shower room really sent chills up my spine. The crematorium was also quite scary, cuz there are pictures all over the walls of it when it was overloaded with bodies. At certain points, they had too many bodies to keep up the pace of burning them, so they just piled up on the floor. Not cool.

All in all, the tour of the site was quite good. Not pleasant, but good. I knew I would leave there feeling rather low, but it was much more depressing than I had thought. I suppose concentration camps are one of those things that everyone knows exists, but you cant fully understand them till youve seen one. And once you have, you dont really want to go back. Thats why I really liked that sign inside that says, in 5 different languages "Never Again".

So now that I've thoroughly depressed everyone, on to something a little more pleasant. Well, I guess... funny anyways. So, here in Munich, there isn't all that much to do, as I have already said. I did, however, take a walk through the Englischer Garten (I'll let you guess what that means in English!)... now, my Lonely Planet had told me that these gardens were often home to nude sunbathers in warm weather. It did not mention, however, that most of said sunbathers are OLD MEN! So imagine me, taking a nice leisurely walk throúgh a beautiful garden where there are swans and duckies in the pond and then I come across a little old man lying in the grass and waving at me. So I look over, trying to be polite you know, and he is NAKED! Oh Dear! Not just naked, oh no! Naked and with a sunburnt penis. Now what am I to do? Point and say, "Sir, I don't think your knob is supposed to be that colour?" Or go bold and say "Dude, have you ever heard of sunscreen?" Well, heres what I did. I gaped, got over it, and turned the other way. Needless to say, I was in shock. Then there was the man walking around naked with an all out boner, but thats a whole other story, so well leave it for now, shall we?

Anywho, so tonight I'm off to a bier garten with the room full of Canadians that just enetered my room at the hostel and tomorrow, off to Heidelberg, where I will visit a statue of a monkey (a brass monkey, at that) and a castle with a beer vat capable of fitting 220 000 litres of beer. Ineteresting...

Tchuss!

Steph :)
xxx