Traveling from Northern Germany, (Berlin), to Southern Germany, (Munich), was much like moving between Toronto Canada and Montreal Canada…..part of the same country but a completely different vibe.
One of Munich’s nicknames is Millionendorf, meaning “village of a million people”. I don’t know Berlin’s nickname but it I wouldn’t say it had a “village” feel. Much of Munich was destroyed by bombs at the end of World War 2, along with Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Berlin. All of these cities have rebuilt themselves from rubble since then. Munich’s distinctive feel comes from the focus on preserving the Medieval feel of narrow cobble stoned streets while they were rebuilding. That rebuilding process continues today, and it wasn’t so long ago they had to evacuate 3,000 people from the city core to blow up an old 550 lb bomb leftover from the allies’ major bombing campaign in World War 2.
Oktoberfest in Munich is the largest in the world. Think of any Oktoberfest celebration you’ve been to before, and this is undoubtedly bigger. The vibe is friendly and warm. Drunk people, (mostly young men and women) are pretty much everywhere, but there are soberer older couples and families with small children decked out in traditional costume for the event as well. The dress most women wear is called a dirndl and the men wear leather shorts of varying lengths called lederhosen. We found out later we could have rented our own traditional costumes and Marla deeply regrets not doing so as her…..assets may have been shown to advantage with a dirndl. Maybe next time.
Oktoberfest is held in a big “meadow” that includes a massive carnival with tons of rides, and lots of fried food. All seven breweries in Munich are represented in at least 1 beer “tent” which is actually a hall that holds up to 12,000 people. The beer is served in gigantic 1 liter mugs called masskrugs and the food in the beer halls is surprisingly delicious. Marla and I shared a half chicken with potato salad and it was fantastic. The table we were sitting at included an American GI with his German sweetheart and their friend as well as a bunch of Italians who were singing A LOT. The band plays a drinking song that everyone seems to know, and at the end you “clink” your beer stein and have a drink. The beer went down easy in that atmosphere for sure. They say they sell a MILLION masskrugs during the two week festival!
We have heard more American accents in Munich than anywhere else we’ve been in the last 2 weeks. I’ve found it strangely comforting. While a lot of Germans can speak English, they don’t flip back and forth with the same ease the Danes in Copenhagen did. This tends to raise the anxiety bar a little higher. We’ve found that eventually you get used to it and find your way around a menu and the mass transit without too much trouble. There is almost always a kind person to help you out ~ like the man who spotted our confusion as we tried to find our train platform to Germering and almost missed his own train helping us out.
On Monday we went on a tour to the Dachau Concentration Camp. Our tour included one young man and his wife, from Minnesota I think, whose grandfather had actually been interred as a political prisoner in Dachau early in its existence. The young man told a story about how his grandfather had been released and told to leave on the next train, which was typical of how the Nazi’s handled prisoners early on. The grandfather went to at least two countries before finally settling in the United States. The fact is that that particular young man would not have been in the tour group because his grandfather chose to leave everything he knew and loved under threat of reprisals and death. It was an amazing story to hear and I wish we had been able to talk to the couple afterwards to hear how being in Dachau affected them.
Most of the people on our tour were Americans, which felt weird but also comforting. It was nice not to have to pull out Google Translate to try to communicate. My German lessons in DuoLingo are definitely not far enough long that they are useful yet.
Seeing Dachau in person was hard, but not unexpected hard. Seeing the artifacts, the showers, and crematorium in person were chilling, but the thing I found the most surprising was how many concentration camps there were. We’ve heard a lot about the big ones, but there were lots of smaller locations with different purposes: some were strictly work houses and some were specifically extermination sites.
We stayed outside of Munich at a little town called Germering. Germering was the site of one of the smaller satellite camps and we could have visited the monument to the concentration camps in that small town as well. Dachau was intense enough so we decided to pass on that one.
There are days in a trip when you just need a little green space. We completed our Rick Steve’s walking tour of central Munich on our final day then headed to the biggest park in the city, the English Garden. I expected the English Garden to be a bit more formally landscaped because of its name, but it was actually just a massive park in the middle of Munich filled with trees, meadows, and nude sunbathers that runs along the Isar River. It was a lovely break from all the pavement and even had a biergarten in the center because that’s how Germans roll.
We always ask each other two questions when we are leaving a place; “Would you live here?”, and/or “Would you come back?”. I don’t think we are ever going to move here, but for sure we would come back ~ if only for the beer!
On to Amsterdam with it’s Red Light district, canals and cannabis!
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