You Can’t Sit There- Matt and Leslie try not to F up in Europe, Ch.4 - Munich

(Continued vacation story/how-to.. See “You Can’t Sit There- Matt and Leslie try not to F up in Europe, Ch.3 - Triberg, Freudenstadt, Baden-Baden, and Ulm” for previous)

CAUTION: Parts of this post contain disturbing information about real human history. Please read carefully. Please absorb. Please be kind to one another.

Munich. Munchen. Whatever this city is called in your language, it is one to which we must return. We were in the city for about 36 hours and really only saw the tip of the iceberg, but we definitely saw the priority items for us….

We arrived in Munich Thursday night maybe around 9pm? We were staying at a Courtyard Marriott near downtown (using points.. **brushes shoulders off**... no big deal). Luckily the parking garage for the hotel was nearby as we navigated there so we found it first try! Woohoo! Unluckily, though, the parking cost us somewhere in the realm of 50 Euros for the 36 hours we were there. Lame.

As I mentioned in the last post, Matt had been doing some intense research on brewhouses as I drove us from Ulm to Munich, and we had decided that Thursday night we would be heading to the Augustiner Braustuben. It was maybe a 15-20 minute walk from the hotel FURTHER AWAY from the city, so we thought we would knock this out then stay closer to the city on Friday.

We had read that the charm and unique feature of these brewhouses was that they really only this long, picnic table type seating, so if you get there and the only seats available are two at a table full of other people, you sit with all the other people! It sounded very communal and friendly and like the best way to make German friends. We were REALLY excited. So we walk in, do a scan of the situation, and then embrace the idea, fight our American anxieties, and we ask to sit at a table with 4 other people. Step 1, done. A waiter man came over within maybe 5-10 minutes (it was pretty busy at that point, so that was fine) and we ordered beers. Another difference here is that they brought the receipts with the beers and expected immediate payment. Definitely no tabs in these kind of establishments. We had cash and were prepared, so no big deal. So we finally have beers, we are taking in the noise and the table NEXT to us full of maybe 8 guys playing drinking games, and we look at the 4 people we sat with and…..they’re having a lovely and calm conversation just the 4 of them. They did not look at us. They did not invite us to join conversation or play a game. They did not become our German best friends.

Oh well.

We sat and chatted and observed. The beers were tasty. Around 11 maybe, it started to clear out a little, so we moved to a more central table for a better view and to try and get someone’s attention to grab a final beer order. It took at LEAST 20-30 minutes for someone to see our empty beer steins and CARE.

Overall, beer was good. We didn’t try the food. The service was meh. And people were not as welcoming as we had hoped. Try again tomorrow…

Back to the hotel to rest up for a long day Friday.

We woke up Friday and had the breakfast downstairs (included.. I think). It was pretty much the same breakfast that was offered at the Courtyard Marriott in Stockholm except there were also soft pretzels haha. Deli meats, yogurt, multiple bread products, and then american style hot breakfast options. Not bad. But we did have to ask for coffee, and of course we know that if Matt has to think or talk or plan much before coffee it does not go well :-)

For the record, I took a pretzel to go, and it was not good.

So as I mentioned, we hit our priorities for Munich on Friday- Dachau and Hofbrauhaus. Dachau was something that Matt and I could not miss being in Munich. The history.... It almost felt like our duty as humans to go. And Hofbrauhaus/ brauhauses in general… as beer people, Munich is almost a motherland of sorts that needed to be seen and experienced in this way.

We decided for a number of reasons to start the day by driving to Dachau. One, by the time we got back we would be done driving for the day and could just park and not worry about the car. Two, when we came back shocked, depressed, and in mild crisis, we would be spending the rest of the day drinking lots and lots and lots of beer.

So we navigated to Dachau. There appeared to be a few options for parking, but we couldn’t really find the lot so our easiest option was parking on the street. Parking was free, entry to the site is free, and they have maps and audio guides you can rent if you are interested.

Now here comes the real talk….

For anyone who may not know (just in case), Dachau was the first concentration camp opened in Germany in 1933. And yes, again, for those who did not know (I think I was included in this), it opened 5-6 years before World War II actually began. It was originally reusing an old warehouse/factory as a place to hold political prisoners under the Hitler regime. In the first few years, prisoners were used to build and expand the… campus… to include a large maintenance/admin building, and barracks with capacity to hold I believe around 6,000 prisoners. This place was used as training for guards at other camps opened all over Germany and Europe. It very quickly went from holding political prisoners to any number of people characterized as unfit, unnatural, unworthy, un-human by the Nazis. The prisoners were categorized and wore badges to show what kind of prisoner they were. Certain groups received some of the harshest work. The camp was also quickly filled beyond capacity, and then beyond anything close to sanitary or … even close to humane. The camp that was built to hold 6,000 people was holding 12-15,000 people. They were tortured and experimented on. Some were literally sentenced to work to death. Some of the images and descriptions from the camp are truly nauseating.

After the first few men were killed at the camp, essentially the attorney general was starting to investigate (meaning hypothetically.. Hugely hypothetically…. the men running the camp could have been convicted of crimes and shut down before anyone else was killed), but Hitler fired him and hired someone who would quietly bury the incident.

The old maintenance building is now a large and overwhelming museum filled with pictures and information on the history of the rise of Hitler and the development of the camp. In the center they have a theater where they show a video in I think 4 different languages which show things like pictures and video clips of what was found at the camp after liberation. It is absolutely not meant for unaccompanied children.

We spent probably 3 hours just in the museum, and I know I did not read every single sign, but was too exhausted from the notion that humans were capable of such horror to continue. They also have two barracks in place, one of which has the interior reconstructed to show you what it actually looked like. You can see the cramped bunk beds, and the small wash room where maybe 60-100 men were forced to wash and bathe in mere minutes. You see the lockers where they kept their few possessions- bowl, fork, spoon….

They still have the space marked with gravel where all of the barracks once stood, though it is empty now. And Lastly, and so….horrendously…. They have the two crematoriums on site. One was built early on with two… furnaces. Yes, this was where they burned the dead bodies. When the quantity of people outgrew the capacity of this smaller crematorium, a larger one was built with 4 furnaces on one side, and a gas chamber on the other. The signs said that they do not believe the gas chamber in Dachau was ever used, but to walk through it, to see the room where the prisoners would have undressed and been told they were all going to shower….

I can’t even finish the thought.

I did not take many pictures because my heart was too broken to have this place come with me. It felt disrespectful to stand and take pictures of Dachau the same way I took pictures of the Greek temples in Sicily or the shipwreck in Stockholm. Also, coming here after having been to so many ancient places in Europe, it really struck a chord with me and my perspective of time.

For instance, the Colosseum. Many, many men (estimate of 400,000) were killed in the Colosseum, many of them for the entertainment of the emperor and the Roman people. It was sick and cruel. But that was THEN. That was almost 2,000 years ago. That was before we had plumbing or electricity or knew the earth revolves around the sun. But then I come to Dachau, where more personal and drawn out torture was committed against 200,000+ men killing an estimate of 30,000 men (just at Dachau). And that was just 80 years ago. That was now. That was our current history. There are still people alive now who were alive when this happened. There is literally no, “They didn’t know any better” excuse. These were men and women of our time that committed atrocious crimes against humanity. It hit me like a shockwave. I realized just how close to home it felt with the views that many around the world today feel about those who are different..

I will leave it at that. We left Dachau and headed back to the city, emotionally ripped to shreds.

We parked the car and stopped up in the room to swap out a few items, then immediately headed back out navigating the Hofbrauhaus. Completely accidentally, we walked by the Marienplatz on the way! Marienplatz is the central square where city hall is located.

Onward to Hofbrauhaus. Hofbrauhaus was founded in 1589 and is one of Germany’s oldest beer halls. Fun fact from wikipedia:

“In fact, the Maibock beer became so famous that it once saved the city from annihilation. When King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden invaded Bavaria during the Thirty Years' War in 1632, he threatened to sack and burn the entire city of Munich. He agreed to leave the city in peace if the citizens surrendered some hostages, and 600,000 barrels of Hofbräuhaus beer.[2]”

We had read that the Hofbrauhaus had become largely filled with tourists, but we didn’t much care. The internet also told us that it was possible to wait up to 3 hours for a spot at a table to open up, but we were able to walk right in around 5pm ish and sit down at a table righht next to where the band would be playing (it’s another place where you just wander and find your own seating). We had a few couples come and go from our table (including a couple from South Africa!), but once again, no German best friends. Regardless, we had a blast. We had a few amazing liters of beer (yes, liters), we had some legitimate German food for dinner, and we listened to a bavarian band play for a couple of hours.

A little before 8pm, we decided we needed to try a couple of other places before settling in at Hofbrau for the night. We paid and left to go to a beer garden called Viktualienmarkt as recommended by Bob! As we arrived, I realized that the absolute top priority was finding a bathroom, and both wonderfully and unfortunately, this place was truly an outdoor market/garden where you just buy a beer from a stand and sit down at a table somewhere. There ISN’T an indoors. I can’t even quite remember, but I think we found a public bathroom nearby… thank goodness.

Anyway. We were feeling pretty confident as we walked up to the stand and ordered two beers… with No incidents at all. Check. Us. Out.

We sat and talked and drank our beers as the sun went down. Eventually a few guys were closing up and folding all of the tables. They were working their way down the row and almost took our table out from under us, so we finished our beers and left.

Our last and final stop of the evening was the Schneider Brauhaus. We sat outside, already decently inebriated… not going to lie to you… and accidentally ordered 8% beers. Woops. But it was lovely. Being able to drink at 4 different true German beer establishments in about 24 hours, sitting with strangers, hearing bavarian music and seeing folks in their lederhosen and other traditional drinking outfits. Amazing. After such a traumatic afternoon, this was the atmosphere we had been looking for.

Luckily, as we left Schneider, already anticipating a rough morning, I saw a pizza stand across the street and made the best decision of the night to get us two slices of pizza for our walk back to the hotel. I think it saved our lives. And then we found animal statues…

The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel again and hit the road! To Austria!!!

See you soon!!