Our tour leader, Phoebe, discusses the day with the group outside our hotel.
This morning began our first and only full day in Munich, the city I was most looking forward to on this trip. We didn’t ease into the day at all, starting with an incredible and somber experience at the Dachau Concentration Camp. We walked the footsteps of the Holocaust victims at Dachau, the only camp to exist the entire duration of Nazi Germany (1933-1945), into the camp which has been mostly emptied for tourist purposes, aside from buildings such as some barracks and crematories. Seeing these buildings along with the interesting paragraphs and quotes correlating with them brought so much reality to one of the most gruesome and inhumane events in history to life. The pictures make you sick, scared, and sad all at the same time, at times an overwhelming experience. After the moving emotions of Dachau the group traveled to the same market as yesterday to eat lunch. The market was authentic food similar to a farmers market we might attend at home, just add a lot more sausage. We then began our bus tour of Munich with Colette, our tour guide of the day, and drove to the BMW HQ, where we spent a half hour looking at expensive cars and souvenir shopping. We drove by the Olympic stadium of 1972 in Munich and had an hour of free time to experience the Munich city center, and all of its many shops. One of which sold a cola product similar to Pepsi or Coke, but has a slight ginger ale hint. Afterwards, we had a great steak dinner and headed back to the hotel. Throughout the day we experienced German culture and history and I’m sure we all had a great time in our day in Munich.
- Alex
Alfonso, our bus driver, takes the group back to the hotel after dinner.
Posing in front of the “SHS Patriot Green” BMW.
To start the day at Dachau was really what I was most unprepared to do. I definitely didn't react the way I had gone over this experience in my head the night before. I went into Dachau not knowing what to expect or what to feel. As I got further into the memorial I became a lot more emotional than I had anticipated that I would be. Seeing the images of the gruesome deaths of the prisoners, and especially the deaths by the hand of human experiments was truly something that just made me feel huge amounts of emptiness. To say the least that kind of set the tone for the rest of the time my group and I spent at Dachau. The rest of the day is something i could write about for pages and pages. But I will say that I think everyone could agree that the most emotionally riveting expience today, and maybe thus far in the trip, was the time we spent at Dachau. But that still didn’t stop all of us from enjoying the city and especially not stopping us from enjoying our time at BMW headqaurters. All in all it was another amazing day, and I absolutely cannot wait for tomorrow.
- Cameron
We watch the surfers on the river that runs through Munich’s English Gardens.
