Munich, Germany, part 3

Returning to Munich for our third visit felt almost like a return to familiar surroundings. There we were again at the Hauptbahnhof, killing time waiting for the tourist office to open. I took the opportunity to send home a batch of souvenirs at the local post office, and after visiting the tourist office we made our way to the Hotel Bristol just a few tram stops away.

We were finally going to spend more than a few hours just passing through Munich. The city has a tremendous amount of sights to see and we had just scratched the surface on our previous stopovers. Our first visit this time was to the Deutsches Museum, a huge science and technology museum on an island in the Isar river. The museum is the largest of its type in the world, with six floors comprising 13 acres. We could have spent a whole week here, as enough (though not all) of the exhibits were labeled in English as well as German. Alas, closing time came and we returned to our hotel for a "nap." We slept right through dinner and into the next morning. We must have been a little tired!

Well rested, we went the next morning to Dachau. The feeling of the place was of overwhelming despair. The site itself is small, only a few acres. We began at the museum, a photo exhibition of the rise of Nazism through the end of the war which detailed the conditions and atrocities of Dachau. This was followed by an even more ghastly film. We then walked the camp, from the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate, to a rebuilt barracks, to the crematorium. As detailed as the presentations were, it is still difficult to make a coherent picture of the suffering and oppression inflicted at Dachau, let alone all of the other camps. The numbers are just too large and the cruelty too great. It is incomprehensible both how it could happen and how it could be denied.

In order to see the better part of German society, we returned to the Deutsches Museum to see a few of the galleries we had missed. We may never see everything on display in that museum, but we wouldn't mind trying.

After a delicious dinner of suckling pig in beer sauce with potato dumplings (we must be the only people who prefer German cuisine to Italian), we went out for a nightcap. We found a great curiosity, a bar called Padres, entirely devoted to baseball and the San Diego Padres. This was in downtown Munich, of all places.

We spent the morning of our last day in Munich back at the Englischer Garten feeding the waterfowl, then we headed out into the outskirts of Munich to meet Markus and Franziska E. and two of their friends at a biergarten. After a nice relaxing chat, we said farewell to their friends and the remaining four of us squeezed into the E.'s Renault Twingo. They were returning home from a weekend in Salzburg, and we would be staying with them at their apartment in Zurich. Our first stop, however, was St. Gallen, Switzerland.