Wednesday, July 2, 2008

An entry from my travel diary. Munchen.

Twenty seven days on the road, often in triple share accommodation, freezing cold...walk a mile, people...

DAY TWENTY SEVEN - January 10th

Goodness gracious, what a treat!!

Adrian snoring while Jeff does the double nose whistle.
An afternoon nap can also be an adventure.
Such a pity I hate to sleep in the day. Such a waste of time.

Breakfast in Munich is excellent - as you would expect of a hotel situated right on the fresh produce markets.
Apparently you're meant to ask them to hand you the fruit and not just indulge you own hunter gatherer instincts... never mind, it was nice to find people who are as excited about fruit and vege as me.
The way they looked at me as I closely inspected their mandarins made me think they were going to call the authorities and transport me back to the colonies.

This is the way breakfast should be.
I can eat as soon as my eyes open, so I did myself proud here.
Poor Jeff, he needs hours before he can enjoy food, so watching me with pickles, radishes and chocolate must really be a trial for him.
Yes, indeed, radishes.

Chocolate croissants, pastries, schinkenbrot, brotchen, cheeses, meats, great lumps of butter, fresh vegetables, cereals, 500 jams and juices.
mmmmmmmmmmmm the Germans know how to eat.
And in the dearest little sunny tea room too.

sigh...I love Germany.

Adrian arrived at the hotel by 10am and we went for another breakfast at the Old Bastard restaurant (of which there are several). Some of you may know them as beer halls.

These places are full of fit and healthy old couples knocking back the weisswurst (white sausage), pretzels and weissbier (wheat beer) for breakfast.
If you squinted your eyes, it looked kinda like a nursing home, but with healthy people and grog. Odd.

Dear God, they actually have a weissbier sorbet on the dessert menu, complete with wafers and garnish.

Disregard my former comment about Germans knowing how to eat.

After my second breakfast, we went out to Dachau.
Bleak and awful it certainly is. And then some. I'm trying to imagine what it may have been like before they partially disassembled it.

As ghastly as it was, it didn't upset me as much as reading a personal account of life in a concentration camp such as The Hiding Place.
It is a very different thing though, to feel and experience a place like that than to watch it on TV or imagine it.

And of course the inevitable happened.
Jeff, who resisted going to any of these places was the most affected of the three of us.
He seems to need to see and touch something to be truly impacted by it.

I'm the other way around.
I think about it and imagine it from every conceivable angle and finally witness the real thing without any major trauma or shock.

It really is a horrible place. I don't think I can even imagine what Auschwitz must be like.

I really felt I needed to go to one of these camps to try and understand how my family, who I have never regarded as vicious people at all, may have lived in a country where this was happening.
Did they know what was happening?
Did it sicken them as much as it would have sickened me?

I saw one image which I believe explained rather a lot to me.
Strangely it wasn't anything in regard to the suffering of the prisoners, again rather it was about the sensibilities of the locals.
I've always been able to empathise with the victims and have read everything I could get my hands on about the Holocaust. The missing piece of the puzzle was what lay on the other side of the fence for me.

Just that one photograph in a gas chamber of an old German lady who apparently lived up the road from the Dachau camp, as she was confronted by 1,200 unburied, emaciated bodies just a few days after the Americans had liberated the camp.
The look on her face displayed a disgust and horror that told me plenty about what she thought and felt.
I'm just so glad I saw I that photo, I'd like to think that it'll help me come to terms with something.
Time will tell.

By the way...the souvenir shops here are no good.
Either expensive breakable stuff, or just really, really bad.
Not cute Austrian yodelling bad, just bad.

But, I am going back for the edelweiss choker which is certainly not worth 22EU, but it is gorgeous, so I'll be doing it anyway.

So, after this snoring nap is over, we're going to have dinner with Adrian's friend, Andreas.
Apparently, Andreas has toy trains that go around his whole garden...

We're back...
Dinner was nice, and better still, was served to me in a frying pan, telling me that OH&S hasn't made it to Germany yet.
It had an array of sausages which were singularly impressive.

Tomorrow we go to Chimsee, an island in the middle of Lake Chimsee. It has it's own old time train which goes from the train station.
We're going to see mad King Ludwig's third or fourth fantasy castle which is a miniature of Versailles.
Methinks Ludwig had a little woody for the Sun King. ;O)

Well, Adrian is staying the night with us, so that we may leave earlier tomorrow and so that I may make the absolute most of the snoring.

Pray for me.





2 comments:

gretchenaro said...

breakfast, dachau, germany, munich, radishes, sausages, snoring, souvenirs


You survived it all and are so extremely capable of relating to us. I must know, WTF is FFS?

Auntie Simone said...

for fuck's sake, mate