Week 5

The middle part of this week was all homework and class and was super boring, but then the weekend rolled around and we left for Munich. Friday afternoon was hectic because I decided to go home between class and our train to pack and get rid of all of my school things. Apparently there was some conference in Bonn though and so my bus didn't come to get me. I was at the bus stop at 4:04 waiting and it didn't come until 4:30. I ended up making it on time but just barely and therefore didn't have time to get any dinner before the train. We made it to Munich late that night but at a fairly decent time.

Saturday consisted of our trip to Neuschwanstein/Hohenschwangau castles. They were so amazing and beautiful. We went to Hohenschwangau first which was the smaller one. The owner built it to be a "small hunting cottage" which is ridiculous because it was gigantic and all the decorations were so over the top. Afterwards, we had to hike up a hill for like 30-40 minutes to get to Neuschwanstein. It was beautiful and I would definitely go again although I would pay the 6 Euro to take the horse carriage to the top because the walk didn't have any great views and was very tiring. The castles were so much fun and there was so much to see that we ended up staying much longer than we intended to. It was a two hour train ride back so we didn't get back to Munich to eat dinner until around 9:30pm. We went to this amazing place that Claire's mom told us about that was like a tradition German hall with live music, lederhosen, and lots of meat. I got a pork dish that was very good but I wouldn't recommend the potato dumpling.

Hohenschwangau

Neuschwanstein

Memorial with flowers left by Mike Pence

On Sunday, we got up early and went to Dachau concentration camp. We happened to go on the same day and at the same as Mike Pence. We didn't see him but we did see a lot of secret service. Overall, this was a very heavy and eye opening experience. The camp was much bigger than I honestly expected it to be. It was really cool though because there were a lot of monuments relating to never letting it happen again and also a huge museum full of history and pictures and it also showed a short film about the Holocaust/Dachau. The film showed a lot of footage that was very graphic and things that I had never seen before. It really opened my eyes to exactly how bad what was happening was and it was really hard to watch. We walked around the museum and all of the grounds including the religious memorials and the crematorium. We went inside of it and also a gas chamber that was built at Dachau but was never used. It wasn't a fun experience but I'm very happy that I went.

Going back to Bonn was also an interesting experience. We didn't to get some food at the HBF to take with us on the train since we wouldn't have anywhere to get food once we started traveling. We decided to get some chinese food from the train station and all ordered together. There were four of us so we ordered four crispy chickens with noodles and then we wanted to get four egg rolls for us. We asked the lady and after some confusion we thought she finally understood what we wanted so we were happy. Turns out she didn't completely understand and we got 32 egg rolls. We couldn't stop laughing and thought it was ridiculous until we ended up eating them all.