Croatia Study Abroad: I Don't See Nothing Wrong... With Munich

Munich was the first stop for Connor, Michael, and I. We arrived plenty early after taking a night bus from Zagreb and loved it right away. Between the brats, the bikes, and of course the biergartens, I immediately felt that Germans just get me. On our first night, we joined in on a tour of the biergartens led from our hostel. Here are a bunch of pictures from the night when we did the tour and when we visited the biergarten again a couple days later during the day, so you can see it better. We went to 3 biergartens on the tour, but all of these pictures are from the largest one in Munich, which can hold around 6,000 people.

One of the days, we visited the Dachau concentration camp, which is a short metro ride out of Munich. It was very informative and of course solemn to realize how terribly people were treated, sometimes tortured, and even killed in the spots where we were standing. It did help to learn exactly how the Nazis started their system of oppression and how many Germans were victimized themselves and forced to follow the Nazi ways or face the same fates. Dachau actually started as the place where, primarily, political dissidents were sent and it wasn't until later on that most of the Jewish, Polish, and homosexual people were sent there. Here are some pictures from that tour. The first picture translates to something like "work makes you free" which is the typical sort of propoganda/euphemism/lie that the Nazis used to keep people thinking these camps were not bad until they got in them. The bunks and the crematoriums show the real story.

We of course made sure to stop by the Hofbrauhaus, which is possibly the most famous beer hall in the world. Pictured with us is Ray from Philly, who we met on the Dachau tour:

One day we rented bikes and biked over to Olympiastadion, home of the 1972 Summer Olympics, and the BMW headquarters/museum. Unfortunately we went on a weekend, so the BMW factory floor wasn't open for touring.

We also took the bikes through the Englischer Garten, which is a park that's bigger than Central Park in New York. In the park there is a "Chinese" biergarten (called that because of a pogada they have in the middle) and a small river that at a certain point on it, surfers can actually practice because of the way a wave is constantly produced from the way they constrict the flow of the water.