Barb and Baden’s Excellent German Adventure – Part 4
Well we sadly left Barb’s dad at the train station in Berlin and said our goodbyes before heading off to the Bavarian city of Münich. We arrived in Münich on Friday afternoon and prepared ourselves for our 4 day stay here.
We first checked out the local area around our hotel and found ourselves conveniently located about 2 blocks from the main downtown shopping area. On Friday night, there seemed to be the whole of Münich out doing their Christmas shopping after work. The outdoor walking mall is a good 100 ft wide and we were all shoulder to shoulder most of the way. All of the major department stores have these great Christmas displays with animated toys and electric trains running through it.
Being the car enthusiast, I have to comment on the cars that I have seen here since arriving. In Berlin, there were tons of Mercedes and BMW as well as other German, Italian and French cars here. In Münich, BMWs naturally seem to dominate here and you see them on every street corner. One of the things that we have seen here that we do not see at all in Canada are these really small “micro” cars. The most popular seems to be the SMART car (manufactured by DaimlerChrysler) as well as the Mercedes A class and Audi A2 series. Most of the cars seem to be really dirty as I guess they never get washed once the weather turns cold. The other interesting thing that I have noticed is that 90% of the cars don’t seem to have any model badge on them (ex: on the back of a BMW, only the BMW logo will be there). It seems that only cars with very small engines (less than 2 litres) seem to have the model and engine size showing. I’ll have to investigate this further to find out why this is.
Yesterday, Barb and I took a trip outside of Münich to the town of Dachau. It was in Dachau that the Nazis built there first concentration camp in the early 1930’s. The camp is open as a memorial and we toured the museum there as well as other parts of the compound. The main distinction between Dachau and other more well-known concentration camps is that Dachau was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz and Treblinka. This does not mean that people were not killed at Dachau but the original purpose was not to perform mass killings. This minor detail nonetheless, the tour through the camp was significantly through-provoking. Seeing the crematorium and understanding what occurred in that room was very disturbing as to what was done during this regime. This will likely be the last event on our list that is as melancholy as this particular day.
Today, we took a train ride up to Nürnberg where we attended what is probably the largest Christmas Market in all of Germany. Needless to say, we were not disappointed and it took about 4-5 hours to go through the whole thing. We also visited the Nürnberg Toy Museum while we were there. The museum has toys on display from as far back as the early 1800’s but by the time we got there, Barb and I were running out of steam and ready to return back to Münich on the 90 minute train ride.
Tomorrow is the most significant event of our trip (for me anyway) as we will visit the BMW factory and museum here in Münich.
Stay tuned for part 5…
Barb and Baden
Continue on to Barb & Baden’s Excellent German Adventure – Part 5
