Beer halls, castles and history

We headed south to Munich, bypassing the Audi museum on the train. It was already too late in the day to stop. We found a street with three hostels next to each other and chose one. It turned out to be the quietest of the three but we were able to watch an oilers game so that made up for it. Our first morning we took part in a free walking tour. We highly recommend these tours to anyone visiting cities they are offered in. They allow you to learn so much more than you can in a guide book. The one here lasted for 3 hours and we visited the main highlights as well as many other places we never would have thought to visit. A lot of it related to Hitler as this is where he gave many famous speeches and started the National Socialist party. We also saw the famous glockenspiel show (highly overrated) and visited the Hofbrauhaus beer hall. Later we met up with Kathi, a friend we met in Athens who lives in Munich. She showed us some of the other sights of Munich and that night we found ourselves back at the hofbrauhaus where we had a few of the big boys and had a hearty bavarian meal, the bratwurst here is delicious. The next day we went on a trip to the Dachau concentration camp memorial site. We did it as a tour offered by the company that did the walking tour. It's hard to put it in words what it felt like to be there. It's horrible to think that concentration camps exist to this day. We went and watched a movie at an english theater as we didn't feel up to much else. It was a much different experience than we are used to. They have assigned seats, sugared popcorn and even balconies. The next day we took a day trip south to Schloss Neuschwanstein. This is a famous castle built by Mad King Ludwig and also the one that inspired disney's castle. It was beautiful inside and out. We were lucky because sometimes you have to wait more than three hours to see it but we just walked up. Munich has been another one of our favorites. There are so many different activties and sites to see, and we have found the German people to be some of the warmest that we have met.

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oompah band

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vomitorium

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