The Land of Beer and Pork
We’re in Budapest, Hungary… we got here a couple of days ago. I love this city but we’ll get to that later. Right now I have some previous stops to report on – Munich & Prague. I’ll make this as quick as I can, despite my usually rambling self…
Munich was sooo much fun! While it wasn’t on our itinerary initially, we decided to make it a stop after Annie and Josh invited us to join them at Annie’s BFF Ellie’s place in Munich which she shares with her fiancé Josh. Ellie and Josh were the best of hosts and the 6 of us had an uber fun 4-day run together… primarily drinking beer and eating sausages, pork knuckle, and a heap of other pork products.
Not to worry, in addition to making sure our livers were earning their keep, we also did some cultural stuff. Not only did we hike up a mad climb to a mountaintop monastery (and rewarded ourselves with their fine brew and swine) and ride bikes all day to explore the sites of Munich (with a pit stop at a beer garden), but we also spent the afternoon at Pinakothek Museum to take in a little Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, and other Dutch and Flemmish art from the Middle Ages.
The most memorable excursion was Dachau – a suburb of Munich which is home to an infamous concentration camp where Nazis detained hundred of thousands WWII political prisoners and Jews. There’s not much I can say that hasn’t been said about the atrocities of the holocaust. Over the years I’ve been to numerous/memorials, studied it in school, and heard my grandparents first-hand accounts… and while those experiences always left me angry, bitter and mainly saddened, the visit to Dachau hit me much harder…
There’s something about standing where it all took place… seeing the barracks, barbed wire, the ‘showers’ (gas chamber), crematorium… walking past all the haunting memorials, each marking unknown mass graves of thousands. It was all too much to take in and it tore me up.
