Munich

Wow, sorry for procrastinating on the blog. So much has been going on it has been tough to write on this thing. Munich was a great trip, we had to sleep in the terminal the night before cause we didn't want to pay for an expensive taxi in the morning. Rummy 500 was the card game of choice in the terminal. After a quick flight to Munich we took the S-Bahn into the heart of the city. English is a very close second language for most Germans so it wasn't too difficult to inquire if we got confused on the stops and what not. Arrived at our hostel promptly and went for a little walk about the city center. Tried looking for the Hofbräuhaus and ended up running into an American from Jersey who was living there for the past 5 years. He was very helpful and took us there.



On the way we ironically just happened to stop and get a look at the Glockenspiel (picture above) going around at one of the four times it goes during the day. Soon after we arrived at the Hofbräuhaus. It was one of the top 5 travel experiences I've had in my life. Great food, great drinks, great atmosphere. I had arguably one of my best meals ever since being over here in Europe: Huge Roasted Chicken with German Potato Salad. Had to buy a huge pretzel from one of the pretzel girls and ended up staying there with my tired, but excited posse of friends until around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Went back to the hostel and had one of my top 5 naps of all time. So right there you can tell that this trip has already paid for itself. We ended up going back to the Hofbräuhaus at night and sat at a table with two couples from Zurich and we babbled on about the cultural difference about the United States and Germany/Switzerland/Europe. They didn't know why we were in Iraq in the first place and didn't understand why Obama wasn't pulling out. The Europeans and the rest of the world love Obama for some odd reason. When I asked why the man laughed and said, "Cause you could have only gone up in popularity after George Bush was gone..." Politics, Politics, Politics - don't care - probably never will (Full disclosure: I haven't had the charm of directly paying taxes yet.)

The next morning three of my friends and I took a day trip out to the Dachau concentration camp. I've always wanted to see one, not that I'm a big World War II buff, but just cause I thought it would be good just to be aware of what happened. Alongside it being very cold out that day, I thought I was being waterboarded with cold water for most of the tour. The injustices that those people had were enormous to say the least. I was overwhelmed by the scare tactics, propaganda, torture that occurred there. The Nazis, the Gestapo, the SS, they were war-hungry savages. I got the feeling of the Stanford Prison Experiment on a large scale occurring there. If anyone is unfamiliar with it, it was an experiment conducted in 1971 in the basement of the Stanford Psychology department building by a Philip Zimbardo, professor at Stanford University at the time. 70 student participants were randomly assigned as prisoners and guards and a mock-jail environment was put into motion. The parameters and guidelines of the experiment stated that the guards could not harm the prisoners. Well, the experiment had to be shut down cause of horrendous abuses and violence towards the prisoners done by guards.





These people were normal people! And you can see the extreme polarization of thoughts, actions, moods by them. I truly believe this is what happened at Dachau. While there were some truly evil men in the Nazi regime a lot of the soldiers were, on the whole, mostly good-willed people with families back home. I might have too much of a humanist-side to me but I think we all have a large piece of humanity lodged in us somewhere, moral codes and rights built into us, but with enough propaganda by the fascist Nazi regime and the prisoner/guard juxaposition you created this impetus that couldn't be stopped. Average men were turned into torturers and represented true evil in those concentration camps and the prisoners, while some banded together with song and prayer, could only have a sense of learned helplessness as they were subjects of horrible invasive scientific experiments, witness/victim to mindless ultra-violence, and starvation. Liberation of the camp occurred no more than 65 years ago, but you'll be surprised at how short of a memory the German people are on that subject. And who wouldn't be! It's a snag in the county's fabric of their timeline and one of the few instances in human history that could be put a few notches higher than war on the violence totem pole. The scary thing is genocide is still occurring in some parts of the world. Just something to think about...

WOW sorry for the intense little rant I just had. Soooo, after the concentration camp experience we headed back to Munich and had an easy, sobering night. Most of the group was extremely tired from the trip and we had to get up early in the morning and head back to London. We hung out in the student bar in the hostel and played pool for a while, then headed to bed. The hostel we stayed in was a mixed hostel and when we went back into the room and headed to bed I saw one of the scariest women I had ever seen in my life sleeping under me in the bunk bed. Petro, my buddy can vouch for me: it was one of the freakiest looking people ever. Her cheeks were hollowed out and hair thinned, we all stood in silence trying to listen to her breathing wondering if she was even alive or not. Scary, scary, we woke up the next day early in the morning and went back to London as soon as possible. All in one piece, I think we all thoroughly enjoyed the trip. (picture of Hofbräuhaus below)




I have to talk about my Istanbul trip that I just got back from, but at the moment I got to do laundry and head to the grocery store. I'll write again soon.

Cheers