Postcards From Oviedo: Cumplí 20 años en Alemania!

So, to pick up where we left off last time...I spent my birthday in Germany!

I took the train from Milan to Munich, which was about a 7 hour trip. While 7 hours on a train sounds pretty miserable, it was not AT ALL. We passed through the Alps, which are incredible, and huge! At one point I was leaning forward in my seat, trying to see the tops of the mountains, when the train went over a bridge and I realized that they were even taller than I first thought. I don’t think the pictures I took out the windows do it justice at all.

When I arrived in Munich I met up with one of my friends/suitemates from Canisius who’s studying in Germany. We took another train to her house in Eichstätt, which is a pretty little college town. It’s in a valley and is surrounded by what looks like a wall of trees. We climbed the “wall” up to a castle and explored around there for a while. We hung out by the river, where there’s a bar in about knee-deep water, which is supposedly good exercise to walk around in circles.

I also spent a day in Dachau, which is a town outside of Munich where there’s a concentration camp / Holocaust museum. The one in Dachau was one of the first concentration camps, and was used as a prison camp for political prisoners well before World War II started (some people were kept there for as long as 12 years). The museum is in one of the main buildings of the camp, and it was sort of surreal being there. It’s a very somber place, and I guess what I didn’t expect, for whatever reason, was that it’s very much a part of the town…as in, there’s a school right next door, and throughout the town, between the train station and the camp, there are memorial plaques and signs with information about it.

On my last day in Germany, we went to Munich, where I tried wonderful pretzels, apple strudel, and various other (mostly sausage-based!) foods that I’m sorry to say I don’t remember the names of (also, they have coffee/tea/whatever to-go and Capri-Sun in Germany. That’s pretty exciting when you’ve been in Spain since New Year’s…).