Day 14: "Munchin is the best city in Germany!"

Thursday we got up to eat breakfast. The breakfasts in Germany are not nearly as good as in France. We are missing some baguettes. We headed out as a group to go meet our tour guide for the Third Reich Tour…intense sounding, I know. The tour guide was this college age student, she was pretty cool. She showed us lots of places where Hitler had gone and where there was Nazi history. She told us a story about her grandfather who had been in school during the Third Reich and Hitler. He had gone into his religion classroom and at that time everyone always greeted teachers and others with Hail Hitler, but this teacher said he didn’t want to see it or hear it. The next day the teacher was gone. He had apparently been sent to Dachau. Those types of stories really put that time period into perspective. Even if you didn’t agree with the Nazis, you weren’t allowed to say anything…you would be executed. This also happened to a group of college students that formed the group, The White Rose. They put out anonymous flyers to try to bring to attention the madness of the party. Sadly, they were eventually caught and killed.

There are lots of lions all over the city. It is apparently the symbol of Bavaria. I keep seeing them and say "Alphie!!"

The tour was really good and afterwards we had free time. For lunch, Taylor, Derek and I had been talking about McDonalds all morning…so we had to go. It was the best McDonalds ever. After that we walked around and went back to the hotel to get ready before the Hofbrahaus. I was feeling really achy that afternoon and evening. I overslept our meeting time but managed to throw on clothes and catch everyone before they left for the rally point. At the Hofbrahaus I figured I would feel better after I ate something so we ordered salad and pretzels and eventually I had a beer. But at the Hofbrauhaus, they are litre beers. It took me all night to drink it. We had two German men sit down next to us. We eventually got to talking to them about all types of things. It was a really fun conversation about Obama, Osama bin Laden, and the holocaust. That was the ultimate European experience, just sitting there talking to real Germans.