Saturday, June 14, 2008

My last day in Germany. It was a fun city and I will be very sad to leave. After getting breakfast with Philipp and Andy, we had music lecture. This lecture lasted an hour and a half and just may have just been the longest class of my life. Philipp ended up coming to class with us and I felt especially bad for him. It was pretty boring and I was so glad when it was all over!
At 10:30 some of the group loaded the bus to go to Dachau. This was an optional trip, but I had been looking forward to it. Dachau was a 40 minutes drive outside of Munich. Dachau was used as a concentration camp until 1945 when it was liberated. The grounds were so beautiful and it was hard to imagine the suffering that went on there. There was a huge museum there that gave very detailed descriptions of the history of the camp. Also, several jail cells and the barracks were open. We walked around I was just trying to take it all in. the grounds also had several religious memorials to the people who had died. The last place that we went was the most chilling. We walked to the crematorium. It was a very strange feeling walking through the building. It consisted of a staining area, “showers” (which were the gas chambers), several “death rooms” where they kept dead bodies, and finally the cremation room with 4 very large ovens. It was a very creepy experience. But I think that it was very important to see.
After running back to the bus, we headed back to the hotel. Philipp grabbed all of his belongings from Andy’s room before so he could leave this afternoon. We walked around trying to find something fro lunch. However, we found something even better! While we were walking we all of a sudden saw many people lined up. Philipp asked what was going on and they said that there was a parade coming through! I was so excited. The parade hadn’t started yet so Philipp and I found a very nice grassy spot to lie down for a little while. The parade started and I loved it! It was people from the regions that had different sections. They were all dressed up. Most of them had their own bands. There were several wagons and horses. But most of all it was just fun to see how they were dressed.
After about 40 clans had gone by, we had started to get really hungry, but we were on the wrong side of the street to head to the city center. So, we started to walk towards the beginning of the parade, hoping to find the starting line to walk around behind the parade. Instead, we found a really cute café. We just decided to sit down and have a coke (and he had a fanta) to watch the rest of the parade. After I think about 80 something clans/regions, the parade was over. We walked further into the city and ended up stumbling onto another festival. This festival was for some sort of Irish thing. They had many booths for games and food.
Philipp had been talking about a certain dish for a while and I was so happy when we finally found a place that sold it. It consists of these little egg noodles cooked in a skillet with lots of cheese, butter, onions, and covered in a little bits of bacon. Sounds good right! It was! I am craving some more right now! To top it all off, we got something else quite delicious. We found a stand that had chocolate covered fruit. We both got a skewer with strawberries; his dipped in white chocolate and mine in milk chocolate. It was so good! It was the perfect ending to a great meal.
After we had successfully stuffed ourselves, we walked through the booths and found Philipp’s godfathers sister. She was very cute! My German is very bad and she spoke some English, so I didn’t really get to talk directly to her, but she seemed like a very sweet woman. After this, we went on a search for my jewelry from Germany for my collection. We found a booth that had reasonably priced things, and I got a very pretty black and red necklace. I know all the UGA girls will be very jealous of my black and red jewelry!
Philipp then really needed to head back home. We walked the train station for him to buy his ticket. We ended up having about an hour and half until his train left, so we got to spend a little more time together. We wandered around a little more before sitting in the train station. It was nice catching up! After Philipp boarded his train, I headed back to the hotel to see what the plans were for dinner.
Amanda and I met up with some people to go walk to the English Garten, a place that was recommended by Philipp. It is a very large park; I think I heard that it was the same size or larger than central park. It was very nice. It had several streams, lakes, and very vast open fields. After walking around the park for about an hour and a half, we met up with some other people from our group at a beingarten. They had a huge big screen television showing the Turkey soccer game. It was very exciting and so many people around us were getting so into it! At around 11:30, Turkey cam out victorious! I was happy for them since there was so many Turkish fans sitting and watching the game with us. We decided to head back to the hotel then.
When walking back, all we could hear was car horns. When we got the rode, we found out why. All the turkey fans had all fled to the streets. They had simply parked their cars on the street and were just going crazy! They were so excited and we just having a huge party in the streets. We watched them for a little while outside the metro station before heading back. It had started to rain and was getting very cold. My bed was very welcoming that night!