München on a wet weekend

 We arrived into Munich on a wet Saturday afternoon, so didn't venture far.

The sun was out in the morning, and we piled into the bus and travelled just outside of Munich to visit the memorial at the site of the Dachau Concentration Camp .

I won’t go into detail here, other than to caption some of the photographs. 

Better writers than I can better articulate the guttural reaction to being here. 

The Visitor Centre is on the site of the original camp. Camp 1. It was designed to hold political prisoners, anybody who chose not to take a knee to the Nazi Party.

I found it interesting that the architect had chosen to make it look a little rickety and irregular, a nod to the old building conscripted into service as camp 1.

I will only add that these original prisoners were given reasonable food and care. This did not last.

This is the main gate. It may be hard to make out, but it has written across the top "Arbeit Macht Frei" which translates to "Work sets you free". It is displayed on many Concentration camps.

This was intended to give the impression that these camps were places of work and rehabilitation.

What it really meant was that the only freedom was for the spirit, leaving the mortal remains forever in the camp. 

The statue in the yard depicts people dying on the electric fence. To many this became a preferred death, an instant escape from the daily horror that had become their life here.

Opposite the crematorium block is a statue to an unknown prisoner. The inscription translates to

“To honor the dead and to serve as a warning to the living”

On a lighter note, this charaecter is wearing what I first thought was a lab coat, and he reminded me of Richard O’Brien. Not a mad scientist. Not a cult musical icon (from New Zealand, by the way). An unknown prisoner. 

The weather at Dachau had been fine, so we proceeded back to Munich for a walking tour. They had done a short one yesterday, but we opted out because of the weather. This was a better day. 

As we drove through town to the drop off, I noticed something that would only interest me. 

Maybe Steve. But that’s it. 

There were road works (where isn’t there?) and they needed to reroute a heavy cable across an intersection. I’m guessing a power cable, rather than a hose, because it’s big. Maybe 45mm thick. So there is scaffolding, like lighting scaffold trusses, up, across the road and down the other side. To drag such an obviously heavy cable up, along and down again would not only be very difficult, but would probably damage the cable. 

The solution is genius simplicity, at least to me. There are pulley rollers on every corner and at regular intervals. Obviously the rollers are the right size for this heavy cable. So somebody climbs to the top of the scaffolding on the first side, and the end of the cable is passed up to them. The cable is then fed across the rollers, and just walked across the truss. And then down that side. The alternative is dragging a dead weight which catches on every truss or angle change. Anyway, interesting to me. Back to the topic. 

No sooner had we set foot off the bus, however, than the drizzle started. Coats on, brollies up. Head off up the street, this won’t last. 

Cross one intersection and it was now torrential. Completely out of the blue, or in this case, the grey. 

We took shelter of sorts under trees near a bridge. Didn’t help. Not in the slightest. Under this bridge were the only people in Munich who couldn’t give a rodent’s rectals if it was raining or not. 

As you may be aware, the etymology of this is the Latin “Rodentum Rectalus”.

We were wearing raincoats which kept us pretty well protected from the nether regions up, but trouser legs certainly got a drenching. And as for my shoes… let’s remember that we packed for the (hopefully) back end of an arse-puckeringly hot Europe, so comfortable walking shoes would be the order of the day. 

Many may scoff, touting their Birken-whatsits or Nordic mountaineering boots, lined with the milk-fed softened scrotums of hand-reared reindeer, but my Sketchers are comfortable and light weight. Are they waterproof? Noooo they certainly are not. They never pretended to be. 

Within 5 minutes under this ‘shelter’, it felt like we were 2 inches deep in the river that now ran down the pavement. My shoes, socks and feet were submerged. Yum. Squelchy. 

In about 15 minutes the bus had managed to navigate himself back to where he dropped us, and we scrambled back on. As is always the case, the cloud seemed to have wrung itself dry, so the rain stopped almost as quickly as it had started. 

This weather change encouraged 2/3 of the group to have another crack at a walking tour, while the rest of us retreated to the hotel to get out of these wet clothes and find a way to dry them. 

That evening we went to a Bavarian restaurant together. Great decor. 

There was a lady playing the piano accordion, and she insisted on being interactive. We were too slow to find an inaccessible corner, so ended up uncomfortably close to her. Rumour has it that I got roped into the percussion backing band for a few minutes, much to Sarah’s delight. 

But as we all know, if there is no photographic evidence, then it didn’t happen. To quote Guru Simpson, “I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can’t prove a thing”

But some people got into it...