To honor the dead and warn the living.

"Dachau - the significance of this name will never be erased from German history. It stands for all concentration camps which the Nazis established in their territory."  -Eugen Kogon

Friday, our last day of Semana Santa, was spent at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial.  I will never forget my visit and am so glad that I was able to see this memorial. 

To honor the dead and warn the living.

Dachau was open from 1933-1945 (12 years) making it the longest functioning concentration camp.  It was the first major concentration camp and also a model for all of the rest.  This sight was chosen because it was close to Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi party, in a city that was very badly effected by the post-war economy in Germany.  Most residents of the city of Dachau were employed at a large ammunition factory, and when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, many citizens lost their jobs and the ammunition factory was no longer making ammunition.  This old ammunition factory was then chosen as the sight for the concentration camp.  This was also the sight of the SS training camp.  Because the SS training camp was located right next to the concentration camp, Dachau was especially awful because new SS Guards would be extremely violent towards prisoners in order to assert themselves as "capable" officers.  Every officer of the SS started their training at Dachau.

Starting in the 1960's, the old concentration camp turned into a memorial.  The SS training buildings are now used by Bavarian police in order to prevent neo-nazis from turning this space into a place of worship.  Though there were many chilling and disgusting aspects of this camp, the most memorable for me was the building that the SS used for torture.  The building was freezing cold and completely dismal.  It was really hard to imagine the horrible acts that had taken place there.  (I am going to spare you the details, even though our tour guide was very specific in describing the disgusting and inhumane acts that took place at this site.)  Dachau also has the last original gas chamber in Germany which I walked through very quickly because it was one of the most eerie places that I have ever stood.  We also walked through a recreation of the barracks.  The original had to be torn down because after their twelve years of use they were in terrible shape.  The recreation showed the changes that took place in the living arrangements as time progressed.  At first, each man had his own bed and about 50 men slept in one room.  Towards the end of the war, up to 500 men were sleeping in one room.  That's 2,000 men living in one building.

Today there are many memorials that honor the 200,000 people that were imprisoned there and 41,500 that were murdered.  The original gate remains, which is always open in order to demonstrate that this is no longer a prison.  

"Work will set you free."

After our day at Dachau we got some gelato to cheer ourselves up and headed to the airport to return home to Madrid.  Our flight was early the next morning, so we had a sleepover at McDonald's before we "slept" on some lovely benches.  

On Easter I had a great afternoon because I was able to Skype with my family while they conducted the Easter egg hunt.  Per usual, Carolyn found the most eggs.  Even though I was feeling a little homesick on Easter, I am really excited to spend my last couple weeks in Madrid!  There is still so much fun to be had.  Tomorrow I have a trip with my Art History professor to the Prado and we are going to her favorite spot for tapas and pinchos after our visit to the museum.  Wednesday is Anna's birthday, Thursday is Liz's flamenco performance, and Friday is Anna's birthday dinner with Gabby and Ro.  Not to mention that Grandma and Ralph will be here this weekend too!  It feels great to be home with Gabby and Ro and this is my last week of classes!  I can't believe how quickly this semester has passed.

That time we followed a handball team to Munich...

Finally our train ride went smoothly!  (Thanks to Max and the crew).

After our exhausting journey to Munich with the twelve year olds in tow, we took a little time to nap and read in the hostel and get our bearings in Munich.  We watched the Madrid-Barcelona game that night and, what do you know, Madrid won!

On Thursday we went on a walking tour through Munich and we bumped into Stephanie along the way.  Our tour guide was a very chatty guy and gave us a good refresher on a lot of WWI and WWII history that I have forgotten since high school.  We started out at the New City Hall, where the Glockenspiel is, and after watching that (rated the second most overrated sight in Europe), we walked through the city and saw lots of WWII memorials, the Hofbrauhaus, the royal residency, a huge market with a beer garden, and a memorial to the German resistance.  Munich is the birthplace of the Nazi party.  The Nazi party held many meetings in the festival hall of the Hofbrauhaus and that is where the swastika was revealed.  Munich has a lot of history with the Nazis because that is where it all started, but our tour guide really stressed that there is so much more to Munich than that, and there was!

Lucky lions.  Lions are the symbol of Munich.  There are four lions outside of the royal residence, but you can only touch 3 for good luck.

The festival hall in the Hofbrauhaus.

After our tour we had lunch at the market (I had a brat because there were no kasekrainers) and beers in the beer garden.  The beer garden is owned by the city, so everyone can bring their own food and picnic.  We sat next to some really friendly elderly Germans.  Pretty much everyone there was a really friendly elderly German.  After lunch, we wandered Munich for a while.  For dinner we went to a really yummy Italian restaurant and ate some gigantic pizzas to celebrate our last night out on spring break and we made it back to the beer garden to finish off the night.

Finished our liter beers!  A job well done.

Edelweiss

Our first day in Salzburg was so relaxing and beautiful.  We stayed in a hostel that was more like a family budget hotel with a hostel in the basement.  It was definitely one of the nicer hostels that we have been in and one of my favorites because there were so many cute little kids running around.  Right up the road from our hostel was the Abbey from The Sound of Music and The Fortress of Salzburg.  We wandered the old neighborhood which is really charming, had some pretzels, and ate dinner outside.  But my favorite part of the day happened when we got back to our hostel.  We watched The Sound of Music in our hostel in preparation for our tour the next day!

Tuesday morning we woke up and went back to the old town and ate Kasekrainers for lunch and sacher for dessert.  Sacher is chocolate cake that is really popular in Austria.  Then we went on the tour!  We saw many sites from the Von Trapp's true history and filming sites of the movie.  The Von Trapp's true history is very different from the movie story.  Maria was hired by Captain Von Trapp as a tutor to one of his sick children.  In reality, they were married for 11 years before they escaped from the Nazis.  And they didn't escape by climbing the mountains to Switzerland.  They took a train to Italy and immigrated to the United States.  At this point many of their children were adults.  They also had two children together in Austria, and one more in the United States.  The age difference between Maria and the captain's oldest child was only five years and the captain's oldest son was a boy.  So after we got the real background of the Von Trapp Family Singers, we saw some of the sights that were featured in the movie.  We stopped at the path where Maria skips on her way to the family house for the first time, the gazebo where Liesl and Rolph sing 16 going on 17, the Nonnberg Abbey, the palace that is used as the back of their house, the palace that is used for the front of their house (the house was really a mixture of two places that were nowhere near one another), and the church where Maria and the captain are married (The Church of Mondsee)!  All the while, we were singing along to the soundtrack.  I couldn't ask for a more perfect day.

Just like Maria!

The palace that was used as the back of their house and the lake where they fell in!

Eating apple strudel.  It took me a total of 60 seconds to clean my plate.

The gazebo from "16 going on 17"

Again--just like Maria!

For dinner I had a Kasekrainer (shocking, I know), and we relaxed in the hotel again with The Sound of Music and snacks.  We also met an interesting crew of characters--Maximillian and his 12 year old all girls' handball team!  They were in Salzburg for a weekend of training and were traveling back to Munich the next day on the train that we needed to take!  We decided, due to our horrible history of failure with the trains so far, that it might be smart to follow them on our journey.  Sure enough, Max and his team were more than happy to have us tag along the next day.

Wednesday we woke up super early to fit in the rest of our sightseeing.  Everything in Salzburg seemed to be untouched by modernization.  It reminded me somewhat of Switzerland because it was such a peaceful town, surrounded by mountains, and very green.  After one more Kasekrainer (sorry), we were on our way (trailing behind Max and the twelve year old handball team).  I'm definitely coming back some day!  (Get ready Rita.)

Some snapshots from our day:

Fun in Mirabell Gardens--just like Maria and the gang.

This is the St. Peter's Cemetery and the information for the scene of The Sound of Music when the family is hiding from the Nazis.  It was actually filmed in Hollywood.  Everyone who is buried here actually rents their grave sites.  Every ten years, the family of the deceased has to pay a tax, and the families are also responsible for taking care of the graves.

Vienna waits for you

Happy Easter!  I am home safe and sound after my most exciting spring break ever.

We started out in Munich, but had to find our way to Vienna right away from the airport.  Unfortunately, the train we needed wasn't running that day because of a train crash (whoops!), so we had to take the much more expensive but much more comfortable high speed train to our first destination.  Once in Vienna, we quickly found our way to our hostel which was a 20 bedroom dorm!  Actually, there were many more people staying there because there were other bedrooms that branched off from our room.

On Saturday, we woke up and explored the city with Anna's brother who met us there that morning.  We saw the Imperial Palace--where the Habsburg dynasty lived for centuries, Mozart's house, St. Stephen's Cathedral, and many huge parks and museums.  For lunch I ate a Kasekrainer, which is like a hot dog with cheese, but so much better than that.  That turned out to be my first of many during my stay in Austria.  We decided to go into the Albertina museum, which is one of my favorites that I have visited.  We saw works by Picasso, Monet, Mel Ramos, and the state rooms of Sisi.  For dinner, we went to a restaurant called WienerWald (translation: sausage forest).

The Plague Monument--1/3 of the Viennese population died during the plague of 1679.

Statue of Mozart (he lived in Vienna for only a short time) in front of the Habsburg's Imperial Palace.

St. Stephen's Cathedral--completed in 1433 and the symbol of Vienna.  The tiled roof was donated by the citizens of Vienna to repair damage from WWII.

On Sunday we went to the Schonbrunn Palace which was another palace that the Habsburgs lived in.  Now it is just a huge tourist destination, and it is easy to see why because it was one of the most beautiful gardens that I have seen.  We wandered through the gardens, played in the giant maze and labyrinth, and had a delicious sort of dinner at the Easter market in the front courtyard where we laid around for hours.  It was a perfect day!  We were so lucky that every day of spring break was sunny and pleasant.

Playing in the maze triwizard tournament style.

The next morning we made our way to Salzburg.  This time we were sure that we could figure out the trains and we purchased the group ticket and hopped on--no problems!  Except we got on the wrong train.  The group ticket only works on local trains, and we got on the fast train.  Oops!  We paid the conductor the difference, and took note of what we needed to do to get it right for our last journey.  Then we arrived in beautiful Salzburg!  

I am 16, going on 17...

It feels like I've just settled down from my last trip to Portugal and now I'm packing my bags again for another whirlwind adventure.  This coming week is Semana Santa, or holy week.  The university closes down and we have a full week to travel.  Actually, this is almost a compulsory vacation for all SLU study abroad students because university housing closes down for this week too.

Anna, Liz, and I will be making our rounds through Germany and Austria.  For ease of planning, we each decided to organize the itinerary and do research for a different leg of the trip.  I'm in charge of Vienna, so I hope I have chosen the best things for us to see!  Tomorrow morning we will be flying into Munich.  From there, we are taking a six hour train to Vienna.  We will be in Vienna until Monday morning, when we will take a shorter train ride to Salzburg.  In Salzburg I am most excited to go on The Sound of Music Tour!  I can finally live my dream of being Liesl and frolic in the hills.  Wednesday night we are making our way back to Munich.  We will have one day to explore the city, and another day to visit Dachau concentration camp, which was the first concentration camp opened in Germany.  I'm sure it will be a very sobering experience, but also such an important thing to see.  We are sleeping in the airport on Friday night, and will be safely home next Saturday afternoon.

"The hills are alive with the sound of music 

With songs they have sung for a thousand years

The hills fill my heart with the sound of music.  

My heart wants to sing every song it hears."

Lisbon, Portugal

Me and my travel buddies: Anna, Lexi, Liz, Kenzie, me, and Stephanie on the coast!

Last weekend I went to Lisbon, Portugal!  I was extremely excited to go on this trip because Liz and Anna had gone in February and have been raving about it ever since.  I had a great weekend, but not without a few minor problems.  First of all, I accidentally booked a different hostel from my friends.  Don't ask me how this happened, but it was kind of a problem.  Fortunately, my hostel wasn't too far from theirs, and at night I was able to sneak in their hostel so I didn't ever have to be alone.  Secondly, we booked a really cool tour that Anna and Liz had gone on when they were in Portugal, but the company sent us the wrong information about the meet time, so we missed it!

Okay, now for the great things about my weekend!  On Friday Liz, Kenzie, and I walked around Lisbon and enjoyed the sun.  We walked to a really high point above the city and snapped some great pictures and bought a kilo of fresh strawberries on the street.  Afterwards, I had quite an adventure trying to find my hostel, but I got there eventually and it was really nice.  Friday night we hung out in the hostel and met a lot of fun people from Canada, Texas (I feel like I have met more Texans in Europe than Europeans), and Germany. 

Praca do Comercio--only a minute from our hostel and a minute from the ocean.

Me and Kenzie with our delicious strawberries.

On Saturday, after the whole missing the tour fiasco, we decided it was a good day for the beach.  So we jumped on a train and went to Caiscais, which is a beach only a half-hour from Lisbon.  We stayed there all day and got some serious sun!  (I really need to get some sun screen before I go to the Canary Islands).  I'm still finding sand everywhere.  

Caiscais

Then we went back to the hostel and went to the dinner that we signed up for through the hostel.  They offer a traditional Portuguese dinner every night!  It was called chicken piri-piri and I loved every bite of it.  At dinner, we made friends with a Cambridge field hockey team that was playing in a tournament in Lisbon.  They took us to an area in central Lisbon called Bairro Alto, the heart of Lisbon nightlife.  The streets were literally stuffed with people.  All of the bars were very small because everyone congregates in the streets.

Why do have have chocolate on my forehead you wonder?  The hockey team introduced us to the After Eight challenge.  You have to try to eat the piece of chocolate and eat it by basically wiggling your face.  I was really bad.  This provided about 15 minutes of entertainment.

When Sunday came along, the beach sounded like a good idea again.  We took a ferry to another part of Lisbon and then a bus to a beach called Costa de Caparica.  Since I was nice and sunburnt, I tried to stay covered up, but we did lay on the beach for quite some time.  I also got a delicious ice cream treat and looked at shells with Stephanie.  This turned out to be my most relaxing weekend yet!  

 On the ferry.  Notice the Golden Gate Bridge look-alike in the background.

Saturday night Stephanie and I stayed up and chatted with some Belgian people.  I even spoke some French!  Then Sunday we flew back to Madrid and I made it home just in time to sign up for my classes for next semester.  

I learned in linguistics today that English has the highest number of second-language speakers.  This came in handy in Portugal.  I know one word in Portuguese: obrigado means thank you.  Obrigado for reading my blog! 

O Valencia!

Last weekend was beautiful and relaxing in Valencia!  Kenzie and I left on an early bus Friday morning and returned Sunday night.  We did lots of walking, saw the beach, enjoyed some picnics in the park, tried Paella de Valencia (paella originated near Valencia), and met some interesting friends on a pub crawl organized by our hostel.  The weather cooperated with us perfectly.  I even got a bit of a tan at the beach!  

Here are some snapshots of my weekend:

Valencia used to have a huge river, but it would flood every year and cause lots of problems.  They drained the river in the 1950's and now it is a huge park that divides the city for four miles.  Here I am walking through the park where the river used to be.

Parts of the park reminded me of the prairie path in Illinois!  There were lots of runners and bikers out on this beautiful day.  Kenzie loves this tree.

Kenzie and I sat at this fountain next to the concert hall while they played Disney songs!  Very picturesque.

A park shaped like Gulliver!  

The dog pond where we ate lunch and watched cute puppies run through the pond!  There was also a small child swimming with them...

Kenzie and I outside of the City of Arts and Sciences--Along the park there is a string of museums that were designed by Santiago Calatrava.  He also designed the Milwaukee Art Museum and is currently working on the future World Trade Center Transportation Hub.  He was born and raised in Valencia.

We finally made it to the beach after about a two hour walk through the park and past the museums!  We picked the perfect weekend to travel to Valencia.  It was 70 degrees on Saturday so we were able to fully appreciate our afternoon at the beach.

On Sunday we went to the top of this lookout tower that is one of the twelve city gates.

After one last picnic in the park, we made our way back to the bus station and headed home to Madrid, where it was raining.  Fortunately today the weather brightened up again and I enjoyed another cheerful day in my favorite city!