Big Adventures, Little World

We had a bit of a sombre stop to start the day at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp from which was used during World War II by the Nazis. It was quite strange wandering around the camp and learning of some of the things that the prisoners were made to do while in the camps. I don’t really know how to explain it r if my explanations of it would do it any justice at all. I think it is something that needs to be seen for yourself to be able to take it in and understand what went on there, although none of us would ever be able to truly understand, just the people that were made to suffer there. In saying that though, I did think that it would have been more graphic that what we had seen. This camp in particular was mainly used as a work camp, and not as much as an execution camp like some of the other ones were, which is why it may not have been so graphic, but there was still over 100000 people that were executed there.

Once we arrived in Munich we went on a walking tour before heading to the Hofbrau Haus, which is giant beer hall. It was hard to find a seat in there for the group of us but we managed to get a table and ordered a round of steins for the table. 11 steins in total, and they were all brought out by one waiter, just using his two hands to carry them all. It was remarkable. In addition to the beers we had some food, including sausages and pork knuckles, all of which was amazing.

After the food and another round of steins we started to get a bit rowdy and started playing a few drinking games, but no matter how loud we were it didn’t really matter because the place is such a loud atmosphere. I think one of the funniest sights for everyone would have been our whole table standing up singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ as we finished it off with a big group ‘cheers’ (which were a common occurrence). This also led to 3 of the steins getting cracked in one go, just after I had told everyone that they must be unbreakable as you could put a lot of force into the ‘cheers’. After my third stein, I headed back to camp early on the bus with a few others to get a good night’s sleep as I needed it with all the partying and full on days we had ahead of us.