Munich Travel Notes: Here I Come to Germany & Visit Dachau Concentration Camp

I started watching football in 2001. That year, Bayern Munich defeated Valencia in the final and won the European Champions Cup. Since then, I have slowly become a German fan and Bayern fan for 20 years:-D

Although I no longer watch football, I will still continue to pay attention to European football trends, especially Bayern and German football news. The reason for being Buddhist is not because we have lost our passion, but because we have witnessed the highs (winning the World Cup in Germany in 2014) and the lows (Bayern lost to Chelsea in the final at home, and failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Germany), and understand that there is no eternal winner. , and there is no eternal loser. What really matters is the happiness and expectation that football brings us.

So this time, Germany is coming, Bayern is coming!

I got up at 6:30 today and prepared to catch the 8:30 train from Vienna to Munich.

As a result, we couldn't find a ticket entrance at the train station, so we went directly to the platform. It was still more than an hour before departure time (it was messy in the cold wind).

Think about it in China, it always takes 20 minutes for you to go through security check and so on. Even if you enter the train station, you have to stay at the station until the train is about to depart before you can get to the platform. It’s great here, you can take the train as a bus. Ticket checking is done after getting on the bus.

But the efficiency is really high. Under this mechanism, transfer is very convenient. European train travel often has transfer times within 10 minutes. This one gets off and goes to another bus on another platform, treating the train as a bus relay. I wouldn’t dare think about it in China, but it would be natural in Europe.

After a 4-hour drive, we arrived in Munich smoothly. The train drove all the way from the suburbs into the city. My first impression was that this city is like a small town. It doesn't have the fashion sense of Paris or the modernization of Shanghai. Although it can't be said to be useless, it gives people the feeling of a larger rural town. Chinese students studying abroad called Munich "Mucun". I thought it was just a joke, but I didn't expect it to be true.

After getting off the train, I immediately started studying the subway, and the first stop was the Dachau Concentration Camp. The first stop in Vienna is the United Nations Office, and the first stop in Munich is the concentration camp memorial site. To be honest, I am not taking the usual route.

It’s not that easy to buy tickets. The guy in front of me wanted to buy train tickets to other cities but couldn’t do it in the end. Unfortunately, it was my first time to buy one, so I had no experience to impart, but after some experimentation, I successfully bought a single-day ticket.

After taking the subway and transferring to the bus, we finally arrived at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site in less than an hour.

It is indeed an educational base for Germans. There should not be many tourists, except for me, I didn’t see any Asian faces.

Dachau concentration camp was the first concentration camp established by Nazi Germany. It was established in 1933 and liberated by the US military in 1945.

In addition to some buildings in the concentration camp itself, the memorial site also has an exhibition hall, which mainly displays text, pictures and some videos. It has a large number of news, newspaper, posters, and various objects left at that time, etc. The exhibition hall introduces the history of the concentration camp before and after its existence, including the social status of Germany before the Nazis came to power, the history of the Nazis' development and growth, the discovery and changes of the concentration camp, the introduction of the victims, the situation after the concentration camp was occupied by the US military, post-war trials, etc. Simply going through them all would take at least over an hour.

The concentration camp site itself includes a large playground, rectangular barracks, watchtowers, gas chambers and incineration chambers, as well as commemorative sculptures built after the war, religious chapels, etc.