Oktoberfest (a week late)

Sorry I'm beginning to slack off on the blog, I think it's been over a week since I last wrote.  Last weekend we went to Munich for Oktoberfest.  We took an overnight bus, leaving at 11:30 pm Thursday night and we arrived back in Florence at around midnight on Sunday.  Germany's culture is much different from that of Italy's, which was surprising to me because it's not all that far away.  Drinking culture is about as opposite as you can get:  Italians drink red wine with meals but don't get drunk, Germans drink as much beer as possible.  It actually felt a little more like America... just a little.  Oktoberfest itself was great, they had countless beer tents (they're called tents but really they're actual structures that hold thousands of people), all kinds of carnival rides, bratwurst, etc.

We also visited Dachau concentration camp, just outside Munich.  It definitely wasn't a fun experience, but probably the most impactful couple of hours we had all weekend.  I had been to the holocaust museum in Washington DC, but this was just on another level.  To actually go to the site where people were imprisoned and killed was a different monster.  The place doesn't look quite the same as it did 70 years ago, but it was still very easy to visualize it as a fully functioning concentration camp.  The whole place just had a really dark, creepy energy.  In fact, as soon as I got out of the taxi, this weird feeling came over me, like I could feel the death camp just around the corner.  Definitely a must if you ever go to Munich.

And on the last day we did a free walking tour.  They have these free walking tours all over Europe, where you take the tour and then tip the guy however much you feel he deserves.  It was a really great tour, and we all learned a lot about Munich and German history.  One interesting story can shed some light on just how much Germans love their beer.  I can't remember when this happened, but at one point their town hall caught fire.  Since they had so much beer around and it was cheaper than water, they decided to try to put it out with beer.  So they assembled a line of people to pass barrels of beer down to the town hall.  Problem was, people had begun to take sips of beer out of the barrels they were passing.  In the end, only 10 of the multiple hundreds of barrels made it to the town hall.  Needless to say, the they couldn't put out the fire, so their town hall burned down.  The government then decided to put a tax on beer, thinking that the citizens had a drinking problem, but this just induced riots and chaos, so the tax was removed.  This was known as the beer revolution.  Pretty interesting culture eh? 

That's all for now, I'll update again soon about the day trips we took this week for school!