From: Rainer Subject: Rainer's Europe Trip 1998 -- part 18 Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 04:31:56 EDT Sunday, 10/11 -- part 18 Sunday brunch at the Holiday Inn was very complete. It was also very crowded. We all got to eat pretty much what we wanted to eat. Monika was content staying in the hotel while Vera and I took a cab back to the train station of pick up the rental car. It was sunny this morning which surprised us all. And, you could see the Alps along the horizon! The view from the hotel and the street seemed very familiar. I figured out that during one of my infrequent business trips when I still worked for the Case division of Tek or Mentor had taken me here once before. Having learned my lessons in Berlin, I reset the GPS, marked a waypoint for the hotel and kept the thing turned on during the taxi ride back to the train station. It turned out to be unnecessary -- Munich is a lot easier to navigate and drive in than Berlin. But better safe than sorry. We rented another Fiat Punto which was going to be dropped off in Italy. It was dark blue, like the Polo in Berlin. During hours 5 through 7 of yesterday's train ride, all of us had experienced some sort of discomfort from the train travel. We wanted to break up the last long train trip from Milano to Paris into two segments. So we stopped at the reservation counter and were booked the stretch from Lyon to Paris -- a high speed train taking only 2 hours. We would have to wait with making reservations from Torino to Lyon until we were in Italy. We decided to leave from Torino rather than Milano since there was no difference in the car drop off charges and it would shorten the first train trip to about 4 hours. The sun disappeared as the clouds moved in. Back in the hotel no one was hungry for lunch since we had such a big breakfast. We decided to head to the Marienplatz and do some tourist shopping. All of the stores are closed on Sundays -- something that is still hard to get used to coming from the U.S. We walked around and found a bunch of shops that we wanted to visit before we left. An unexpected good find was the climb up Den Alter Peter, a church built in the 1200s. The view was fantastic -- all the red tile roofs everywhere. Monika and Vera had a little lunch at a pastry shop, Konditerei, on our afternoon drive to Dachau. The site of the first Nazi concentration camp is now a memorial to the many that perished here. Dachau is only about 15 miles from the hotel. It's not a highlight of a vacation, but it's a part of history that, as a saying on one of the memorials states, should serve to honor those that died and serve as a caution to those that are alive. The weather had turned very grey in the late afternoon. A light rain was starting to fall. It made the visit seem all the more solemn. It's mind boggling to know what happened here. There's a sense of shame that I feel that such inhumanity could have happened. I don't know whether that's because I'm German or because I'm human. The GPS make navigating back to the hotel almost like following another car that knew the way. Until, that is, there was no off ramp to the middle ring around Munich where we had joined it from an on ramp. We were close enough that the Vera and the map guided us back without mishap. We stopped at the Pizza Hut Express this time to get a pizza to go. Monika was happy to stay in the hotel alone some more with the pizza and the laptop. Vera and I head off to the Ratskeller for a dinner alone. The Ratskeller is right on the Marienplatz which we knew how to find now. We found a parking spot closer that this afternoon's and remembered the way through the passages that let pedestrians shortcut through city block between buildings -- something cars can't do. The Ratskeller is huge. Our dinner of potato soup and Nuernberger sausages with fried potatoes and sauerkraut was pretty good, even if the waiter was a bit ditzy. It was good to be just the two of us, talking, watching the people, and enjoying a good meal. We stopped to listen to some street entertainers on the way back to the car. To our surprise, the passage had had one end closed by a gate. We retraced out steps hoping that the other end of the passage wouldn't be locked by the time we got there. It wasn't. Monika had done pretty good damage to the pizza and was playing a couple of winning rounds of solitaire on the computer. We settled down on our respective surfaces. I made sure there was no beer left in the minibar. There wasn't.