Whoops

So it has now been 2 months since I last updated this. Sorry about that. A lot has happened since the beginning of December. As many of you know, my mom and sister came to visit me in Munich from December 22 or 23-30. It was an incredible amount of fun. We did pretty much every touristy thing in Munich that you can imagine which was awesome. We started off at the Christmas Markets while they were still open, enjoyed the food and bought gifts for each other and for the people back home.

This is the town hall from the tower of St. Peter's Church, the little green things are the stalls which contained small items to buy as Christmas gifts as well as food

Entrance to one of the markets, there are several in Munich

We went to mass on the night of Christmas Eve in the Frauenkirche, which is Munich's most famous church that you often see on postcards. Its the one with the two towers

Us dressed up for mass

We still managed to have a real Christmas. We bought a little tree and decorated it and bought each other gifts

In the days following Christmas, we went to Schloss Nymphenburg and toured the castle and gardens there. It was really beautiful. We also went to  a circus show (Circus Krone) and saw a show there the day after Christmas. The tickets were cheap, only 17 euros a person, we had great seats, and the show was actually really good. Normally I go to these things and am pretty bored and daydream about random things, but this show was about 2.5 hours and that didn't happen a single time for me

The main building of the castle complex

The Circus. Many lions.

We then visited Schloss Neuschwanstein, which is the castle that Disney modeled Sleeping Beauty's castle after. It was incredibly beautiful

This is a smaller castle next to Neuschwanstein called Hohenschwangau

This Ludwig II guy had good taste

A side view of the castle (complete with tourisits)

A night shot of the castle

We then visited Dachau concentration camp, which admittedly is sort of a strange thing to do on a family vacation, but I think that it is good to be educated about these sorts of things. It was the third concentration camp I visited, and still equally as interesting. There are actually notable differences between how the camps were run and general life there when compared to each other, which I think is interesting

The main gate to the prisoners camp

The missing door. The famous "Arbeit macht frei" sign was stolen around the beginning of November, and still has not been recovered

This is the system the Germans used to prevent escape. I thought it was cool so I posted it

Those hooks on that bar in the center of the top of the photo is right in front of the fire places in the crematorium where the bodies were burned. Prisoners were often hung right here in front of the fires

The crematorium

There was actually a gas chamber at Dachau, which I did not know. It was not used for mass extermination, but only to kill a few prisoners. I did not take a picture of it though.

After Dachau we visited the  Olympic Park and BMW World, did some shopping, ate at Hofbrauehaus and Hard Rock Cafe and generally had a great time. Our hotel was awesome and had the best breakfast buffet I have ever seen. It was honestly the most fun I've ever had in a week.

That is pretty much all for this trip, sorry for posting so little!

.