Greetings once again from Bavaria! Munich continues to be a lot of fun, although the weather today is pretty crummy - drizzling and sort of cold all day. Thankfully I'm from the Midwest so I'm used to this sort of thing.

I had a very enjoyable birthday celebration yesterday - at the beer garden where we ate dinner, the very sweet German couple sitting next to us bought us a round of drinks to celebrate. We also went overboard on the desserts, ordering two different types of struedel and these fried apple rings that were out of the world. We pretty much rolled ourselves back to the hotel after that!

Our trip out to Dachau was very interesting - it's the first time I've ever been to a concentration camp and it was very moving. Most of the buildings that stood at the camp during the war have been torn down now, but the foundations remain to give you a sense of what things were like. There are many memorials on the grounds now commemorating those who suffered at the hands of the SS, including a group of 4 female British army officers who were shot at Dachau 60 years ago today. Every German schoolkid is required to visit a concentration camp at some point during their education, and it's easy to see why. While the photos and stories from the survivors are profound, the stark sight of the barbed wire and guard towers alone is enough to drive home the moral adopted by the place - "Never Again."

After a sobering morning, we came back into town and headed off to the Deutches Museum, which certainly lives up to its billing as the German Smithsonian Institute. Anything that you can imagine about the scientific and technological history of Germany is there, along with a ton of stuff you wouldn't expect. With the museum being so large (over 10 miles of exhibits), we only saw a small portion of it. I was having great fun at the exhibits about the history of printing, but Adam doesn't like to let me hang around anything to do with books for too long for fear that I'll get carried away. I think he's probably safe here, seeing as I don't read German.

Tomorrow it's off to Füssen, the nearest town to the Neuschwanstein castle. We're hoping for better weather for hiking and photos!