Back From Munich

Back from the short summer holiday in Munich, though to be honest it seemed like a fortnight. I can't get away from the fact that the ME has changed my energy levels considerably. We made the most of the days though - breakfasting at 7am, out of the hotel by 8am, and walking solidly until around 4pm. I think we must have clocked up 50 miles of walking, but it was well worth it, and there is plenty to see in the city.

By the end of the week, I could barely walk; travelling light meant I couldn't take the stick I occasionally need to keep me upright. That didn't stop us however, from visiting Dachau on the last day. Forward planning should have warned us that the trip from the station to the camp was a 45 minute walk, including getting lost. By the time we reached the camp Jane had a winging moaning awkward sod carping on about the pain he was in, and how hot it was in the sun. A walk around the camp changed that, and brought to home just how much suffering people have to endure. The picture below was one of the last taken in the holiday. I have plenty of photos of ovens, gas chambers, disinfection rooms, watch towers and opposing national socialist buildings, which all the tourists (me included) took to reflect the oppression of the place. None of the depressive oppression comes across in these photos, and I took the next photo as a reflection of my impression of the camp. I deliberately wanted only a small portion of the photo in focus, and for that to be the barbed wire. Everything else is a blur.



There is relatively little post processing on this photo. It's cropped to remove some tourists, blurred around the edges and converted to black and white. There was a temptation to darken the photo, but that gave it a 'black' mood, when I was looking more for something more sombre.

Munich is certainly somewhere we'd visit again. A long weekend is not enough to see everything on the list, and although much of what is there to be seen is in a relatively small area, a lot of travelling is needed. I have an aversion to using public transport when we visit a city, preferring to walk and not risk missing anything, but having said that, we spent a could of days on Munich's MVV system.



The above picture was a test of Jane's camera. A 1 second handheld exposure. I'm not sure how I managed to keep so steady over a second, but I did it three times. I was probably too tired to shake. The other remarkable thing about this photo is that it was taken at one of the busiest times in one of the busiest stations (the city centre tourist mecca). No-one walked in front of any of the shots - this was the only train I could shoot as ours was next.

And finally, a museum which reflects that Munich looks to the future as well as remembering the past. The BMW museum is worth a visit if you have a couple of hours to kill and can do with some air conditioning. Much as I hate car shots, it was fun to wander round, look at some very historic pieces of engineering, and take some clichéd photographs.