July 11

For Sunday, we decided to head to Dachau in the morning and the Deutches Museum in the afternoon.  Dachau is of course a very dark and sobering place to visit.  We toured the grounds, and walked though the museum.  The museum is located in the buildings where the incoming prisoners were processed.  It was pretty haunting to walk anywhere in the camp, but particularly to go along the steps that the victims did, seeing visual evidence and reading about the brutality that took place.  Much of what I learned I would like to forget, but the images and reports of the brutality are difficult to, and should not be forgotten.  After the processing area, we looked through the reconstructed barracks that were there for the prisoners, and walked past the foundations of all the rest of them to the various memorials that have been set up.  I can't stress enough how somber the entire place is.  We then went through the crematorium building and gas chamber as well.  That made for quite the morning, but I think it was important to see the depths of what we are capable of as humans.  For the afternoon we went to the Deutsches Museum, which was a rather different atmosphere.  It is extremely expansive, and covers most any technical topic or part of technology, new or old, that you could think of.  We split up to see it, because we all have different tastes and headed off.  I of course went directly to the Pharmaceutical exhibit.  It focused more on the body and things like that than actually the process of making a drug; however it did focus on that as well.  They focused on St. John's wort and its extraction.  When they showed the organizations and people credited with putting the exhibit together, Böhringer was quite prevalent.  I liked how they presented the history of drug preparation, along with explaining a bit of how drugs actually work.  After that I toured many of the various exhibits, which are too many to enumerate.  Suffice it to say though, that I was able to mosey about very contentedly, perusing many cool engineering and technological achievements.  I could have stayed in there for several days just looking around at exhibits.  We left the museum at closing time, went back to the hostel to collect our bags, and barely missed the second-to-last train that we could have taken back.  So, we waited for an hour until the last train that would be able to take us home arrived.  The trip back started out well, we made good time, and passed through stops like normal.  Then we came to Stuttgart.  We sat on the tracks there for a couple of hours.  Initially they said that trains would be held for the ICE connections in Mannheim, which was where we needed to go.  Then we kept on sitting there, and sitting there and sitting there.  There were policemen on the train and we just were not moving.  Eventually they couldn't hold the trains anymore, and from what I could tell, they never gave us an explanation for why we weren't moving.  After two hours, we began moving again, but kind of did the whole start and stop thing for a while.  Before the two hours were up, they started giving out drinks free at the Bistro on the train, so the three of us had a Beck's beer each.  They were cold, which was nice, but it didn't make up for being stuck on a train for many more hours than expected with no explanation.  In any case, we made it to Mannheim after a long while.  They kept open the service station there for us, and it basically came down to those with missed connections (most of us) waiting in line to get Taxi vouchers.  I was happy to not have to sleep in a train station while waiting for an early morning train back to Ingelheim.  It did however mean that I took a 60km cab ride from Mannheim to Ingelheim at 1:30am after an already long day.  My driver was a Turkish man name Bünalt or something like that.  He was cool, and I got to practice my German, which was good enough to converse with him over a variety of topics.  It's fun to talk in German, because it's good for the learning, and you pick up pretty quickly on where you need to improve, which is still most places for me.  The problem with speaking German is that conversely, people want to practice and show off their English ability, which is typically good.  I was glad that this was not the case with Bünalt.  Eventually at around 2am I arrived in Ingelheim at my apartment, completely exhausted.  I unpacked briefly and hit the sack for about 4 hours of sleep.  I am writing this on Monday, because had I written it yesterday it would have been incomprehensible.