Friday, June 1, 2018

Eric Conway: Morgan Choir Visits Dachau & BMW Museum, Has Farewell Dinner








Dr. Eric Conway writes:

Day 10 - Dachau, BMW Museum, and Farewell Dinner

Due to the German national holiday - Corpus Christi - as well as being the day before our departure, we used our final full day to further explore Munich.  Although the main purpose of these tours is to spread the great word about Morgan State University in song, as you can tell from the tour sites visited, we are always trying to give our students opportunities to learn about their world.  What better way to learn about history than to visit historical sites to become virtually engaged in the history as much as you can centuries later.

Today we visited the Dachau concentration camp - very first concentration camp in Germany.  As we entered the property, we saw the deceiving words: "Arbeit Macht Frei" - "Work will make you free.”  Although I do not want to go in too much detail about the atrocities of the Holocaust in this report, however, I do want to say that it was good for our students to see up close and personal man’s inhumanity to man.  We sang a concert at Chizuk Amuno congregation in April on Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Our visit to Dachau was a great follow-up to that concert.  I toiled over whether we should visit a place such as this on the last day of our tour, but in the end we must never forget, and learn from humanity's mistakes.  See short video clip captured of the exhibit if you choose to view, (it does show some graphic imagery), and a link to the audio of a twenty minute presentation about Dachau if you want to hear a formal lecture on Dachaugg.

From Dachau, we went back to city center of Munich for lunch on our own.  Due to the holiday, many shops were closed.  There were far fewer persons on the streets.  Those who were walking around downtown Munich were in holiday mode!

BMW stands for Bavarian Motor Works.  We happened to be in Bavaria.  We took the time to visit the BMW museum.  Even if you were not a driving enthusiast, you could not happen to appreciate the beautiful BMW cars of earlier times.  The colors of the cars were brilliantly displayed with colors that one could not help but to at least take a closer look!  The BMW museum - called BMW Welt (World) - was across from the Munich Olympic stadium where the infamous 1972 Munich Summer Olympics games were held.

After the museum, we returned to the hotel to begin packing and prepare for our early departure.  At 7 PM, we had a farewell dinner, a short visit from the hotel.   Unfortunately, it rained heavily on the walk to the restaurant. We fondly reflected on the ten-day tour of this Central European area.

We were blessed to have an excellent tour guide, Lela Delic, from Croatia.  She was a last-minute replacement due to an urgent matter that our original guide had to resolve.  It turned out that Lela was perhaps the best guide that we have ever had during the years of our touring.  She was stern when she needed to be with the group regarding being on time.  She also was quite knowledgeable about the region.  She also had a very unique perceptive, being a former journalist with the BBC.

We immediately went in anticipation of our 5:30 departure in the morning!

Link to audio of Dachau presentation:

Dachua short video:

Musicians in Munich performing on the main square:

Video from BMW museum:

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