Munich and Dachau

Munich, December 2018

I worked on Christmas Eve, and then went north to spend Christmas Day and Boxing Day with friends, and back to work today. I'm a bit behind in relating what's been going on in the lead up to Christmas, but a week or two ago I went to Munich and visited the Christmas Market there with the same friends who went to Dusseldorf with me a year ago. Another friend who lives there was singing in a Christmas concert in a church, so we went to that too. The weather wasn't great - rainy and cold - but we enjoyed the food and drink, including the classic Bavarian specialities of sausage and cabbage. We also tasted Flammlachs, which was salmon hot smoked before our eyes, and which flavoured our clothing with fishy smoke for the rest of the trip.

Gatehouse, Dachau, December 2018

I had a day on my own in which I went to Dachau, the site of the concentration camp. The trains were in a mess after a strike that morning so I didn't get there very early, and the site closed before I'd seen everything. It felt similar to my previous trip to Auschwitz - sanitised, sterile, recounting atrocities but without giving me any emotional connection. But I was feeling chilly wrapped up in my fleece, coat, scarf and hat in a heated building - I can't really imagine what it must have been like in thin clothes in the open air at this time of year.

At work the main activity of note has been the delivery of another of our Carbs 4 1 courses to a group of people who were probably the most unruly of any I've ever had to manage. We coped somehow, but they didn't make it easy for us. To restore my faith, however, one of my patients last week unexpectedly gave me a bottle of wine for Christmas, which was lovely. So let's end on that note rather than the sombre thought of historical atrocities or the clusterfuck of our modern day political situation. Happy Christmas!