Alter Südfriedhof, in the Heart of Bavaria

I am finally beginning to come home to San Diego. I miss Germany and Austria, but the patterns of my life here are picking up almost where they left off. In any case, Time passes and we grow up with it.

An outdoor cafe somewhere outside of our hotel, called Carat
 (very early morning, Day 1)

I wish I'd written more while I was over there. Now that I'm back and miss traveling so desperately, I regret not leaving a record of my thoughts and feelings when they were fresh. That's one less thing for me to sift through when I try to recapture whatever mood, whatever emotional state I'd found over there. I didn't even take very many pictures. Or at least, I could have taken more.

But I think it is time now for me to sit and preserve what remains of the trip. I have collected all my train ticket stubs, my receipts, my brochures, and my luggage tags and smoothed them out, placing them in a box for safekeeping. It's so I can look through it later, and remember a little.

I won't be able to tell things exactly as they were, because memory is never completely reliable. I won't know how to describe the way the light looked in the early morning when we woke up that first day. Nor the way it felt to wake so early, to look over and see a strange girl in bed next to me, the feeling of intrusion. I can't make you understand what I myself did only a little while ago, and then forgot.

I think I will write a few posts on specific places and experiences, rather than going day by day, or place by place. If you are interested, my APEC teacher did just that:  http://majesticeurope.blogspot.com/

Today I want to talk about Alter Südfriedhof. The name translates to "Old South Cemetary", and when I think of this trip, and of Munich, that is what comes to mind first. I asked our tour guide about it later, but I can't remember if he was the one to tell me about it. Perhaps not, but I remember asking him all the same.

Alter Südfriedhof

Duke Albrecht V founded it for plague victims in the mid 16th century, which explains its location outside of the city gates, Sendlinger Tor. Apparently a great many notable painters, musicians, muses, and writers are buried here. None of the names jumped out at me, so I never bothered to remember any of them. That's enough background, wouldn't you say? That's all I've got in any case. Either that or I've forgotten the rest.



We'd discovered this cemetary, Alicia and I, on that first morning. I'd woken before her and sat in the inky morning light, refreshed and restless. We were out the door before 6 am. I waved to the young man behind the front desk as we left. I got a bemused look in return.

Side note: I think I've done a pretty terrible job deciding the order of these pictures, but let's pretend like that adds to the charm shall we?

Alter Südfriedhof, on a Northerly path. Or was it Westerly? Neither. It was Southerly. I think. 

I like being out very early and very late, because all the other tourists are in bed and I can be as touristy as I want all by myself. I mean, at 5:45, pretty much everyone else is still in bed. I thought it was pretty weird that their convenience stores didn't open til 8. Here they never seem to close. 8 doesn't seem like a very convenient time to open, if you ask me, but then, I appreciated the refusal to honor the instant gratification principle.

Either way, we were out in search of a convenient store that was open. That was how we came upon the old cemetery. We cut through it as a shortcut to get across town to a gas station. Ali must have looked up directions on her phone, or else how could we have possibly known to go through there? But I seem to recall finding the gas station convenience store with a sense of being lucky, so maybe the traipse through the cemetery was just exploration on a whim.

I love that cemetery. We walked through it every morning, discovering every inch we could. It's very old, almost- but not quite- overgrown. It's not so sanitized as some other graveyards I've seen, with their orderly rows of white markers on manicured grass beds. In Alter Südfriedhof, no two graves were alike. 

It was very peaceful in there, although there was only a wall separating it from the street. There were barely any cars so early in the morning, but even on our way back, or on days when we came later, the sound of engines and people driving was muted. I think it's the ivy on both sides of this wall. It grew so thickly and in such robust clusters and tendrils that it must have muffled the noise. 

There's a playground immediately outside the first half of the Alter. Ali called it creepy and I suppose in a way, it was pretty gruesome to have children play so close to the site of the sleeping dead. But I've noticed that we're the only ones that make such a big fuss about Death. It's as natural as living, you know. Maybe they aren't so afraid of it there.



There's so much more that I can't make clear. How the gravel crunched under my sandals, the individual pebbles finding ways to worry my toes. How the air smelled of leaves and soil and rain. How some of the statues had lost noses and worn so that they looked ghoulish, all discolored and Voldemort-y. How the man in the blue linen shirt looked up at us, surprised to find anyone at all there, but especially foreigners. How the massive sculpture of Jesus on the Cross had turned green in some parts. 

Good thing I have pictures.

You know, for a cemetery, this was a surprisingly charming place. Not exactly welcoming, because there was this sense of disinterest in the coming and going of people. Not foreboding, though. No brooding gloom, no threat of zombies. Very beautiful. I miss it already. 

Not as macabre as it sounds.