Back in Berlin

Another quick weekend trip up to Berlin. This time it was just the two of us and we were determined to get a wider overview of the Berlin we'd only just glimpsed the last time we were there. We had caught the train up on Friday night and were staying at the same hotel in Friedrichshain as last time with the incredible buffet breakfasts. You could take on a whole city on just the goodness contained in the huge array of yums that they laid out for us every morning. We had a reasonably early breakkie as we wanted to get to the Reichstag when it first opened to try and avoid the queues that are usually stretched out the front of tourists trying to get inside to see the heart of the German nation. Sadly we got the timing a little wrong and had to line up with the rest of the rabble for about 45min before being shuffled in.

Volke - the People

The Reichstag has been at the centre of events in Germany for a long time as a very powerful symbol of rule. It was the fire in the Reichstag that helped kick the National Socialist party into power in 1933. The Russian Army raising a flag on top of the Reichstag signified the end of the European theatre of war in WWII. The building was severely damaged in the fighting and has been slowly rebuilt and now has a very cool dome of glass designed by Sir Norman Foster. The dome concentrates the sunlight and funnels it down into a heat pump down in the building which supplies some of the electricity needs for running parliament.

There's a double helix ramp inside that you can walk all the way to the top

We then wandered around the main shopping street in town trying to find some new shoes for me (all I brought to Europe were Blunnies and a pair of sandals) to no avail. We found some really cool shoes by El Naturalista in a store on Friedrichstraße but they didn't quite come in my size (that would be "huge and skinny") so we tracked down their Berlin head office and made our way there, only to find that they didn't make them that big at all. Bummed out a little by our failed shopping endeavours we turned to the next best thing which is food. We'd heard about a cool café in Kreuzberg called Gri Gri that sounded like they had amazing food so we caught the U-Bahn down towards Kreuzberg to try and find it. It turns out that they were doing track work on that section of track so we ended up walking quite a bit further than we expected to along the canals which was actually a pretty cool and interesting thing to do anyway. So thanks Deutsche Bahn for fixing up the track that weekend! Gri Gri was as good as we'd heard and we had a lovely lunch watching the passing parade, which included the strange sight of a white van disgorging it's contents at about 2pm of 4 dudes who were obviously in a band and had slept there next to the canal all night. It must have been a hell of a night and their morning(afternoon) ritual was pretty funny for all the people in the café who were observing.

Some random art on the way through Kreuzberg

From the café we headed back through Kreuzberg on Oranienstraße which turned out to be a real find. The street was packed with really cool shops full of amazing things and every now and again we'd hit a pocket of restaurants from all corners of the globe. We'll definitely be back there for a closer visit in the future. Eventually we found ourselves at the Jewish Museum which was our destination for the afternoon. It was designed by Daniel Libeskind and follows a very unusual floor plan which can be seen on their website. We lost ourselves in the museum for hours and were eventually kicked out at closing time. It was a very very cool building, evoked some pretty strong emotions at times, especially in the Void that holds "Shalechet" (Fallen Leaves). If you were to see any two things relating to the Holocaust in Berlin it would be this museum and the Jewish Memorial Park that we saw on our previous visit.

Fallen Leaves

Pretty worn out by the incredible amount of walking that we'd done we headed back to Friedrichshain for some very delicious Thai food to finish off the evening. The next day after another enormous breakfast we checked out of the hotel and found our way to Alexanderplatz where we were due to start a bike tour of Potsdam with Fat Tire Tours.

Waiting with our Fat Tire cruisers for the train to Potsdam

Potsdam is the palace region just outside Berlin that is often compared to Versailles near Paris. It certainly compares well in terms of sheer opulence but I think Potsdam has the edge when it comes to being bike friendly. Our tour guide Marielle was excellent and it was a nice contrast to the walking tour that we'd done before. We visited the New Palace (which looked pretty old to our colonial eyes), saw Sans Souci (no worries mate) and were generally very grateful for the excellent access and bike paths in and around the parks of Potsdam. Friedrich the Great was a pretty progressive leader and the fact that he built places like the palaces of Potsdam is a pretty nice legacy to leave behind.

A brief chalk history of Germany

The historical highlight for me was the visit to Ceclienhof Palace at the end of the tour. This palace was built in the style of an English hunting lodge and it was where the famous Potsdam Conference was held and the Potsdam Agreement was hammered out between the 3 major powers at the end of WWII to split up the spoils(France was not invited but received the meeting minutes!) . This led to the 4 zones in Germany and eventually to the Berlin Wall being built on 13 August 1961. Stalin had the edge in the negotiations having been present at the previous 3 summits between the UK, USA and Russia when they agreed to become allies. Truman was pretty new to it all and Churchill actually lost the job as Prime Minister of England while this conference was on, so Clement Attlee ended up as the English delegate. It was amazing to see the building just as it was when these leaders of the world were discussing how to carve up Germany. The design of each countries rooms was done to try and make them feel at ease and so there were some interesting touches like pictures of bulldogs and so forth. There's no better place than Europe to get a feeling for history and I feel pretty lucky to have spent so much time here visiting places where such major events took place.

Cecilienhof Palace - venue for the Potsdam Conference

We covered more ground than I expected to and had a very nice lunch at a microbrewery by a lake (excellent hefeweissenbier) and before we knew it we were back on the train to Berlin and from there straight back on the train to Leipzig. Another fantastic weekend away full of adventures, food and history. No new shoes and my feet were pretty unhappy about the pounding they'd received with all that walking on Saturday but it was well worth it.

F-Stop 2008: Leipzig photography exhibition

A weekend where we don't travel out of Leipzig? Who ever heard of such a thing? What will we do with ourselves? No tickets to book, no hotels to compare, no tours to pick between, no getting up early in the morning to catch a train. This calls for something different. Something cultural. Something like F-Stop 2008.

The Spinnerei

We rode down to the south of Leipzig with our friends to an old cotton mill called the Spinnerei. It's a rather large complex of old brick buildings that used to be a bustling centre for trade and manufacture that fell into disrepair and ruin once the bottom fell out of the textile market. It's now a very funky space for artists and small businesses that have moved in and set up shop in the old buildings. Most of the previous fixtures and bits and pieces were left behind and so there's an accretion of stuff behind just about every door.


Some of the cool photos on display

F-Stop is a yearly photography exhibition that is held in Leipzig and is spread over a couple of dozen buildings in both the Spinnerei and up and down Karl Heine Strasse. The photos on display in this year's exhibit were pretty cool, but they were outshone by the buildings that the exhibition was housed in and the photographic opportunities that abounded at every turn. There were so many people toting cameras around the exhibition that I wasn't sure whether it was more fun looking at the photos or looking at the people taking photos of photos or taking photos of people looking at photos. The funniest of all was seeing this really bohemian looking dude with the long dreads, a scruffy bit of facial hair, hemp clothes and bare feet - the real struggling artist/uni student look - wandering around with a $5000 camera and a high end lens probably worth more than the camera. Ironic.


300 - The Locker


To Betty?


Crumbling room, photos of crumbling photos - very post-modern

Berlin

We spent the weekend in Berlin which was a first for Col, a second for me and about the fourth of fifth time for Ruth & Rhett. Berlin is definitely a city that you want to return to. One of the main reasons is that the next time you're there it will probably be different to the last time. There's so much construction going on. Buildings being torn down, old districts being revitalized, palaces that haven't been around for decades reinvented and built exactly as they would have been. It's a city of renewal both in an architectural and social sense and it's a focus for some of the best and worst things that Germany has been through in the last few centuries. It has a fairly long and involved history that's pretty impressive for a city built on a swamp. Most of what we learned about Berlin came from the excellent Insider Tour that we went on with our guide Mike who was quite possibly the most passionate history buff that I've ever encountered. He loved Berlin and its history with a vengeance and his enthusiasm infected all of us on the tour. If you ever get a chance to visit Berlin and haven't done this tour - you should! Highlights included the Käthe Kollwitz memorial, the building with glass on the outside of stone and the incredible number of buildings that Karl Friedrich Schinkel managed to get built in Berlin during the neoclassical period.

We did a whole lot more in Berlin but none of it very interesting: shopping, eating, wandering around, so I'll have to let the photos do the rest of the talking.

These are a few of my favourite things

Travelling around Europe gives you a sense of history, you get to see the past in stone (or brick, or marble) and a taste of the different cultures living cheek by jowl on the continent. The other thing it does is give you a chance to visit some of the sets of the most famous movies ever made. One in particular used the locations of a town in Austria to play out its story and it just so happens to be Col's favourite movie of all time. The last guesstimate of viewing based on number of weeks in the summer multiplied by the number of trips out to the lake etc brings her somewhere way over the 100 mark which I don't think I could even get close to on any single movie. Irregardless, the ability to recite the entire movie for every cast member at will only comes after a lot of repeat viewings.

In case you haven't worked it out yet, we spent a four day weekend in Salzburg and were accompanied by Col and Ruth's fine voices singing The Sound of Music (not so ably backed up by me and Rhett). I'd seen it enough (I have a younger sister) that I knew most of the choruses of most of the songs and so they were the constant soundtrack in my head for our time there. Salzburg is actually more famous for another sound of music, that made by Mozart and not by Rodgers and Hammerstein. We managed to see a sum total of zero Mozart related things whilst in Salzburg. That just gives us an excuse to go back, right?


Salzburg on the River Salzach

We stayed at the excellent Strawberry Youth Hostel which was located not far from town and right on the river Salzach so we had a nice stroll along the embankment each morning to start our explorations of various parts of The Sound of Music (SOM). The youth hostel was great as it had a kitchen so we could make our own food, was open 24/7 so no worries about being out too late, all the staff were very friendly and the rooms were very clean and had views over the river.


Late night view from our room

We started out just wandering the streets of the old town (the Alt Stadt is actually a world heritage site) to get our bearings and see if we could do the splash in the fountain from I Have Confidence. Sadly there was construction work around the main square and the fountain was dry and inaccessible. Scratch one re-enactment.


Pretty, but dry

We stumbled across some markets in progress and got ourselves some delicious cherries to munch on. They are quite possibly the best cherries ever grown in the world ever. I'm not a fan of stone fruit by any means but these were just unbelievably good. So good I actually had three of them.


Best. Cherries. Ever.

After wandering through the markets we went up the cliff and walked along to the most dominating part of the landscape, the Festung HohenSalzburg. This castle is perched on a ridge overlooking the town and river and is pretty unassailable as far as these things go. It was built by an archbishop in the 1100s to protect the clergy from opposing forces and grew fairly organically after that. It remains one of the most well preserved fortresses in Europe. It's also a good spot to get a fantastic view over Salzburg and the Nonnberg Abbey (yes, The Abbey).


Some of the towers in the Festung Hohensalzburg


Defender's view of Salzburg

We then descended the hill again to see if we could find Nonnberg Abbey and have a look. It was used for parts of the movie including the wedding and hiding in the cemetary but most of the interior shots were actually on a sound stage set. Even so, it's a very pretty abbey and it was a privilege to be able to walk around the church inside. It's one of those churches that has its own sense of weight and history.


The Abbey tower


Peaceful

Apparently the children sing this song about Do-Re-Mi for about an hour, because that's how long it took us to walk from this bridge to the Mirabell Gardens, both of which are featured in the song.


Mozart's bridge, more famous for having singing children hanging off it


Do-Re-Mi steps


Blurry Do-Re-Mi race re-enactment

With quite enough SOM related visits and scarily bad singing by me at times, we went out to try and find some authentic Austrian fare to fill the empty stomachs that you get after traipsing around medieval towns all day. Now everybody knows that I'm a big fan of schnitzel. There used to be a luncthime every week dedicated to schnitzel in Australia where the food courts were plentiful and the schnitzels always available. I called it Fat Friday. I loved Fridays. Wiener Schnitzels were obviously perfected in Vienna (Wien) and maybe someday I'll get there and sample one. For now Salzburg was the closest place I'd come to schnitzel nirvana (although Germany is very very good, let it be said). We found a cool pub called the Alter Fuchs (Old Fox) with old school wooden furniture and a lovely beer garden out the back and they had a fairly traditional Austrian menu with schnitzel of course and knödel (a sort of large potato dumpling). It was a really welcome respite from pounding the streets in pursuit of all things SOM and we ended up having a really nice evening there with plenty of good beer and wine. The Alter Fuchs is also now the place where I had the best schnitzel ever. Austrians really have mastered the art of this wonderful dish full of crunchy deep fried goodness.


The Schnitzel

On the Sunday we took a bus out to visit Untersberg which is an incredibly picturesque mountain just up the valley from Salzburg. There's a great quote by Maria in SOM talking about it:

Mother, I could never be lost up there.
That's my mountain. I was brought up on it.
It was the mountain that lead me to you.

The visit to the Untersberg is probably the most unexpectedly wonderful part of our trip. We took a cable car up almost 1300m to the top and walked around in a generally breathtaken state for a few hours before the weather started closing in and we wisely made our way back to town. We managed to have an alpine picnic up in a meadow on the side of the trail and it is going down as my most memorable picnic ever. So that's at least three personal bests in one town. Not bad for a single weekend away. The pictures don't do it justice.


Tiny little hiking trail at the bottom of the picture


The hills are alive!


Trails along the ridgeline


Family postcard

The Untersberg is really a magnificent place to go and there's even a hotel up on the side of the hill that would be great to stay at and stage hiking trips from. There were a lot of very fit looking hikers up on the peak with those funky hiking poles that we like making fun of and I think we could find ourselves joining their ranks, given the chance (sans the poles). We didn't make it to the ice caves either which would have required a bit more preparation in terms of food and clothing and probably a guide but it's definitely on the list of things to revisit when we get through our current list of places to go.

Travel, good food, good friends. These are a few of my favourite things.

The big bike ride

Every now and again you get it into your head that you want to try something and even though the logical thing to do is to try it when the conditions are good and you're more likely to enjoy it, sometimes that doesn't happen and you go ahead and do it anyway. And enjoy it more because of the challenges presented by weather, wind and the sheer silliness of it all. So it was with the Big Bike Ride of last week where Jens, Thomas and I rode home from work.


Not really the actual start but a lucky photo!

For some background we normally drive to and from work on the very decent German roads and the spectacularly fun autobahn. The trip is exactly 50km by road and takes us about 40 minutes. This particular Thursday that we rode home came after the hottest day of the year so far at 35°C, was forecast to also be 35°C with afternoon thunder storms. The route we took is a little more direct as we got to utilise the extensive bike path system which took us past some lovely little lakes and through some very soothing green forests. Not quite so exciting and stressful as the autobahn concrete ribbon. All in all the ride was about 40km which is exactly 35km longer than I've ridden for a very long time and probably 25km further than I've ridden since being in Leipzig and riding around to all of the various lakes that we've been to.

The Route

It had been hot and humid all day and the storm clouds were brewing as we left the office. We escaped just before the storm hit Thalheim and managed to stay ahead of the leading edge of the worst of it for about 35km. Of course the leading edge of a thunder storm (and a particularly energetic one) is usually full of strong gusting winds coming from all directions, in this case mostly as a persistent headwind no matter which way we rode.


A storm was a brewing
So maybe it was a silly idea. At least we enjoyed ourselves and managed to see a bit of Germany that most people on the autobahn don't have a clue exists. Maybe next time though without the wind and the thorough soaking from the tropical rain at the end of the ride?