Ich liebe Deutschland - a retrospective, May 9, 2006

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I did manage to write a couple of posts about my Berlin trip in May 2006 - Enjoy!

This morning, it occurred to me that I should be blogging about my travels! As I walked back from Potsdamer Platz here in Berlin, and saw five pieces of what used to be the Berlin Wall, I realized two things: a) how lucky I am, and b) that I should be recording this for posterity! So here goes, and this will be short because of my terminal jet lag...

We arrived yesterday in Berlin for my company's Annual Meeting - sounds fancy (and it is), but I'm partly responsible for the planning, so this is more work than pleasure! After getting no sleep on the seven hour flight over, I was ready for a nap. We are staying at the Hotel Adlon, which overlooks the Brandenburger Tor (that's German for Brandenburg Gate), which is the former gate between East and West Germany. The Hotel Adlon is on the east side, and I have heard from those people that were in East Berlin before the wall came down that there have been quite a lot of changes here over the past several years.

I think Berlin has gotten a bad rap as being a city that is modern and severe...but I have found that while this is true of certain city blocks, there is also a surprising charm to much of the city. On the western side of the gate, a long stretch of green grass divides the two sides of the road, and as you travel down, you come upon the Reichstag, Berlin's government headquarters. The Reichstag sits in a rather open piece of land and boasts some signs of the city's former military glory in the form of old tanks, now monumentalized.

To the south, as we walked this morning to Potsdamer Platz, we passed the new Holocaust memorial...strange but true fact that Germany is host to one of the world's best Holocaust museums in the world. I remember the first time I flew into Germany, feeling an incredible sadness over some of the horrors that occurred here. So it is only fitting that they have a memorial. The memorial is quite interesting...it is a whole block of various sized charcoal grey stones...they are all rectangular in length, but all different sizes...I plan to look into why that is.

Anyway, those are some random thoughts on my trip so far. I will try to make them more cohesive in the coming days, if I have a moment or two to write once the conference begins!

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