Don't Mention Ze...

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...Football...

On to Germany! Home of autobahns, fast cars, bratwurst and beer! What more could a bloke ask for. As a result of our random change in travel plans we wound up in southern Germany instead of in the Czech Republic so we decided that the nearest and most interesting place to Zurich was Stuttgart.

Now most people think of Stuttgart and wonder why you'd want to go there. Well, the answer, when it's late November, is mineral baths. Yep. Mineral baths. We came across the border from Switzerland and travelled through a countryside not unlike that through which we had just been, but without the snow. Winter doesn't seem to have hit southern Germany as hard as Switzerland. Many of the trees still have leaves, there's no sign of snow. In fact it rained on us. How unbelievably rude! We spent our first afternoon in Stuttgart just having a wander round the town. Most of the city was levelled during the war as the Allies flattened all of the heavy industry in the area so there's not a lot left in downtown that's more than fifty years old! However, we wandered through the Markthalle (always a fun experience!) and admired the baked goods and meat products (well, I did...!) before heading up to the nearby Kanstadt for lunch. Kanstadt is, well, Farmers. It's pretty cool and has a most excellent restaurant in which one is charged for the contents of one's plate by weight. It's good value and one can get a lot of food for not very much. And it's good food too! After sitting in the warm department store for a bit we took a wander down the Konigstrasse to Schillerplatz and admired the statue to the 12th century German poet Schiller and the stunning Neues Schloss in the background. It seems to be one of the few old things that remain in the city, a 17th century Baroque pile in the middle of downtown. After dining at one of our two local Turkish places, we nodded off early - a couple of late nights up with Bill and Anna and we were both a touch knackered!

The following morning, after a rousing German brekky of schokomuesli (chocolate muesli!) and coffee we braved the weather and walked down Konrad-Adenaur Strasse to the trainstation from whence we rode the S-bahn (not to be mixed up with the U-bahn!) out to Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion to visit the home of Mercedes-Benz (or DaimlerChrysler as it's now known!) The museum here was built only a few years ago and is a really fantastic space to visit. Over eight floors it takes the viewer through the initial works of Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach and Karl Benz and their creation of the worlds first automobiles, vans, trucks, powerboats, motorbikes (!) and every other mode of transport under the sun. As one progresses down through the museum one is treated to an explanation of the origin of the name “Mercedes.” She was the daughter of Emil Jellinek, an Austrian “Gentleman Driver” who raced Daimler cars and when a new range was commissioned he asked that it be named after her. So there you go. One can see the oldest Mercedes in existence (owned by the US billionaire Vanderbilt!) as well as examples of the cream the design bureaux of Daimler and Benz could come up with. Some of the older cars are absolutely stunning. Further along one sees the development of Mercedes into the cars we know today through the Depression-era merger of Daimler and Benz through the war to the era of the 300SLR and the Mercedes Gullwing - the two sexiest cars they ever built - and then on to the sixties and seventies, when all Mercs were hideous box cars to the present day, when the Kompressors, the A-Class and the C-Class have all been successful and pretty cool to boot. There's also a great display of all the racing cars Mercedes have ever run, including the McLaren Mercedes Formula One car and the Silver Arrows which won LeMans when Mercs came back to racing after a fifty year absence. Alongside the main galleries are thematic displays of some of Daimler and Benz' more interesting and practical creations - one of the first double decker London buses, an Austrian ten-tonne mobile post office and the first of Mercedes Benz' newest luxury touring coaches are all in a gallery of transporters; there is a gallery of touring cars and stationwagons, one of emergency vehicles and one of celebrity cars. This last one has some stunners in it - Princess Diana, Ringo Starr, the Sultan of Morocco (first monarch to buy a Daimler in 1896!), Kaiser Wilhelm II and Emperor Hirohito all drove Mercedes. The best one though is the Popemobile! Just for a laugh though, but it's still kinda cool.

So the Mercedes museum was really rather good but while we had been inside and toasty warm, the weather had turned for the worse and it got very cold and very wet. We missed our train back into the city by about five minutes and so sat in the cold for half an hour for the next one. This was all for the good though as we cruised back to the Hauptbannhof for lunch (bratwurst unt baguette mit senf unt ketchup) before heading back out to Bad Cannstat to the Bad-Leuze, the mineral baths. After much faffing around working out what was going on, we sat soaking for two hours in the warmed mineral baths and left feeling remarkably refreshed and warm from the inside out. I can heartily recommend the stop if you're ever in the neighbourhood, especially at this time of year! Just whatever you do, don't drink the water out of the fountain at the entrance. Trust me on this. You can and you're supposed to, that does not mean you should!

Turkish again for dinner (it's cheap and good!) and we had the most excellent felafel at Artos on Charlottenstrasse (again, if you're ever in the neighbourhood) before I retired to have a job interview by phone from Wellington! I'm sure by this point everyone knows the outcome, so I won't repeat it here. Next morning, after more hearty German brekky we walked down to the hauptbannhof and jumped aboard the train to Munchen - home of beer, more beer and beer halls! I'm sure it has other merits though, and that is what we shall explore. And the beer, of course. What? Did you think I wasn't going to?! Yeesh, some people.

Turns out Munich, while on a similar latitude to Stuttgart was incredibly cold. Like inexplicably cold. The morning forecasts on CNN predicted a temperature range of between 0 and 2 degrees with a wind chill of up to - 8! COLD! So that throwaway comment earlier regarding the lack of winter in southern Germany, pure rubbish frankly. Not great beer drinking weather sadly, so I only managed a couple, but they were very good. Germans really do make excellent beer. Excellent.

We kicked off our visit to Munich with a handy dandy walking tour thanks to the Lonely Planet. We strolled into town through the impressive medieval Karlstor in the direction of the Marienplatz. We stopped off at the Michelskirche, Germany's oldest and most impressive Renaissance church
and really enjoyed being out of the wind and admiring some of the stunning sculptures that line the walls. Further along we left the Kaufinger Strasse and ducked in behind the main street to see the Frauenkirche, with it's trendy (in the 16th century) onion domes. On the outside, a little silly but the interior was quite stunning. One of the real highlights, despite being covered in scaffolding and men with vacuum cleaners, was the tomb of Ludwig I of Bavaria, one of the last kings or Bavaria. Ludwig II was the crazy one who built Neuchwanstein. He's not buried there. They're not that fond of him! Finally we arrived at the Marienplatz under the stunning gothic monstrosity that is the Neues Rathaus (New Town Hall. I've always liked the fact that the German word for a building full of politicians and bureaucrats was called a Rathaus!) and spent ages just wandering around looking at this most hideous of buildings. It's really rather spectacular but quite quite over the top.

The following day it was still snowing and we were starting to wonder if we'd be able to fly to Berlin. We headed out in the snow and walked down to the far end of Munich's downtown to the Deutsches Museum. Billed as an interactive science museum, it didn't quite live up to that, but still made for an interesting stop. We looked at all sorts of random things - airplanes, sailboats, water powered machines, smelting, the history of mining in Germany, weirs, dams, bridges. It took up most of a morning and was really quite interesting. Sadly they didn't run the electrical discharge display, since that looked really rather cool. After the museum the weather had improved slightly so we had a walk around the Viktualienmarkt, Munich's largest and oldest food market before stopping for felafel (it's new in Germany, they're all rather taken with it. It doesn't seem to have taken off with Turkish places anywhere else, including Turkey!) and wandering down to the Hofbrauhaus. It wouldn't have been right to stop in at this icon of German brewing and frankly it was as hideous as I expected. There was even an oom-pah band in the corner. Teehee. I'll stick with Augustiner in future I think.

We headed out for Munich airport the following morning. Al's Top Travel Tip for Munich: try and find a cheaper way out there than the train. NINE EUROS! NINE! EACH! Crikey. It costs 2.10 from Berlin Tegel to anywhere in Berlin! Which segues us nicely into a discussion of what we did in Berlin. First off, I will say for Air Berlin that they are singly the worst budget airline in the world. WORST. They gave us coffee and snacks during the flight and chocolate when we got off the plane. We had assigned seats, helpful staff and they didn't manage to lose our baggage. Worst budget airline ever. They're more like a proper airline. It was great! Fly Air Berlin if you're ever in the neighbourhood.

So it was cold and damp by the time we got into downtown Berlin but we were thrilled to find our hostel a few hundred metres from the Museum Island, the Unter den Linden and the Oranienburger Strasse. The last one was the most important as it seems to have become the central eatery for this part of the city. There were some fantastic looking restaurants, but we settled on Tex-mex and managed dinner for a mere 14 euros. Dinnertime happy hour. Brought us back a couple of days later!

The following morning dawned bright and clear so we set out intending to visit the rather famous Berlin Zoo. With a couple of stops on the way mind you. So we walked down to the Unter den Linden, with it's many denuded lime trees (it's not as pretty as it should be at this time of year) and ambled past the Humboldt University toward the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag. The Brandenburg Gate, concealed by underground construction work, was something of a surprise. I've always been used to pictures of it standing in glorious isolation at the end of the road, but since the fall of the wall, buildings have approached all the way up to it's edges and really made it into a gate proper. It's rather fabulous and I cannot fathom what Napoleon thought he was doing dismantling the Quadriga and sending it off to Paris. Good thing they gave it back!

I had a little moment playing “East Berlin, West Berlin” before we headed under the gate and up the steps of the seat of the German parliament - the Reichstag - with it's Norman Foster-designed crown. It was bitterly cold but we decided that since the sun was still out we should go up to the dome. So we joined a queue with a few really underdressed Australians and a lot of Germans. It seemed that most of the tourists in Berlin were German. Here we learned something about Germans and queues. Now if the stereotype is to be believed, Germans should be almost as good at queueing as the English. Turns out they're not. They're really impatient! People were constantly walking up to the front of the queue to see what the wait was and then walking back, having a yarn with their companions and wandering off, only to return and rejoin the queue later. Odd.

Anyway, we rode the lift up after yet another manhandling by German security people (this is a real theme for me in Germany!) to see the dome. It had a great little photo exhibit of the history of the building from it's inception with the founding of the Imperial Reich in the 1800s through the 30s, the war, the Wall and the return of the parliament from Bonn in the 90s. From the top of the dome one could see for miles and I can understand why the guidebook said Berlin is 8 times the size of Paris! It's a really spectacular structure, and while it does look somewhat incongruous given the sort of neo-classical architecture of the rest of the building, the dome is a great addition and I for one am glad to have climbed it and braved the cold. We saw that the weather was closing in and decided that the zoo would wait to see if we had another nice day (which we didn't!) and instead we would go down into town. We walked in the direction of Potsdamer Platz past the new memorial, remembering the murder of the European Jews. This large and somewhat peculiar memorial is a series of large cubes of differing heights arranged in rows inside a large square. It doesn't mean a great deal from the outside but the effect when one walks through it is wholly disorienting and by the time one reaches the centre, the walls loom up over you and despite the fact that you can always see a way out, it seems like an awfully long way away. That's what it felt like to me, anywho. Perhaps that was the idea, perhaps not.

Futher along we arrived at the Potsdamer Platz. This enormous square, built by Kaiser Bill to facilitate the easy mobilisation of troops stood almost at the heart of Berlin during the Wall period and was completely empty. Since 1989 it has been the largest construction site in Europe and now modernity rules over the enormous square. One would have no idea of it's former emptiness if not for a small section of wall with photos of the old Potsdamer Platz. We wandered around the buildings and admired the shiny Deutschebahn HQ that lords over the square as well as having a stroll through one of Berlin's many Christmas markets. After lunch we looked in on the Sony Centre where they have an English language cinema to see what was on, just in case, and then headed down to the Topography of Terror museum.

This outdoor exhibit (not a great plan in late November...!) sits of at 8 Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, once the home of the administration of both the SS and the Gestapo. There have been plans to build a proper museum and memorial on this site for several years and only now are they just beginning to get to work after the last one fell through. The museum looks back on the origins of both organisations, their activities and their methods of operation. It's far from pleasant reading but still interesting to see how things came to be how they were. It made for an interesting introduction particularly to some of the material we encountered in the Jewish Museum the following day. It has a really fascinating exhibit on prominent members of German society who actively resisted Nazism and would up in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse for their efforts. It was quite a sobering memorial to people that we would otherwise have been ignorant of. It also remembers many of the men who died at the hands of the Gestapo after the Berchtesgaden bomb plot in 1944 that missed Hitler by a hair's breadth. I remain impressed at the openness of Germany to it's history and the preparedness of the government and people to accept that these things need to be remembered.

There was an annoying begging woman and child in the Topography of Terror Museum (this riles me quite a lot at sites like this!) and she appeared to pursue us (and a number of other sightseers) out of the rain and into the mall at Potsdamer Platz. I asked her if she spoke Maori (with my shocking Kiwi accent I might add) and she looked really confounded and wandered off, only to be rounded up and given the bum's rush by mall security. So you see, the cunning plan developed in Egypt actually works. My Top Travel Tips aren't all nonsense you know.

Finally, we found a way to escape the miserable weather and headed back to the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz and saw Stardust, an excellent adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel starring Claire Danes, Robert deNiro and Charlie Cox, with an outstanding cameo by Ricky Gervais. If it's out in NZ and you haven't seen it, I can heartily recommend it. It's a lot of fun. It's the first time we've done it on this trip and it's amazing what a sense of normalcy there is in seeing movie previews in a language you understand. I can't commend the German's enough though - I can kind of order things in German and say thanks and stuff and they were quite happy to play along with my pretending to speak German, but when they confounded me, they were almost without exception able to explain in English. Germans really are really quite lovely people. They've been as good as the Swiss, the Italians and the Greeks. I think it might be one of the perks of travelling in the off season, as customer service people aren't as annoyed by stupid tourists.

Anyway, back on track Al, back on track. It was late and free night at the Pergamom Museum (always a bonus for the budget traveller!) so we decided that it would be wrong not to go and off we went. Arriving at one minute after six, when the freeness kicks in, meant that we were in a mostly quiet museum for the first half hour or so. It gave us an excellent opportunity to wander the main hall, admire the Pergamom Altar and it's fabulous friezes and muse over why Turkey hasn't demanded that they give the thing back. It's an impressive structure and the work that has gone into restoring and conserving it is immense, especially after it's destruction during the war. The altar is not the only gem in the museum, they are also blessed with a fantastic collection from ancient Babylon, including the famous Ishtar Gate. Much of the monument in the museum is a reconstruction and it's easy to see the original tiles, but it must have been a spectacular entrance to what must have been an amazing town. A couple of scale models barely even begin to hint at it's greatness. There are some stunning bas reliefs and sculptures from Babylon and more from Persepolis - some of the brick paintings of Darius' Immortal Guard that didn't wind up in the Louvre were probably the best of the collection. Altogether a fabulous evening out at one of the best collections in Europe. Seriously, it's worth the visit!

The next day we tried to sleep in despite our roommates best efforts and left the hostel for a long walk down to the heart of East Berlin to the Jewish Museum. We had plans for that afternoon too, but frankly they didn't eventuate as we were in the Jewish Museum for FIVE HOURS. Yep. It's an outstanding museum....memorial....archive....thing. I don't really know how to describe it. Daniel Liebskind has built an amazing building where no wall is parallel, the floor's not flat, nothing is regular and there isn't a long straight wall in the place. He says that the whole thing is open to interpretation but his idea was to include “voids” where the visitor isn't reading anything or seeing anything and is just able to think I guess. I won't go into too much detail about what's inside but it traces the history of Jewish communities in Germany from their earliest appearance in Mainz and Worms (Pronounced Vurms. Seriously.) through their development into important communities until pogroms in the Middle Ages ruined things and their rebuilding of their culture in Germany through the Enlightenment before it was turned on it's head in the post-Weimar days of Adolf and cronies and then into the present day where the museum considers immigration in general and the idea of assimilation. I think one of the things that we both really enjoyed about the museum is that it largely dwells on the successes of the Jewish community in Germany, it's great personalities and their contribution to Germany as a nation. What it doesn't do is dwell heavily on the Holocaust. Believe it or not, the Jewish museum in Berlin existed before the war but it's founding in 1938 was, in some respects, a response to the actions of the National Socialists. The museum also talks about some of the intricacies of the religion and goes some way to explaining things like kosher and what Orthodox Jews do with their house keys on Shabbat. You want to know? Shabbat forbids carrying things including, for example, one's house keys. So someone invented the Shabbat belt, a loop of fabric where both ends clip onto ones house key, thus forming a buckle. At that point one is wearing ones house key not carrying it and this couldn't violate Shabbat as walking around with ones pants around ones ankles would be silly. Brilliant eh?

We had a pretty quiet evening after wandering back past Checkpoint Charlie, of which I've realised we didn't take a single picture. Honestly, it's not that interesting. There are more interesting places as far as the wall goes, Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburger Tor for two. Mostly it's just one of those places full of people selling fake Russian memorabilia and just not that interesting. We skipped the museum there this time, maybe in the future, but it doesn't come that highly recommended. The one we went to the next day was, on the other hand, rather good.

Our last day in Berlin was a bit random really, a bit of a mishmash of things to see and do but mostly it was wall related. Wall you say? Well, duh, that enormous thing that divided the city for 30-odd years. It's quite an impressive structure and the decision by the FDR to build the thing (supported only half heartedly by the Soviets!) is one of the defining moments in modern German history. Having skipped the museum at Checkpoint Charlie we decided to go to the Berlin Mauer Dokumentazionzentrum. (Berlin Wall Archive, if you will!) on the north side of West Berlin. It was set up when, in 1961, the Reconciliation Church of Berlin was walled off from it's parishioners. Yep - the wall went straight across the front steps of the church, leaving it's pastor and parishioners in the West and the building in the East. Really quite mad. And then they blew the church up. Good grief!

The first thing we saw was a doco made in the late 60s when the FDR were completing the second part of the wall project, making it a proper fortified border with two walls, barbed wire, spotlights and watchtowers around most of the western part of the city. A GDR helicopter flew the entire length of the wall taking a continuous film of charting it's path across the city. Seeing places like the Potsdamerplatz and the Brandenburger Tor way back then and to see how far they've come in less than 20 years is quite astonishing. It's mostly the phenomenal wealth of photos that are held by this little establishment that make it so extraordinary. Only a few are on display but some of the most poignant ones are of Berliners waving at their neighbours across the wall and frankly looking a bit bemused by the whole thing. There's some really interesting basic history, great for people like us who have the Wall in living memory, but only really the end of it, as well as a great collection of archival footage of the wall going up, people escaping across it and footage taken by the British, French and Americans of their parts of the wall. One more note about the wall, just for interests sake. For the Wellingtonians, you know down by the Old Bank where there are bricks in the road showing the outline of the remains of Plimmer's Ark, well they've done that in Berlin as well. A little double row of bricks runs the length of the city tracing the route of the wall from beginning to end. Amazing eh?

We jumped on a tram and rode the length of the Danzigerstrasse all the way out to the East Side Gallery. This is the largest stretch of wall still standing and has been an open air museum for artists since before the wall came down. There's some fabulous graffiti art on it, but most of the artworks have been destroyed by tourists writing all over the thing. Still, it's quite an impressive thing and one can still see in the wasteland that runs alongside the well where development has yet to catch up with the open spaces! We stopped off at Alexanderplatz, under the TV Tower in the heart of East Berlin for a bit of a wander and then returned to the warmth of our hostel before we went out to brave the weather for our last meal in Germany. The last dinner was outstanding. We went back down to the Museum Island and went to the funfair. I had a half metre bratwurst for dinner and it was outstanding. Jen had gluhwein and was also well pleased. It was all very German and frankly quite good. A great way to end a great stay in a great town.

Now after our brilliant not-budget flight in on Air Berlin I was expecting some retartitude from easyJet when we flew up to Berlin and they frankly failed to achieve the lofty heights of incompetence I had expected. That was, aside from dealing with one stupid passenger who left a bag in the lounge, the easiest flight ever. Check in took all of 5 minutes, for the first time I didn't get manhandled by a German airport worker and when we arrived in Paris our bags were in the first 10 on the carousel. Easiest flight ever. If only they were all like that!

So we're in Paris now! Exciting! Amazingly I've just covered for you the best part of a months holiday in a few pages. It's pretty vague and I'm sure these things are making less and less sense as I continue writing them. Bear with me though, there are only three more to come. Then I'll stop, I promise. I also promise to get the France one up as soon as we arrive in Lisbon. Promise.

Till then, you can all count the days till we get back. 20-odd days and counting.
Talk soon,
Al and Jen

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Photos

Downtown Stuttgart
The Schloss!

The Mercedes Museum
Stunning eh?

The 300 SLR
Best car they ever built. Ever.

The Original Popemobile
Brilliant!

Famous Cars
That's Kaiser Bill's on the left and Hirohito's on the right!

Frauenkircher
with fashionable Onion Domes!

Munich Neues Rathaus
The New Town Hall in all it's Gothic glory!

Altes Rathaus
in the background. Hideous fountain to the fore.

The Eye Lion
Munich has a parade of these things. This is the ugliest!

Me in Munich
with snow. Yep, it was that cold.

Hofbrauhaus
Interior. Gaudy?

Brandenburger Tor
Lovely!

The Reichstag
Main entrance. The capitol reads: Dem Deutsches Volk - The German People.

Us in the dome
Magnificent piece of Norman Foster. Love it.

The Jewish Memorial
Really it has to be seen in person, but maybe you can see what I'm on about?

Potsdamer Platz
Glittering in all it's modernity!

The Unter den Linden
or "Under the Limes" in English. Prettier at night!

The Ishtar Gate
Babylon must have been amazing!

The New Synagogue
that still somehow managed to escape the National Socialists. I still don't know how.

Der Berliner Mauer
The reconstructed wall. Imagine that as part of your daily life.

The East Side Gallery
An iconic image of the wall...

The East Berlin TV Tower
Note glowing golden cross. A legacy of Swedish engineers having a poke at the Communists. Teehee.

Me with a 1/2 metre bratwurst
Easy. Good too.

Jen with gluhwein
Good she says and warmer for it!

Comments

[Cielle]

Cold eh??
-2, that's not cold. When it's negative 10 plus wind chill, then you get to moan that it's cold. Sounds like your having fun. Keep it up :)