Second trip to Germany!

As Monty Python said: “and now, for something completely different!”.

This was another road trip because we went with François car. Ok, let me begin for the beginning. We were Maija and François, and Emma and me. We went to Germany by car, by François car.

This post will be really different than the first trip’s post. In the second one there is another type of information and enjoying and it was shorter, so I won’t explain you everything.

The first morning we went to Aachen. The leitmotiv was the Lindt Factory. Apparently you can visit it but we went straight to the store, and bought... some chocolate. Oh my God, I haven’t seen before so much chocolate together at the same place and at the same time! It was funny. And after we visited the city and we realised that something important happened there... I was suspecting something... Come on! Charlemagne was crowned there! In the afternoon we went to Düsseldorf which is not a really nice city but we went shopping (without shop anything) for a while and we had a really nice and good dinner there. After it we spent the night at Motel One (double is the word, and anything else is too much information).

The day after we went to Köln which is a really nice city, but the weather was awful, so we didn’t enjoyed very much anything... in the evening we bought some beers and something else and we had our own party at the hostel. Oh yes, we shared a four-bed room. And it was really funny because we were a bit drunk and we were telling jokes. Fun is the word!

The last day we visited Bonn, which is a really nice city. And before going to Vienna was the place where Beethoven (not Mozart honey :P) lived. So we visited Beethoven’s house which was nice too. In the afternoon we went to Maastrich, after eating a typical German bratswurst in Bonn. Maastrich is nice, but the weather was awful again. At the end my Godchild called me and I was really happy about it (and to share this moment). We arrived quite early to Louvain-la-Neuve but everything was closed already, so Emma and I invented a salad for dinner, and it was the end of the nice trip!

PD: I want to apologize because I only have a few photos (and I know that you don’t want me to show your photos...), so we’ll explain you guys everything that you want (almost).

Germany is under construction (III: Berlin)

I don’t want a bore you, so I’ll try to summarize Berlin in one new topic.

Day one:

I’ll show you the photos soon (more than the ones that are here now) and I’ll explain everything that you want, now I’ll just write a list of the places that we visited with a little explanation (and some funny adventures!).

Brandenburg Tor: ok, it’s big, and it has something green on the top... anything else? I don’t know the story, sorry.

“The Place where Love Parade take place and there is a Golden Woman”: basically it’s a golden woman at the top of a column. You will notice that German people have a fixation with the golden or green sculptures over the famous buildings. Between those monuments there is another one which was build in honour of the Russians soldiers that died more or less over there, with a couple of Panzers next to it.

After it we saw the Spanish Embassy which is one of the buildings with Nazi structure. It survived at the bombings of the WW II, and it was a present of Hitler to Franco (so nice...). The Nordic Embassy (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland) is quite weird, it seems a sauna: everything is made of wood (outside). After it we had lunch at Potsdamerplatz (I was really hungry), and in the afternoon we visited the Saint Nikolai district, the Philarmonic building and the History of Music Museum (only a quick look outside them). We came back at the hostel at nine. So we had been walking and visiting Berlin for more than ten hours. I should be careful with it because I was completely exhausted, I ate my pizza in a few seconds and I slept from 21:00 to 8:00. I really needed it, but in the following days I’ll bring with me some food (sugar, energy) with me.

Day two:

The day after was so much better, because I took care of myself and my eating troubles. Apparently the weather was good at the beginning of the day: apparently. We tried again to go to the Bundestag (ex-Reichstag) but the queue was amazing again, so we decided to go and visit something else. The first thing that we visited was the “Monument to the Holocaust”. It is a big square full of grey rectangular prisms of different sizes. It has a small museum dedicated to how it was built, but we were there too early so we kept on walking. After it we went to the shopping part of Berlin (one of them I guess). It was in Berlin west which is really (I mean really) different from Berlin east. After do not shopping for a while we took the U-something and went to have lunch at Berlin east which is so much cheaper than west. Actually, Berlin east is cheaper than Belgium and maybe cheaper than Spain.

After the lunch we wanted to visit another museum, it’s called “The Terror Topography”. It was supposed to be built at the same place where the SS headquarter was. And it was started to being built more than ten years ago but they have been having funding problems so there’s no museum. Instead of this there is a free outdoor museum. This means a couple of walls full of pictures and explanations (in German). I don’t speak German so I have no idea about the explanations but the pictures were quite clear. I won’t post any of them here because they make me shudder: if someone wants to see them just ask me.

The next one was the Checkpoint Charlie museum. As everybody knows Berlin had a quite big wall from 1961 to 1989. It was divided in two big pieces, the east one it was the Russian part and the west one was the American, British and French part. The wall surrounded the west part with the purpose of not allow people from the Berlin east cross to the west part. There were several Checkpoints but this one is special because the American tanks faced Russian tanks here. You can read (there and in my brand new t-shirt) “you are leaving the American sector”. History apart they have a museum here explaining a bit the story of the wall and the story of several people who crossed from east to west. They used suitcases, hand-made scuba equipment, cars Isseta and other ways to escape. The feeling that you have in this museum is that everybody was the “bad of the movie”. And probably they are right, and I don’t want to start an argument about who was worse than whom. I really hope that everybody who is reading this lines agree with me that in a war there are no good ones. At the end of the exhibition there is a special place for the falling of the communism along Europe. It is known that the end of the wall happened at the same time that the end of the communism, and I guess that because of that they give at it a lot of importance.

Okay, I must confess that it was our museum day. The next turn was for the “Jewish Museum”. The price was the half of the “Checkpoint Charlie Museum” which was pretty seedy. But this one was so much better organized, with security controls. And it was our first funny adventure. They had a magnetic arch (sorry for the straight translation) like in the airports. So we took of our bag-packs and jackets and put them into the x-ray. They used those machines to check if we had something else (my belt for example) and they were a bit surprised with Eric’s bag: they found two knives there! Funny: he didn’t remember that they were there. He has his tent here so they were for the camping stuff, no problem but a bit shocking. And let me talk about the museum. It’s a really strange building. It is divided in three axis: the axis of the continuity, the axis of the exile, and the axis of the holocaust. The first one (and the biggest one) ends on an exhibition which goes along the history and the remarkable Jewish people from the biblical times until now. I learned something interesting. It is said that Jewish are good in barging and there’s the myth than most of them are (or were) moneylender, at least in the medieval and posterior ages. They were coexisting with the Christians (don’t talk about the Inquisition please...) but they weren’t allowed to work in several jobs and because of that they started to trade a lot because they couldn’t built things (not because of the skills), and they became good in that stuff. After it, and because they had money they started to became moneylenders and receive interests. This was the point, because apparently Christians were not allowed to receive interests of money! And I don’t want to become boring, so just say that this exhibition goes from Moses to Einstein (at least). The building has a weird architecture and you are walking and changing directions apparently without change the level and at the end you are at the beginning. The second axis (the axis of the exile) is a short one and it ends in a garden full of rectangular prisms and in the top of them there are olive trees. The last axis, the holocaust one, ends in the “holocaust tower”. I didn’t know what to expect of it. We entered, and they closed the door. It’s a huge, cold, dark and grey tower and it’s completely empty. They shape is quite strange; more or less it’s a triangle. The feeling inside is weird and I suppose that if I would be able to read German and read everything that was before the tower everything would be different.

In the afternoon we visited a couple of German graveyards. They are really nice. I don’t know what are your (people who are reading this lines) graveyards but in Spain, where I come from, we have a lot of “wall graveyards”: people is not buried on the floor, the coffins are putted in several spaces on a wall. I don’t know how to explain it, but for us is a bit weird to see a graveyard with a lot of different gravestones and trees, grass with this melancholic atmosphere. It was nice. And it was our last visit of the day.


Day three:

The first thing that we did was go to a garage to check the car (maybe we shouldn’t, right Eric?). And we went to a really nice park in the middle of Berlin. Sorry, it will be a really nice park in a month, now is too brown without leaves on the trees and the grass is a bit spoiled. But still, it’s a really nice park. After it we went to another one, the “Victoria Park”. It is situated at the highest place in Berlin. This hillock (because it’s small) is called “The Hill of the Cross”, Kreuzberg. It is nice and the district with the same name is more or less nice (considering that it is in Berlin east) but it seem to be dead.

After lunch we had another adventure. I don’t know how the subways or undergrounds work in your respective countries but in Barcelona before jump on the train there is a barrier which is opened with the ticket that you buy before. In Berlin there is no barrier. Apparently you have to buy the ticket (it is not easy and the Spanish instructions don’t help really much) and after buy it, validate it. We didn’t know anything... so we were buying the cheapest tickets and validating only some of them. But at the last day I decided to buy the proper one and validate it properly too. But Eric didn’t. When we were in the train a weird guy (he looked as a gang guy) was showing something and everybody was showing their tickets. When Eric showed his ticket the guy asked him to jump out of the train. So we jumped out, and you know... we are from Spain so it was quite easy to look like stupid tourists. He was supposed to pay a fine of forty euros. But you know... we were tourists and we didn’t know anything, and one of us had the proper ticket... so the guy was really nice and forgive us. We just bought another ticket, and that was our adventure!

After the adventure (it was our last trip by train there) we went to pick the car (and don’t ask about it). And let’s go to Potsdam! I really want to apologize to Eric because I was sleeping when he was trying to drive towards Potsdam and I was supposed to help him... I’m sorry! And Potsdam is really nice. It’s a different town than Berlin, a small town, and there took place something important with the allies. It is a city full of rich people (considering the houses that we saw, the cars and the motorcycles) and it has something that reminds to Holland, actually it has a Dutch district. And it has a couple of small lakes with really nice sights where we were having a nice walk, with nice conversation and some funny pictures. Again I won’t show the most funny picture here... but just ask me about it. And it was the end of our trip.

Eric a bit stressed with the camera and the cell phone next to the lake in Potsdam.

Me watching the really nice lake in Potsdam. At the other side you can see the nice houses.

A Baroque (I don't agree... but they say it) building in Potsdam, and Eric shouting a bit...

Day four:

More than nine hundred kilometres, stop at Aachen to have lunch, and come back to Louvain-la-Neuve. It has been a really nice and interesting trip, maybe a bit tiring but it’s worth trip. And I was really happy to come back to Louvain-la-Neuve. I was missing too much...

Germany is under construction (II: Leipzig)

They are rude, really rude. You can ask Eric for it: he just wanted a map of the city and he asked: “gutten tag, I want a map please”, and the answer was: “a map of what!?”. But apparently is a problem of the Saxonia region.

And of course, Leipzig is under construction too: every square, every street, every monument. And talking about monuments, I think that Eric likes “Leipzig monuments”, and as we say in Spain “until here I can read” (sorry for the stupid translation of “hasta aquí puedo leer”).

After lunch we drove to Berlin, we arrived there... without a map. So, again stealing wireless to try to find where we were and where we had to go! At the end we found the hostel. We were in a eight people room, but we were only three people: Eric, me and a German guy who went to Spain (to Lloret de Mar, of course). We had our own shower and the room was ok, so we went to have dinner somewhere.

I had my first bad Berlin-experience. It’s a huge city and it’s a dark city in the night. I was driving through Berlin and Eric was guiding me with the map (he’s better than me with maps) but it was raining a bit, everything was dark and we where at Berlin east. We ended at a Mexican (and expensive restaurant), and I was complaining that Berlin it’s too big for me... I was a bit disappointed. I was hoping that the day after everything was going to improve.

Germany is under construction (I: Frankfurt)

Well people, as you know Eric and me went to Germany last week. We left last saturday. It was quite early in the morning (for some of you it was almost midnight). We left at 5:30 from Louvain-la-Neuve and we arrived at Frankfurt at 9:30.

The first problem was: where is the f***ing hotel? Frankfurt is not Louvain-la-Neuve! It’s a big city, so we try to find an Information Office and catch a map. After it we were a bit more situated and we could find the Hotel. I’ll explain later how the room was...

The first visit was at the Goethe Haus. I hope that everybody knows who Goethe was: the guy who wrote Faust. Ok, he was something else: a posh. He had an amazing “haus”, with three floors (and an additional floor for the servants). If I understood well the German (probably not) when he was born he was already rich, so he hadn’t a difficult life. Ok, if some of you know something about this man and I’m wrong, I’m sorry ok?

After it we visited a nice square with old buildings. I must say that the concept of “old buildings” in Germany is quite weird, because almost everything is restored. They are really (I mean: REALLY) good building cars, but not restoring buildings. You can notice that it is not a real old building from a couple of kilometres far. And in this cute square we ate some typical German sausages and frites, and drink some beer. We spent the rest of the day walking through the city. It’s an important financial city and it has a good combination of skyscrapers and old buildings.

The German weather is not very nice and we were quite tired, so we went to rest a bit at the hotel (with a cheap pizza with us). We asked for a wireless connection, but... they had problems with the date. So we had to drive through the city searching a wireless connection because there was the Barça – Madrid match! (It finished 1 -1). And after it we went again to the hotel. Ok, we had a double bed... yep, me and Eric sleeping together... don’t worry, it was a huge bed and we didn’t touch each other in the whole night!!