Miniatur Wunderland, Hamburg

On March 31, 2014May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany11 Comments

A number of my Blog-Friends have posted about Miniatur Wunderland, but I didn’t know it existed the first time I visited Hamburg. I wish I had known, because it’s awesome and I want to go back sometime. The place is so incredibly detailed, there’s no way I saw absolutely everything. I’ll give you some examples…

The exhibit is broken into sections. There’s a Hamburg section, an America section, a Scandinavia section, Bavaria, Switzerland, and a large portion for the fictional town of Knuffingen. One of the most amazing parts is the Knuffingen airport, a large and completely automatic airport with planes landing and taxiing to the gate every few minutes. Oh, and every fifteen minutes, “night” falls and the lights change.

I took some video of one of the landings, because it was amazing.

There are also lots of smaller things happening. While I was there, this plane caught fire and tiny fire trucks raced over two it for about ten minutes…

The imaginative people who put the exhibit together aren’t shy about nudity either.

Speaking of the people behind the exhibit, they have a fairly sophisticated control system. Their monitoring area is in the exhibition area, which has got to be incredibly distracting:

…and they’re building new sections. I’ll have to come back in a few years when England is built. This section is going to be Italy!

There were fires in other parts of Knuffingen, but the firemen were ready to roll!

The core of Miniatur Wunderland is that it’s got automated model trains. Miniatur Wunderland is the world’s largest model train, in fact, with more than 12,000 meters of track.

There are lots of tiny jokes embedded throughout the Wunderland. For example, this kid has tossed his shirt in the bushes and he’s running, naked and free!

…while across the meadow, a pedophile watches him with binoculars. Kind of creepy, but also a little bit funny.

Meanwhile, in a giant field of flowers, another couple gets it on.

The fair was also incredibly detailed, with a half dozen moving rides. The ferris wheel, the spinny thing next to it, the bungee jump, and more, were all in motion.

The sports stadium in the Hamburg section had a game on.

One of the buildings in the Hamburg section opened up, and a tiny orchestra was playing- the various pieces of the orchestra were moving.

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, weird shit is happening. I don’t know if there’s a real place that looks like this. It wouldn’t surprise me, though.

Some of my favorite things were just little tiny gags that you might miss if you go through the Wunderland too fast. Here, we see a mole who has been busted by the Polizei for digging a hole in the park.

…and cows wearing scuba gear. Seriously.

Master criminals at work!

…and in the America section, Area 51 has a Stargate! (And little green dudes playing basketball!)

When the Wunderland chooses to duplicate a real building, they do an amazing job of it. Here’s tiny Miami Beach.

… and here’s tiny Las Vegas.

The Grand Canyon.

They’re amazing at buildings, but I don’t think they really understand America’s relationship with sports. The baseball player ready to hit the pigskin thrown by the football player while an elderly couple and a flamenco dancer look on is pretty confusing.

The Wunderland makes up for that weirdness with lots of incredibly detailed tableaus. Here’s a very intricately detailed concert.

They’ve really thought of everything… the tiny concertgoing people even get a row of tiny porta-potties!

…and in the crowd of that concert, I found more adventurous cows! These two seem to be wearing shower caps. Maybe it’s the scuba diving cows from earlier…

There are also some exhibits near the cafe and restrooms of certain time periods in Germany. Here’s the day that the Berlin Wall came down in 1989:

…and here’s the bombed out city at the end of World War II.

Have you ever been to Miniatur Wunderland? What was your favorite part?

A Hamburg Weekend.

On March 27, 2014May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany11 Comments

I went to Hamburg last weekend. Most of the pictures I took from Hamburg were in Miniatur Wunderland, which will be Monday’s post because it’s amazing and because I took a bazillion pictures that I haven’t sorted through yet. There were a few other reasons to go to Hamburg besides the wonderment that is Miniatur Wunderland, though

1) I wanted a chance to visit with Sarah Stäbler and her husband Tobias before their baby is born. I probably won’t get another chance to hang out with them before I leave Germany.

2) I wanted to find Beatles-Platz. It’s a tiny section of the Reeperbahn adjacent to where the Beatles played. I couldn’t find it last time I was in Hamburg, but I went this time armed with more information and more time to look for it. More importantly, I had looked at pictures of it this time, so I knew what the heck I was looking for.

3) Another Category One station, the Hamburg-Altona station. Then there were five…

I’d like to begin the show and tell portion of this post by commenting that I had forgotten just how strange the Hamburg main train station is. It’s set up a little bit like an Oreo cookie- the restaurants and shops are on the upper levels at either end, and the creamy center of train platforms is down a flight of stairs. The two ends are connected on the inside of the building only by way of the train platforms.

Beatles-Platz is right at the intersection of Große Freiheit and the Reeperbahn. The “statues” aren’t really anything of the sort, they’re actually just metal outlines of the Beatles. The three in front are John, Paul, and George, and the drummer is supposed to look a little like Ringo and a little like Pete Best.

Standing a little way off to the right is one more guitarist. The Internet says the fifth Beatle is supposed to represent Stuart Sutcliffe, the original Bass player for the band. You can’t see it clearly in these photos, but the Beatles-Platz is circular, and is paved black to look like a vinyl record. It’s fairly striking.

On Saturday morning, I had brunch with Sarah and Tobias. As is my custom, I completely misjudged my travel time and arrived ridiculously early. This gave me some time to look at the artwork on the buildings nearby.

This was a giant door leading into a tattoo and piercing shop.

An apartment building. The bird was striking. The graffiti over top of the artwork was really unfortunate.

I’m not sure what to make of this one. It reminds me of someone I know, though…

People in this town make art with biiiiig ladders.

This one was totally my favorite. The girl on the purple scooter is awesome. It also reminds me of someone I know.

Brunch with Sarah and Tobi was pretty great- good food, and good company. It’s not completely visible in this picture, but Sarah is wearing a How I Met Your Mother maternity shirt. It says “I’m going to be Legen…wait for it…”

After brunch, we walked around the neighborhood a tiny bit until we reached the U-Bahn station I needed to move on to the next part of the day. Next up, Miniatur Wunderland!

It took me two visits to find Beatles-Platz. Are there any sights that you haven’t been able to find on the first try?

The Repatriation Countdown Checklist

On March 24, 2014March 16, 2014 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe13 Comments

I’m less than thirty weeks from the end of my stay here, less than 200 days from moving back to the United States. I’ve watched many of my fellow expatriate bloggers go through the process of leaving, and every time one of us approaches the end, there’s a sort of checklist that we go through. Been to Oktoberfest? Check. Taken the usual picture of Neuschwanstein? Check. Had a beer on the Zugspitze? Seen Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate? Visited Prague? Check, check, check.

I’m no different. There’s a slew of things that I feel compelled to finish before I go. I still have a few Category One stations left to visit. I have a bunch of cities and countries that I want to see before I leave. Moving back to the US won’t stop me from visiting and traveling around Europe, but it will slow it down a great deal.

Even so, the Countdown Checklist mode has set in for me too. I just got back from Hamburg, and between now and my departure in October, I’m going to take trips to Dresden, Leipzig, Heidelberg (#hbergmeetup!), Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Berlin again, and Furth im Wald to see a giant robot dragon!

I’m also doing some extreme padding of my “countries I’ve visited” resume before I go. Here’s the places I’ve got solid plans to visit:

Brussels, Belgium
Bruges, Belgium
Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
Keukenhof for the Tulip Festival, just outside of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Helsinki, Finland
Stockholm, Sweden
Oslo, Norway
Copenhagen, Denmark
Krakow, Poland and Auschwitz
Budapest, Hungary
Vienna, Austria (again)
Bratislava, Slovakia
Vaduz, Liechtenstein

…and that’s all before mid-summer!

For those of you who have moved back home, did you have a Repatriation Countdown Checklist? Tell me about it in comments.

Travel Anxiety

On March 20, 2014March 18, 2014 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe14 Comments

By now, most of my readers have figured out that I travel a lot, that I’m planning on continuing to travel a lot, and that more often than not, I travel alone. I’m pretty experienced at traveling, and I’ve more or less got my rhythm down. What would surprise most of you, I think, is that I suffer from fairly strong travel anxiety. Utterly pointless, illogical, irrational, but still very powerful. In my head, it’s kind of like this:

Gut: We’re gonna miss the train!
Brain: Relax. We have seven whole minutes to walk from platform four to platform eight. We could moonwalk there and still make it.
Gut: But what if this train is EIGHT minutes late to the connecting station?
Brain: Then we take another train. There’s another train going to the same place twenty-five minutes later.
Gut: WE’RE GONNA MISS THE TRAIN!
Brain: ::sigh::

…and so on.

When I’m traveling, I get into a partial flight or fight mode. My heart beats faster than normal even if I get to the train station or airport with hours to spare. If I have imbibed more than a tablespoon of water, you can bet I’ll be in the bathroom repeatedly. (I joke that I’m just following Imperial protocol, dumping all of my garbage before I make the jump to light speed.) I’m always worried that I’ve left something behind or forgotten to lock my apartment door. I can’t fall asleep on planes or trains either; I’m usually too wired.

My brain knows that I can handle anything that might come up- there’s always another way to get to where I’m going. I’ve never been truly lost, or truly stranded. Even when my flights got buggered up last March and I was stuck in Frankfurt for an extra night, I was able to find a hotel with Jenny’s assistance from her computer back in Regensburg. I’m not even all that bothered by airplane turbulence.

Every problem I’ve ever encountered while traveling has been solvable and none of it was really all that bad.

…Gut: But we’re gonna miss the plane!

Do you suffer from (or enjoy) any travel anxiety? How do you handle it?

Karlsruhe

On March 17, 2014May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany5 Comments

In the weekend leading up to Rose Monday, I went to Karlsruhe. My reasons were selecting Karlsruhe were twofold:

First, Alex of ifs ands & butts and Bev of Confuzzledom both live there, and they’ve been posting nifty things about the city for as long as I’ve known each of them, so meeting them and seeing their city was definitely something I wanted to do.

Secondly, Karlsruhe, is a category one train station, and I’m trying to see every category one train station before I leave Germany for good in October. For those keeping score, this trip allowed me to see the Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Köln Messe/Deutz, Dortmund, and Duisburg stations. Only six to go!

I did get to have dinner with Bev and her boyfriend Jan in the local Irish pub. The food was delicious and the company was fabulous. Alex was working, so she wasn’t able to hang out very much, but we did get to chat a little bit. I very much enjoyed meeting Bev and Jan though; they’re both really neat.

All of the pictures I took in Karlsruhe were taken during my visit to the Badisches Landesmuseum, nestled in the Karlsruhe Palace. The walk up to the palace is a big open space with some sculptures. People were out enjoying the sunshine. These gentlemen were playing a game in which they threw hand-sized metal balls at other metal balls, then picked them up with a magnet on a cord in order to throw them again. I’m pretty sure it was Bocce, but I’m not certain since my only exposure to Bocce prior to this is that clip from Splash where the tour guide uses it as an exclamation.

There are also a great many sculptures surrounding the palace, like this statue which is supposed to represent Hercules slaying Cerberus, but it looks more like a dragon than a hellhound to me.

The Palace itself is beautiful, or at least it is in the photographs I’ve seen other people post. For me, though, it was construction time. Karlsruhe itself was under construction. In fact, there’s a sandstone pyramid in the city that I was not able to find at all, even though I apparently walked within about ten meters of it: Because of all the construction, it was completely wrapped and obscured. (Google Maps claimed to know where the pyramid was, but following the map only led me to the Pyramide Shisha Bar. In hind-sight, I should have taken a picture of their sign for posterity.)

The museum is currently holding an exhibit called “Imperium der Götter,” or “Empire of the Gods.” There were some really neat sculptures inside. This one is one of my favorites- there’s so much going on here!

The museum also holds lots of paintings of the royals from the region. This is Princess Marie from Baden.

Who doesn’t love a little statue of Sleeping Eros?

Stained glass can be very pretty. These panes were quite nice.

A very, very old bicycle. Note the pedals attached to the front wheel, just like a penny farthing. The earliest bike builders didn’t figure out right away that using a chain to drive the wheel is more efficient.

Here’s another statue I liked. This one is tiny and bronze, no more than a foot tall. I should have written down the name of it.

There was a section of the museum dedicated to the Holocaust. They even had a set of the famous striped pajamas behind glass.

In their “1980s” section of the museum, they had a Commodore 64 with the original monitor and an old 1541 floppy disk drive. Considering this computer was introduced when I was nine years old, there’s no reason at all for seeing this in a museum to make me feel old.

Another of the sculptures that I liked was this tiny metal cat. This sculpture was only a few inches tall, and it reminds me of the kinds of tiny sculptures that my grandmother used to have around the house. Hers weren’t museum pieces, though.

The museum has a nice little gift shop attached, and I very nearly purchased one of these little fellows. The originals were on display across the hall, but the gift shop versions were neat looking. (And reasonably priced, too.)