Category: Travel Posts

Oh That’s Right… Barcelona!

On By StevenIn International Travel - Europe7 Comments

Before last month, whenever anyone mentioned Barcelona to me, this is what came to mind:

Last month, a long-time friend of mine and her husband were visiting Barcelona for a family birthday event last month.  I love exploring new cities, but I always have more fun if I’m doing so with another person, so this was a great chance for me to see Barcelona while catching up with Christina.   On the Tuesday of that week, headed over to the Munich Airport.  From there, Lufthansa took me to Barcelona for a very reasonable fee. The flight time from Munich to Barcelona?  About 90 minutes.  Easy peasy.

Getting around in Barcelona is also pretty great.  The Aerobus takes you from the airport to the city center.  It runs every five minutes during most of the day.  Once you’re in the city itself, the taxicabs are very affordable, and there’s an extensive underground Subway system.  A four-day/unlimited rides pass was just over 20 Euros.  You can also rent bikes, if that’s your thing.  I got around for the entire trip using just public transportation and two or three cab rides.

A quick note about technology:  Whenever I leave the borders of Germany, I lose the ability to use my phone for mapping and location stuff-  roaming data is absurdly expensive, so I just turn it all off.  On this trip, I managed to get around for the entire stay using just two apps regularly.

The first app is a simple Metro app that uses your GPS to figure out the nearest train station, and it plots a route  using the subway.  The second app was the TripAdvisor app.  This one has a huge list of attractions, hotels, and restaurants, and it uses the GPS to locate you on a pre-loaded map- no roaming data required. It also combines the GPS with the phone’s compass to make a really nifty “Point Me There” feature.  Without this feature, I would never have found my hotel, and I would have gotten lost over and over and over again.

I won’t bore my six and a half readers with the day by day travelogue styled post that I originally wanted to write.  Instead, I’ll give you the highlights.

Gaudí, Gaudí, Gaudí!

Antoni Gaudí was an architect and certified crazy genius who was responsible for a slew of Barcelona’s most famous sites.  I’m going to nutshell them here, because I could easily write pages and pages and pages about these structures.

La Sagrada Familia – This enormous church has been under nearly continuous construction since 1882, and it’s expected to be finished sometime around 2028 using Gaudí’s original plans.  One side very ornately shows the Nativity and the life of Christ. I’m standing in front of that side of the building in the picture below.  The other side is more austere and it shows the Passion, the death of Christ.  The columns inside were designed to resemble trees and branches.

Parc Güell – This is what happens when you set Antoni Gaudí loose on a park and garden complex.  I only saw a fraction of this park, because it’s enormously huge and I was on foot and kind of turned around.

La Padrera – An apartment building designed by Gaudí, this is now part museum and part office space.  You can go up on the roof, tour the attic, and even visit a sample apartment.

Casa Batlló – This building has a skeletal, fish-scale appearance.  This was originally designed as housing for rich Barcelona folk.

Not Gaudí, But Still Impressive And/Or Interesting.

Arc De Triomf – Built for 1888 Universal Exposition, this is your typical enormous stone gateway. Very eye-catching, don’t you think?

Placa Espanya – Placa Espanya holds several very impressive structures.  First of all, this is where the Font Màgica (Magic Fountain) is located.  Thursday through Sunday nights, after about 9pm, there’s a water show set to music.  If you’ve ever seen dancing fountains at Disney or the Bellagio, then this is nothing new to you, but it’s still fun to watch.  Also in the Placa Espanya are Venetian Towers, a scale replica of the originals from Venice which were a gift to Barcelona for the 1929 Universal Exposition.

Palau de la Música Catalana (Palace of Catalan Music) – Often referred to by travel writers as the most beautiful concert hall in the world, this amazing space seats about 2200 people, and during the day it’s illuminated entirely by natural light.  The sculptures behind the main stage are the figures of 18 muses. Their lower bodies are depicted in mosaic, and their upper bodies protrude from the wall. Each muse is playing a different musical instrument.  If you take the tour, you get a lot of background about the decorations, the lighting, and the acoustics, as well as a demonstration of the pipe organ.

Flamenco – While flamenco didn’t actually originate in Barcelona, it’s still a long-running tradition;  there are several Flamenco shows in Barcelona.  We went to a dinner and show off Las Ramblas at an establishment which has been there since 1970.  Dinner was at 10:00 PM and the show began at 11:30 PM, so it was a pretty late night.  They have earlier shows, though.   The food was spectacular, and the show was amazing.

There was a lot more.  There is so much more to do  than what I’ve shown here. I was there for four days and took over 600 photographs.  Many of those photographs are visible in my Barcelona Flickr gallery, including many more detailed pictures of La Sagrada Familia and everyplace else I went in the city.

If you do visit Barcelona, you should try the tapas.  The food was excellent almost everywhere I went.  I particularly enjoyed my meal at Cafe del la Princesa in the old gothic quarter (Barri Gotic) near El Born.

I’ll close out this post with a few more photographs of things that I thought were interesting.

During our visit, we took a guided tour of the city, and it was pointed out that people who are frustrated with the Euro-zone financial crisis have “redecorated” the facade of the city’s main stock exchange.

Wandering around the city, playful children and live street music were everywhere.  In that order:

And lastly, the Barcelona airport has a rather interesting feature-  from the gate, inside security, you can walk out onto a sun deck and get some ice cream while waiting for your flight.  This is brilliant.

Stumbling Blocks

On By StevenIn International Travel - Europe, Life In Germany6 Comments

On the corner of Maximilianstraße and Königsstraße in the Altstadt, I stumbled across nine gold colored blocks on the ground with names and dates.  They’re obviously a memorial of some sort, and I’ve taken pictures of them on several occasions with the intent to find out the story behind them.

Today, I found five more at the place where Pfarrergasse intersects Neupfarrplatz, and in a fit of amazingly coincidental timing, I’ve also found an explanation and a history of these blocks.

The blocks are called Stolpersteine.  The German word Stolperstein literally means “stumbling block” or “obstacle” and Stolpersteine is the plural.    They were created by artist Gunter Demnig in 1993 and the first installation was in Cologne, Germany, in 1994.

Today, there are more than thirty thousand Stolpersteine in at least ten countries.  I first learned what they are because of a blog entry about them on andBerlin.com.  That post led led me to the official site about them as well as http://stolpersteine-regensburg.de/.

(Edited to add:  Fiona was able to witness the installation of some Stolpersteine and posted about it on her own blog recently.)

The Stolpersteine blocks are designed as memorials to commemorate individuals who were sent by the Nazis to prisons and concentration camps, as well as those who emigrated or committed suicide to escape the Nazis.  Some of the blocks represent those killed by the Nazis and some represent survivors.    The Stolpersteine are not limited to Jews, either.  The vast majority were Jews, but there have also been blocks placed for various other types of people, including Romani people, homosexuals, blacks, and even Christians who opposed the Nazis.

The actual block is a ten centimeter concrete cube covered with a sheet of brass.  Demnig then stamps the details of the individual, the name, year of birth, and the fate as well as the dates of deportation and death, if known.  Each block begins with “Hier wohnte,” which is German for “Here lived.”  Most are set at the last residence of the victim, but some are set near workplaces.

These tiny little memorials are an amazing idea.  Since I started researching this, I’ve seen countless instances of people commenting, “so that’s what those are.  I was wondering.”  That’s how the Stolpersteine got me curious, and I’m sure I won’t be the last person to hunt down this information.

More importantly, though, people are still visiting the memorials and remembering.  One evening, while I was walking through the Altstadt, I noticed that someone had left flowers and a Yartzeit (bereavement) candle at the first set of Stolpersteine I had stumbled across.

When I walked home a few hours later, the candle was still burning.   I think that’s kind of fitting.

Public Holiday: May Day

On By StevenIn International Travel - Europe1 Comment

One of the many things I had to learn when I got to Germany was the different holidays. Many of the holidays that I’m used to from the US just aren’t a holiday here.

Thanksgiving is a great example of this. Most of the Germans I’ve met don’t know anything at all about Thanksgiving. I got here in the middle of November, and I was fortunate enough to meet a lot of folks in the local ex-patriate crowd right away.  This allowed me to attend a Thanksgiving dinner in the local Irish pub. As one of the actual Americans in attendance, I spent a fair amount of time explaining what the foods represented, and what little I could remember from grade school about the background and story of the holiday. I also fielded questions like “how on earth do you eat this cranberry sauce goop?” It was a highly entertaining time. Plus, there were twinkies.

But I digress. The first of May is a public holiday here in Bavaria. It’s a holiday in much of Europe, actually, but the Bavarian holiday schedule doesn’t always match up to the rest of Europe. It does today, though, which means that most business are closed, and everyone goes out and enjoys the newly minted sunshine for a change.

May Day, first observed as a public holiday here in 1933, is also referred to as Labour Day here, and I’ve been told that sometimes there are activities related to work and employment, but I haven’t seen any.

What I have seen is a lot of Maibäume, or maypoles.  These started to turn up at the beginning of April, and they usually show up near churches or main village squares from what I’ve seen.  I’ve done a bit of research, and the date that it goes up varies- in some instances, it’s put up on May 1st, and might be left up for the duration of the month.  In some cases, the pole itself is left up year round, but without the decorations.  The placing of the maypole is often followed by a dance,  or Tanz in den Mai (Dance into May).

There is a wealth of information online about maypole customs and decorations in other countries, but I’m focusing on what I’ve seen here in Germany.  The poles I’ve seen have been blue and white, which is the colors of the Bavarian flag.  They’re also covered in wreaths and some other decorations which, according to The Google, usually depict local crafts and industry.

There’s another element to this tradition though, which I quite like.  On the night of the last day of April, many men erect small decorated maypoles in front of the houses of their sweethearts, with a decoration attached in the shape of a red heart with the name of the girl.  The genders reverse on leap years and women leave the maypoles in front of their sweetie’s house.   This is often done in secret, and it’s up to the person leaving the maypole to decide whether to remain anonymous or give a hint to their identity.

Happy May Day, everyone!

Berlin, briefly.

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany7 Comments

Last weekend I took a short trip up to Berlin.  I had the chance to visit a new city and an old friend at the same time, and I couldn’t pass that up.  I’ve known Heather since high school, and she and her husband Mike were in town for a few days, so off to Berlin I went!

I left after work on Friday, and got in late that night.  I took a room at the same hotel that Heather and Mike were using, the Casa Camper.  It was a smidge pricier than I would have chosen if left to my own devices, but the hotel was awesome.  It has very large rooms, which is unusual for any hotel I’ve been to in Europe thus far.  It also has pretty spectacular amenities, including all-included food in a 24 hour snack bar sort of place, and a good sauna at the bottom level of the hotel.  I actually did try the sauna for fifteen or twenty minutes, but that’s an entirely different post.

The bed seemed like an American queen sized bed to me, not a typical German bed size.  I wouldn’t swear to the measurements though, I just know it seemed like a pretty big bed.   The room also had air conditioning, which is something else I haven’t seen much of since I got to Europe.  I haven’t slept in air conditioning in more than five months, and I had to turn the AC off to really get comfortable.  It’s amazing how quickly no AC has become my new normal.

Needless to say, I slept very well in that big fluffy bed, and Saturday morning after breakfast, we ventured out into the city to do touristy things.  First stop: The Brandenburg Gate!  Except we ran across a small children’s festival on the way to the Gate, and there were oddities aplenty.  For example, there was a parkour demonstration:

We also saw four guys carrying a piano down the street and the world’s shortest rollercoaster.  It’s that kind of town.   We also saw a Segway tour, and I can never resist taking pictures of a Segway tour.

After some walking past the Reichstag and some other stuff, we found ourselves at the Brandenburger Tor!

Once again, I’m amazed to discover that a major piece of German architecture is based on Greece.  In this case, the design is that of the  Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.  If this keeps up, I won’t need to ever visit Greece because I’ll have seen all the things based on the architecture there in other cities.

After we were done at the Gate, we wandered over to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a Holocaust memorial consisting of 2,711 “stelae,” slabs of concrete of various heights arranged in a grid over sloping ground covering 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres).  There was also an information center beneath the structure, which holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.

I didn’t know much about this place until we got there, but according to the designing architect,  “the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.”  I can agree that the place is confusing, but it was also peaceful in a way.  Here’s four pictures from there, including one I quite like of a Tibetan monk walking between the stelae.

The city of Berlin knows that when you’ve spent some time in a solemn place, the best thing is to cleanse the palate with something patently ridiculous…. like fourteen guys dressed in banana costumes riding a mobile bar that is powered by the pedals at their feet while a fifteenth guy in the center servers them beer.

No, really.

Bier Bike

It turns out the “Bier-Bike” is a pretty common thing for stag parties, and I’ve seen it several times since, including one here in Regensburg where all the participants were wearing standard Lederhosen.  This was my first sighting though, and it was kind of magnificent.

Next stop:  The Berliner Dom, a big ol’ church.  Big pipe organ, big catacombs, and so forth.  Plus a rather distinct dome in this Dom.   Here’s a few pics from the Dom.

No first trip to Berlin would be complete without a look at some of the historical stuff surrounding the Berlin Wall.  In one area, there is a representation of where the wall actually stood, along with representations of tunnels, and a stunning amount of information about how people snuck past the border at times.  Here’s the representation of the actual physical location of the wall:

Here’s a physical representation of one of the guard towers.

…and, for good measure, an actual section of the original Berlin Wall, moved to another location by the Nestle corporation for posterity:

We also visited the “House am Checkpoint Charlie,” a museum that has a lot of information about how people crossed the border.  There were ultralights, hot air balloons, a personal submarine-  people crossed inside of gas tanks and welding machines and in one case, inside the passenger seat of a car.  The ingenuity was incredibly impressive.  Plus, you know, the actual checkpoint was represented here:

Last but not least, is a very important cultural museum that we spotted on the way to our dinner.  The Currywurst Museum.

No, really.

As you can imagine, these eighteen pictures are not a good representation of the entire day- there are 111 photos from Berlin all visible in my Berlin flickr gallery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenglassman/sets/72157629534724430/

Short Post: Living by sun and wind.

On By StevenIn International Travel - Europe1 Comment

I’m sifting through my Berlin photos and getting a post ready about that weekend, but it won’t be tonight, so instead, here’s a short post about some of the interesting energy sources I’ve seen since I got here.

When I first got here, I noticed right away the diversity of power sources.  Even on my initial drive into town from the airport back in November, I couldn’t help but notice how many little houses and other buildings had solar panels up:

I’ve also seen some gigantic solar farms, which I didn’t know existed here.  For example:

On my trips by train since then, I’ve also noticed something that I’ve only ever seen in Canada until now:  gigantic, enormous windmills.  I’m told that people don’t like these as much because of the noise from them, but they’re fun to watch, and they’re kind of fascinating to me in a Don Quixote sort of way.