Tag: travel

Another Weekend In Berlin

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany10 Comments

On the second weekend in September, a group of people who live in Germany and blog in English descended on Berlin for WEBMU 2012.

WEBMU is the “Whiny Expatriate Bloggers MeetUp,” and it’s basically an excuse for a group of really fun people to get together, do a little sightseeing, and eat at a bunch of amazing restaurants.  Snooker in Berlin and No Apathy Allowed were the organizers and hosts, and they did a fantastic job.  I don’t want to do a lengthy recap of the entire weekend, but I took a some pretty neat pictures while I was in town, so here we go.

I didn’t join all of the tours that the group took part in, but I did go to the Friday morning tour of the Stasi Museum.  The original headquarters of East Germany’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit have been converted into a museum and it’s pretty fascinating.

The picture below is a propaganda photograph of Katarina Witt, the German Olympic figure skater.  I didn’t fully understand the impact of this photograph until after I’d gotten back home and started doing my traditional pre-blog-post research, when I found this detail:

Following the dissolution of East Germany, Stasi files were found to show that the secret police had worked hard to keep Witt from defecting by giving her cars, accommodations, and permitted travel. Witt found 3,000 pages on her life from the age of eight.

A lot of the original furnishings are still present in the museum, including this cabinet reel to reel system and the rather large conference room table in the next two photographs.

One of the more interesting sections of the museum were all the examples of spy cameras-  buttonhole cameras, necktie cameras, bird-feeder cameras.  This one was large and obvious by comparison.

One of the display cases contained a selection of period music and pop culture that had been reviewed by the Stasi.  This section was fascinating to me.

While walking around Berlin all weekend, I saw a huge variety of street art.  This sort of thing rarely happens in Regensburg, but in the big city of Berlin, this stuff was kind of everywhere.

I’d like to take a moment to state that the Berlin Hauptbahnhof is just amazing-  the upper levels are S-Bahn trains that go around the city, the mid levels and there are a bunch of levels of other trains.  The Berlin Central Station is different than most of the Bahnhofs I’ve been to in that it the trains moving through it are East-West on one level and North-South on a different level- most train stations only have tracks running in one direction, not crisscrossed.

The Berlin HBF also maintains a healthy online and social media presence, as I learned when I asked friends on Twitter for a route and I got answered by @HBF_Berlin.

Most importantly for a nerd like me, though, is that the Berlin HBF is just cool to see.  The various levels are somewhat open to each other, and you can see many of the trains criss-crossing the station.

I’m not sure if this counts as street art, but it was at the top of the steps to the U-Bahn closest to the Stasi Museum, so it caught my attention.

One of the most common foods in Berlin is Currywurst.  I learned on this trip that Currywurst means an instant migraine for me.  Neat, eh?

One of our tours was walking around an urban area and we stumbled across a Saturday morning street market. Interesting stuff.

Walking around on that same tour, the tour guide pointed out that there’s a bar in this building.  Can you spot it?

The neighborhood also had its share of what we’ll consider ‘eccentric’ residence.  For example, the owner of this charming van.

And sometimes, you just have to ask your neighbors to trim their building.

These signs were all over the city in green spaces.  The literal translation is Green Investment Scheme, which makes sense in the marked green areas.   There’s a Green Investment Scheme aspect of the Kytoto Protocol for environmental benefits, but I’m not sure if this GIS and that GIS are directly related.

During our walk, I kept getting distracted by little tiny things.  For example, this little guy:

Getting My Roller Coaster Fix In Germany

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany4 Comments

It’s safe to say that the few years I lived in Orlando kind of spoiled me for theme parks-  Disney and Universal are the gold standard for theme park crowd control, ease of navigation, and kick ass rides.  That doesn’t stop me from trying other theme parks though.

Since I was already in Köln, it seemed like a good idea to spend a day in nearby Brühl to visit the 45 year old Phantasialand theme park.  I stayed in Brühl the evening before going to the park, but I could just as easily have stayed in Cologne-  you can get to Brühl Mitte from the Cologne Bahnhof in thirty minutes or so via a streetcar, and from there, a bus runs to the theme park every so often.

The entrance area was chaotic and not very well organized, which led to the quote of the day: “I hate this park.”  Even though I had a lot of fun in Phantasialand, this was said at least a dozen times throughout the day.

Phantasialand is broken up into several separate lands, none of which are very clearly marked.  We got turned around several times and had trouble finding our way repeatedly throughout the day.

One thing they did right, but in a strangely frustrating way, was their version of Speedpasses.  You can buy them in packets of four, but the entrances aren’t always easy to find or follow.  Still, the Speedpasses made it possible for us to ride a lot in a single day that we wouldn’t otherwise have managed.  They turned 70-90 minute waits into ten minute waits on several of the rides.

I posted some pics from the theme park to Facebook, and a lot of my friends commented that it looks a great deal like EPCOT back in Florida.  I can understand why though-  Phantasialand has a golden geodesic dome over one of its attractions.  This was built after EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth, but it’s still an easy comparison to make.

The park has an often fantastical look about it.  For example, this ride is called the Würmling Express, and it’s a sort of single car slow-moving monorail.

There’s a 3D animated shooting ride called Maus Au Chocolat, in which you shoot balls of chocolate at animated mice to score points.  You compete against your seatmate for highest total- it’s pretty fun.

Not so fun, in my opinion, is Talocan, seen in the picture below.  I don’t like getting held in inverted positions or getting flipped around in that sort of scenario.  Especially when you can see far around you.  It was popular though.  There’s no accounting for taste.

The best part of the park was the roller coasters.  The Colorado Adventure had an old west mining-train theme to it, and that one kept banging us against the sides of the car. I spent some time before we went on that one trying to figure out why the sign had Michael Jackson’s name on it.  I learned when I was preparing for this post that he actually opened that ride, and there are photographs of the man himself on the coaster, trying to hold his hat in place.

The others coasters were better at keeping us from swinging around so much in our seats.  Winja’s Fear, an indoor coaster, had a lot of fun spinning action.  There’s a relaxing all-dark coaster called Temple of the Night Hawk.

And then there’s the Black Mamba.  It’s smooth and fast.  Really fast.  According to The Internet, the ride hits 4.5G at points.  There’s one particular corkscrew that is amazing to ride.  We briefly considered going back to hit the Black Mamba again, it was that good.

It turns out that there’s a metric pantload of theme parks in Europe.  I get the sense that Phantasialand is one of the three best known though.  Now that I’ve been to Phantasialand, I need to check out the other two-  Europa Park and Disneyland Paris.

A Weekend In Köln

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany7 Comments

Continuing on my longstanding trend of seeing new cities because there’s a concert there that I want to see, I went to Köln (Cologne) to see Owl City.  I’d seen them once before, in Orlando, and the previous show was bigger- more people on stage, real stringed instruments for the violin and cello bits, and so forth. This time around, it was in a smaller club with a smaller lineup.  Still a great show, though.

There’s more to Cologne than a happening concert venue, though.  While I didn’t see the entire city by any stretch of the imagination, I did see some nifty parts of the city.  Here are some interesting things about Cologne.

The Beer Is Tiny:

The local beer, called Kölsch, is a pale and tasty drink which is usually served cold in very small cylindrical .2 liter glasses.  The picture below is an abnormally big one.

In pubs in Cologne, the common practice is to immediately bring you a new one every time your glass is empty without any prompting.  To make the beer stop flowing, you have to leave your glass half full or put your coaster on top of it.

It Has A Pretty Neat Bridge:

If you arrive to Cologne via train as I did, you come in on the Hohenzollern bridge, which crosses the Rhine river.  This is the most heavily used rail bridge in Germany, with around 1200 trains passing through it every day.

The bridge also has a pedestrian walkway alongside the tracks, and since 2008, the fence between the footpath and the train tracks has been covered in love locks much like the bridge here in Regensburg.  While I was taking these pictures, a couple got married a few meters away from me, and then placed their own padlock on the bridge.

Their Cathedral Looks Just Like Ours*, Except Way Bigger:

You can’t miss the Kölner Dom when you come out of the train station.   The cathedral is enormous and it was constructed in Gothic style, just like Regensburg’s Dom*.  As a result, the look and feel of the place is very similar.  It’s just much, much larger.   It’s huge.

No, really, it’s enormous.  Here’s a closer shot to give you a sense of scale.

Climbing the spire is a pretty popular tourist attraction.  It’s 509 spiralling stone steps to a viewing platform just over 322 feet above the ground.  They’ve put in fencing to keep people from dropping stuff, but even with the fencing, the view is pretty spectacular.

Tour Groups Everywhere:

Look, a Segway tour group!  I swear, I’m gonna ride one of those things some day.

They Have A Cable Car:

The Kölner Seilbahn has been crossing the Rhine river since the late 1950s.  With my previously established love of tall places, it’s a given that I had to ride it across.

They Have A Chocolate Museum:

Of all the museums I’ve been to, the Schokoladen Museum is my current favorite.  The actual history of chocolate wasn’t all that interesting to me, but the place has functioning chocolate manufacturing processes which can be seen at various steps.  One part is an entire automated line which made the small chocolates that are given to each visitor as they enter the museum. The machine below is constantly turning molded chocolates in various shapes as they dry and harden.

One Last Thing About Köln:

The city is adjacent to another nearby town, Brühl, which is the home of the  PhantasiaLand theme park.  That’s another post, though.

Nobody can do it like a Dampf Lok!

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany3 Comments

It would be fair to say that a great deal of my musical taste was formed in the 1980s.  Brian, my best friend at the time, was constantly sharing music with me, and I absorbed it and ran with it.   He introduced me to diverse artists such as Kraftwerk and Mannheim Steamroller, both of which I still love to this day.  Then there were the musicals.   I’m an unabashed and admitted musical theater geek, but I wouldn’t be if Brian hadn’t had musicals in the collection.

In 1984, he got the soundtrack to a new Andrew Lloyd Webber show that had just hit Broadway called Starlight Express.  The show is about toy trains come to life in the mind of a small boy, and it’s a spectacle-  the actors portraying the trains perform on roller skates.  I wanted to see it badly.

The original Broadway run was only a few years, but the UK show was on the West End in London for years- over 7400 performances.   In the early 1990s, I found out that another friend of mine, Chris, had been to see it in London.  He told me that he fell asleep during the show because he was jet-lagged, and I never quite forgave him for that blasphemy.

In 1992, the London show was heavily revised as “The New Starlight Express,” and a new cast recording was released.  I didn’t care much for the revisions-  they removed a villain character who I always felt was vital to making the plot interesting.  They also dropped a few songs that I was particularly fond of, and added a bunch of new songs that I didn’t think were as good.  I still wanted to see it though.

(Editor’s Note:  If you’re interested in a  detailed breakdown of the changes made in the 1992 version, the Starlight Express Wikipedia article contains more information than anyone will ever need.)

About two months ago, I was perusing a list of live music scattered around Germany.  Concerts, musicals, and the like were all represented, and I saw that Starlight Express was in Bochum.   A quick map check showed me that Bochum is easily reachable by train,  and I put it on my list of “I’d like to do that sometime” jaunts.  It’s a pretty big list.

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