Tag: trip reports

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.

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/

The Deutsches Museum

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany4 Comments

A few weeks back, when the weather first started to turn sunny and nice, I took another short day trip. This time, it was to München to see the Deutsches Museum. This place is sort of like the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.

Inside, there’s a huge selection of aircraft, boats, space vehicles…

I kept waiting for James Franciscus and the mutants to come see this one…
This poor guy must have been waiting for his flight forever.

Up on the sixth floor, there’s a sundial garden. Since the weather has recently started to be sunny, this was a beautiful spot.

…I also got this pretty spectacular panoramic view of the Munich skyline from the sundial garden:

I don’t have a lot of commentary for the rest of these, so I’ll just put up a lot of pictures.

Foucault’s Pendulum
Biggest bong ever.
Looks like I need to eat more Big Macs.

I don’t know why, but I find this hilarious.

This was next to the self playing piano in the music section.

Back to Nürnberg, Part Two

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany3 Comments

After I was done at Doku-Zentrum, I took the tram back toward the Bahnhof, and from there I met Heather from “Heather Goes Deutsch”  for lunch and some hang time.  Heather lives in Nuremberg and teaches English there.

I’ve noticed a trend among other Americans that I’ve run into here. We tend to be in one of three categories:  Technology workers, Teachers,  and Students.  (Although there are a huge amount of American troops here in Germany, I’m not counting the military folk because they’re not necessarily in Germany by choice, and many of them tend to have short term assignments here before getting deployed elsewhere.)

Ah, but I digress.  I was talking about Nuremberg.  Heather went to lunch.  On the walk there, we saw some preaching Christians.  They were much louder and more preachey than the Mormons from my previous visit.

Heather and I ate at Alex, which is a chain-  I’ve eaten in the Regensburg location as well as the Nuremberg one.  Alex feels a bit like TGI Fridays or Applebees back home.   It overlooks a large courtyard which was filled with a green market at the time.

After lunch, it was time for a walk up a very steep hill to see the castle that I missed last time I was in town.  It was tall and castley.  Heather warned me about the hill, but it was much steeper to get all the way up than I expected.  (The journey back down looked like it would have been a lot of fun on roller blades.  Until you broke your neck, that is.)

Here is a rare photograph where I’m in front of the camera instead of behind it:

The castle ramparts were sufficiently high up that the view was pretty spectacular looking over the town.  Here’s part of it:

After our controlled descent from the castle, we walked around the city a little bit more.  While Regensburg has monuments to Kepler, Nuremberg has the Albrecht Dürer house.  Dürer, as it turns out, spent quite a bit of time in Nuremberg, born there in the late 1400s and returning for parts of the 1500s.  He was there in between stints in Italy and the Netherlands, and his famous painting of a hare has resulted in a lot of rabbits in stores and sculptures.   For example, there’s this super creepy statue.  I told Heather that it looks like Alice in Wonderland on peyote.

By this point in the afternoon, I was pretty much ready to hop a train back home, so we started to follow the city wall back toward the train station. Interesting fun fact:  The wall around the city of Nuremberg is mostly stil intact  You can walk along large sections of it and eventually you’ll wind up back at the train station.

On the walk back, I saw some nifty stuff that needed to be photographed. I’ll close out the post with these last three photographs-

1) Some nifty graffiti that translates to “Against sexism, against homophobia!”  At some point I will take pictures of more graffiti around town in Regensburg.  I’ve already got a nifty collection of pictures of the decals that people put on street signs and lamp posts- I find it fascinating.

2) A street musician playing an instrument that I can’t quite identify.  It’s not quite a harp, but it’s similar.  It also looks quite heavy.

3) Random Greenpeace protest.  Apparently they’re against nuclear power.  (And power is yet another topic on my future posts list.)

Back to Nürnberg, Part One

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany2 Comments

This weekend, I found myself with a free Saturday-  no plans.  What I did have was a BahnCard, a nearby train station, and a surge of wanderlust.  But where could I go that would be interesting, but wouldn’t involve a hotel or an overnight stay…  well, I never did get to see all the touristy stuff in Nuremberg, so that seemed like a winner.

Administrative note #1:  I referred to the city in the title of this post as Nürnberg, and in the paragraph above as Nuremberg.  Both are correct- Nürnberg is the German word, and Nuremberg is the English spelling.  (See also: Munich and München.)

Administrative note #2: I’m splitting this trip into two posts because I’ve got about twenty photographs and there’s a good and logical place to split them apart.  Moving on!

Every trip to another place so far has started with the same thing:  Trains!  And while the view from the train last time I travelled was snow covered fields, this time around the green is starting to come back.  The snow that was there melted off, and the plants are pretty happy about it.

The trip to Nuremberg on an ICE (Inter City Express) train is roughly an hour long; a very quick and comfortable ride.  Once I got to the city, I followed the signs to the tram, which is basically a ground level train system.  The streetcars in San Francisco are more or less the same thing.

Side note:  The crutches the girl in this picture is using?  They’re very common in Germany.  Frankly, I think they’re much better than the sore-armpit crutches that are commonplace in the US when people sprain an ankle or what have you.

The #9 tram takes about ten minutes to get to the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände, or the Doku-Zentrum for short.  This is the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rallying Grounds.  It’s a museum in the unfinished Congress Hall where many Nazi party rallies were held.

There is a tremendous amount of archival footage from the Nazi rallies, along with artifacts from that time.  Although Nazi symbols and paraphernalia are illegal in Germany in the present day, that wasn’t always so.  There’s an example of old army man toys- the same kind that children in the US play with all the time.  The difference between little green US Army men and these is obvious and striking though:

It’s also interesting to see the commemorative things-  this is the sort of products that the Franklin Mint sells today, except this was all Hitler all the time:

There were also newspapers on display from many nations during that time period.  It was interesting for me to see the political cartoons of the time from the American newspaper.

There were a great many photographs and films of bombings, of allied troops reaching Nuremberg, and so forth.  There was an entire section dedicated to the Nuremberg trials, and the original books, logs, and tapes of the Goering interviews are all on display here.

The exit path of the museum contains a section with chips that have the names of many concentration camp victims on them, along with the names of the camps.  It’s designed to look like a train track that goes on and on-  very striking.

All in all, this was a fascinating museum.  Since my arrival, I’ve seen lots of news reports about Nazi activity- as I said previously, it’s illegal here now, but there are still pockets of Nazi activity in some of the cities.  While I don’t think anything like the Holocaust could happen again, this was still a pretty sobering experience.

Luckily, the rest of the Nuremberg trip was all fun and games.  And lots of walking.  Lots and lots of walking.   That will all be in the next post.