One more day in Berlin

We had one more day in Berlin and decided to go on our own walking tour of sorts--one without history or direction. :)

Guided by the little green hat walk sign--a symbol of East Berlin (apparently after re-unification there was a big disagreement over whether they'd use the hatted or un-hatted men),


...we started back at the museum area, and had a leisurely lunch at Vivolo in Hackescher Market, watching and laughing at the street performers. They have to be licensed here and they're really good. As an example, one guy with a clown nose followed people, mimicking them--sometimes they knew and sometimes they didn't. One jogger never saw the running clown with a plastic red squirt gun that was following him as he ran.

We stumbled upon the Kunstmarkt--Berlin has a ton of Sunday flea markets-- and wandered around for a bit. Then stumbled upon another one, and so the day went.


We passed the zoo, with it's giant elephants in front. Initially we thought this was a Chinese restaurant, and being hungry, were very excited:


The previous day, Lindy had seen something from afar that she wanted to check out, so I let her convince me to take the Hi-Flyer (Welt Balloon) that went 150 meters over the city, even though it said DIE on it in big letters:


The "Die" balloon as I called it did give us some great views of the city, although we had to rotate with the other people on the balloon so as not to tip over to one side. (The guide assured us we were "very safe.")


In this picture below, we're currently being balanced out by about 4 large men on the other side. Hmmm...


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A few other Berlin notes:

Oh, by the way, if you were a resident of East Berlin, you would have had to wait 15 years on a list for one of these:


Fist pump! They're everywhere. Love them.


Some random street art on the way to dinner.


After dinner we met some people who took us to a bar called Wild Heart, a rockabilly-ish place that ended up being pretty cool.

A taxi home and we leave for Munich tomorrow...

Berlin Walking Tour June 2010

Berlin is a much larger city than it initially appears and we're not really sure how to navigate it, so we decide to take a walking tour in English.

Most of this post discusses history and the tour, but there were 2 funny things that happened that I'll talk about first.

1) The free coca-cola truck.
My friend Lindy is obsessed with coke. Usually diet, but at a particularly sweltering point in the tour where we were seriously lacking shade, we hear "Free Coke" and I've never seen Lindy beeline with such purpose. She was one of the first in line for a Coke Zero (it then took me about 10 minutes to get to the front of the line and I almost lost the tour):


2) The Bier-bike.
Apparently for German bachelor parties, you can rent a bier bike. It's a fabulous float-type, bike-pedaled, keg-holder that travels through traffic just like a car with many people hanging off of it. It's quite a spectacle. I believe the guy on the front in the ballerina outfit standing on a keg is the bachelor:


Also, it was a gorgeous sunny day, apparently the first in awhile, and the parks were packed with people sitting out on the grass, just doing happy park day things.


The tour itself was a living history lesson--one I won't forget. Our tour guide grew up in East Berlin before the wall came down--an added plus that made this tour extra fascinating. She's a huge history buff and I learned more about Berlin and the history of Germany in 4 1/2 hours than ever before.


We start near the Berlin Cathedral, a spectacular Protestant Cathedral, with lush green grass all around it. The grounds are in fact so lush, they're actually called the Lust Garden (translates to Pleasure).

The cathedral, museums and pretty fountains are located on "Museum Island" and as amazing as this all is, it's just crazy to see and hear how much of it was all bombed during WWII. Some buildings are new, but some buildings have partially new parts (you can see the difference in brick vs. stone in some of the buildings - not shown).

As I'm sure you can imagine, there's a huge war theme to the beginning of this tour, but it's incredibly interesting. The memorial above is the Neue Wache, The National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny. Instead of a soldier, it's a mother holding her dying child. It's open air, so she is outside with the weather.

It can be argued that the Brandenburg Gate is one of the most photographed and famous landmarks in Europe. It's been said to represent the reunification of the city of Berlin after the wall came down.


A great deal of the tour focuses on the Berlin Wall--although to the East Germans, the wall was called the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.


The remains of the wall can be seen throughout the city as cobblestone blocks that break up sidewalks (almost always without the plaque, but this is the only time I took a picture of it).


We ventured to the subway to see the Ghost Stations--basically during the years of the Berlin wall, trains passed through stations that were blocked off. These stations are marked by the special letters (this one says Unter den Linden).


We also visited the Holocaust Memorial, which was really interesting. It was many different sizes and shapes of concrete blocks that all filed in together. Pictures can't really show how cool it is, but an aerial view is below:


It was very labyrinth-like to walk through it--you couldn't see your friend if he or she disappeared past another block. Some say that this is a way to interpret what it was like to lose / not know where your family was.


Another part of the tour takes us past buildings that had been bombed, shot at or seen their fair share of shrapnel. Sometimes it was small bullet holes, but in the case below, the hole was bigger than my hand.


Finally the tour takes us past Checkpoint Charlie, one of the checkpoints (named like Alpha, Bravo, Charlie...etc) of the Berlin wall.


I was kind of fascinated that there was a McDonald's as one of the first "restaurants" outside Checkpoint Charlie, in the American sector (no photo).


The tour ended in a plaza with highly ornate churches. The one below is the French Church.


Overall, I'd highly recommend the tour. If you can, get Kristen. :)

Amsterdam June 2010

Next country on the list is The Netherlands. I arrive in Amsterdam, excited to meet my friend Lindy, who is coming to join me from San Francisco.

She meets me at the tram stop outside the house of Sara, a friend of a friend, with whom we are planning on staying (who quickly becomes our friend as well).

We have three days in the Netherlands, with a loose itinerary, but on our list is a canal tour, a visit to the Albert Cuyp market, the Ketel One distillery (separate post) and the Anne Frank house (green / black doors below):


I had just read Anne Frank's diary for the first time on the plane (to Frankfurt--prolly not so politically correct), so the story and the quotes on the walls were fresh in my mind. It was a really sobering experience to see the tiny rooms where 8 people lived for 2 years without ever going outside for fresh air. It was even more tear jerking to watch videos of the liberation of concentration camps prisoners--old women on their knees kissing soldiers hands for setting them free. It's sometimes hard to believe all that madness actually happened.

However, there is a bright side to it all, in that Otto Frank (her dad) kept and preserved so many of the family's stories and artifacts in the interest of promoting tolerance in diversity long after WWII.


After the tour of Anne's house, we walk around the city. The canals are really beautiful. This one is Lindy's favorite:


It is one of the prettier ones. The way the canals shape the streets also causes interesting architecture. I have to wonder what the rooms are like in this house:


Travelling around by canal also creates interesting twists on common problems, such as traffic jams. In the end, the little paddle boat on the right got gently pushed into a canal wall as another tour boat passed on the other side:


We walked a lot this day, seeing various different sights. In this very tolerant city, we also found some non-tolerance:

So in case you're a pirate, know that you can't go to what is now an old boarded up cafe.

After navigating the maze of canals for awhile (it doesn't get old, really):


Sara gets done with work so we meet up with her and her friends for a drink at Cafe Thijsen, a wonderfully pleasant little outdoor cafe with long picnic tables just off one of the canals.


Sara, Lindy and me...around 11:30, when it finally gets dark.


It's a very nice way to end the day with a glass of wine.

Nolet Distillery

Our first day in The Netherlands we actually took a trip out of Amsterdam to Scheidam, which is near Rotterdam, to the Nolet Family Distillery, of Ketel One fame.


The Nolet family makes 2 kinds of spirits, Jenever and Ketel One vodka. Only the vodka is imported into the US. Jenever is Dutch gin, it's very different from London gin--unlike those gins, it doesn't contain coriander and juniper berry. It's awesome. :)

We get a private tour of Scheidam and then of the facility from Pim. He first takes us into a beautiful windmill with a starlight reception area and offers us coffee/tea and shortbread cookies with little windmills on them. Then we enter the distillery...


Here's Pim, above, shown stoking the charcoals for the distillery ketel #1. Then he lets us try...It's VERY hot in there.


The bottling facilities and storage are all on the premises so we catwalk around storage barrels of vodka and gin and through various bottling areas.


Next we enter a tunnel under the canal, built by the company--the Nolet distillery bought all the buildings around it, and across the street. Being the newest building, this is the "smart plant." It looks like a fancy Schotz brewery (of Laverne and Shirley fame). It's all automated: pallets of empty bottles line up on conveyor belts, caps go up, bottles get washed and filled and packaged up neatly. And there's mass warehouse storage space with pallets of empty bottles, gin bottles, vodka bottles, etc.

More than just a factory, the distillery has been the headquarters of the family business for over 300 years, so it also has many beautiful rooms of dark wood walls, stained glass windows, aged wood desks, bottles from years past and historical artifacts from the family and the distilling process. There's also some modern conference rooms.

To wrap up the tour, we end up in a private movie theater, where we watch a 12 minute film on the history of the Nolet family and their distilling process.

After finishing the tour, Pim arranges for a private water taxi for us to take us to the city of Rotterdam. It's a beautiful sunny day for a 15 minute ride across the river.

Hamlet's Castle

It’s my last day in Denmark, and there’s one place I want to go that I haven’t been yet, which is Kronborg Castle in a little town called Helsingør, about 50km north of Copenhagen on the coast. Kronborg castle has achieved fame in many ways, but one of the most notable is being the setting for Shakespeare's Hamlet.

My plan is to take the train there and ride my borrowed bike back to Copenhagen along Rt 152, down the Danish the coast. I get on the train with my bike for the hour or so ride to Helsingør. Once I get off the train, I walk into town, through Danish flag-lined streets. I’ve seen this before with Italian, Chinese and Mexican flags, but never Danish. It’s really festive.

It’s not hard to see the castle off in the distance—and it really does have a moat! Super cool! (It’s only about 6 inches deep though. )

The rooms in the castle are very elaborate. The bedrooms of the royalty have elaborately painted ceilings of stories that weren't able to be written down on paper.

The large ballroom is amazing. Walking through it you can almost feel the ghosts of medieval meals and dances taking place around you...

One of the best parts of the experience is the Dutch Maritime Museum, which let's you get on the roof of the castle. The views are amazing and you can see Sweden in the distance. It's only 4km away.

On the way home, I ride through town again and see a really cool statue of girls dancing, surrounded by flowers...

Approximately 10k down the road, I also stop by Louisiana, which is a museum that just happens to be closed on Mondays. So I continue my way down the coast. It's reminds me of New England...cold and gray beaches, but beautiful...


Overall, the trip takes about 4 hours, including many stops. It's a beautiful way to spend my last day in Denmark.

Østerport

Østerport is a train / subway station in Copenhagen. And for some inexplicable reason, I keep accidentally ending up there.


In the first 5 days I've been here, I've been to Østerport 3 times. Once by bike and twice by train (2 stops past where I need to be).

Dunno what that's about. Ideas? :)