It was our final day in Berlin and the last place we would stay for more than a couple of days before we got home. When I woke at about 8am, it was grey, raining and miserable outside and as our overnight train to Paris wasn’t due to depart until 8pm, we decided to take it slow on our last morning in our apartment. Except that I went to do our last lot of washing so we would have enough essentials to make it home – there are just some things you can’t wear twice. So off I traipsed – Lowes spray jacket almost iridescent blue (against the greys and blacks that everyone seems to wear in Europe in winter).  I cut a lonely figure wandering down the rain soaked street in the pre-dawn light to the laundromat where I found a few other lost souls also completing their domestic chores. Washing done, I headed back to the apartment to help Dan cleanup. We packed up, deposited the keys, took the Christmas tree down to the dumpster and headed to the Hauptbahnhof to deposit our bags and head out for one last day in Berlin.

As the shops were still shut and quite a few of the attractions, we decided today was a good day to look at open air museums. Thankfully Berlin has quite a few. First stop was the other open air site in Berlin that I hadn’t seen on my last trip – the East Side Gallery, where a long stretch of the wall was left standing and painted with murals by prominent artists following its fall. The gallery was spectacular, yet disappointing at the same time. The back of the wall, where several pieces had been removed so locals could access then Spree Riverside, had been left for taggers and Graffiti artists to do their thing (and there were some skillful pieces amongst them. What was disappointing was that the artist’s murals had not only been  tagged by those with little respect but that there was additional graffiti not by artists but by random people, some of them tourists, leaving their mark, promoting their own nationalism or just drawing rude bits on the artworks. What created this gallery was a pivotal moment in history and many of the artists responsible for the original murals captured the poignancy of that moment. The other curious thing was that where the murals had been refreshed or recreated in 2009, the artists had added an email or web address instead of a signature. The future of artistic signatures perhaps?

From the East side gallery we caught the train to Checkpoint Charlie. The outdoor memorial, which weaved its way around several building sites last time I was here, seemed a bit more concentrated than last time I was here (probably partially because so many of the buildings that were under construction have now been completed. In any case, there was plenty of information to se. For me perhaps the most interesting was a series of photos of the border crossing in May 1964 when it was a series of fortifications rather than a wall and the 8 line border crossing checkpoint that it subsequently became. The reason why this photo series was so interesting to me was that it was taken within months of my mother’s visit here and this is where she would have no doubt crossed from the West to the East when she visited. Just down the road, the original Checkpoint Charlie border crossing guard’s box stands in the middle of the street. What should really be a haunting reminder of the strict controls here and the number of people killed trying to flee to the west, some of them just months before the crossing was opened for good, has now become a tacky tourist trap where you can pay to have your photo taken with young Germans dressed as DDR Border guards and get your passport stamped with Checkpoint Charlie. I did get my passport stamped at Santa Claus village but getting it stamped here seems very wrong and completely disrespectful to what went on here only a few decades ago. For the record I also wasn’t tempted to buy a Border guard’s hat or equip myself for the apocalypse with a cold war era gas mask.

A few blocks away in a non-descript laneway, one of the watchtowers from the walk is still standing – there are only a few of these throughout the city. What makes this one interesting is that it is just standing there, with nothing around it except apartment buildings and wasteland. No monument, no souvenir shop, just a decaying tower reminding people of the division in their city less than three decades ago. In the park of the apartment building 50 metres away there are three painted pieces of the wall. Of all the memorials and commemorations of the wall, the most understated is probably one of the most revealing and informative. Throughout the city, the path of the wall has been marked by a line of cobblestones in the pavement, created from the rubble of the wall sections.

From here we headed to somewhere a bit warmer and more modern – Potsdamer Platz. The Sony Centre was open but alas (poor Dan) not the Sony shop. After looking at the dining options – I really needed a break from pork – we chose the same Australian themed café that I had eaten at last time. It’s called Coroboree and predictably includes kangaroo and crocodile on the menu. We actually ended up ordering off their fusion menu – I had a Newcastle brown ale and beefsteak pie (I guess that was Aussie – Irish fusion?) and Dan had Tandoori chicken which came with fries and stir fried veges (Asian – Indian Aussie pub fusion?) There was a heavy emphasis on cabbage in the stir fried veges which I didn’t think was very modern Australian but I did pinch quite a portion of the vegetables. Not that we had seen one anywhere, but what I really felt like was a fully vegetarian menu. Despite Dan’s reluctance to eat at an Australian themed restaurant in Germany, the food was really good and gave us the respite from the wind to steel ourselves for the rest of our walking tour.

First though, we had to visit a Christmas Market for the last time. It was a pretty flash one here at Potsdamer Platz, complete with one of those long slides that had been turned into a tobogganing/ tyre tube ride with the addition of fake snow. First stop was the crepe stand. They make the crepes here while you wait. They pour the batter on a large round hotplate and use a stick of dowel with a handle to spread the batter out and a big long thin spatula to turn it. Dan had his the traditional German way with Nutella and I had mine the traditional Tracy way with Zitrone und Zucker (lemon and sugar). We kept wandering around the market and may have found a perfect gift for someone on my Christmas list.

From here we wandered to the Holocaust Memorial. The only way to get a true sense of this memorial and the feeling of despair that it is designed to engender is to visit it. Photographs just don’t capture that feeling. I also recommend visiting at different times of day and different seasons. My experience on this visit, on a cold windy night in almost complete darkness was a different experience to my visit five years ago when the memorial was covered in snow with bright blue skies above.

From here we went around the Brandenburg gate, thankful we had come here a few days ago as workmen were putting up some kind of barricade around the gate and the Tiergarten in front of it – presumable for some kind of New Year’s celebration. From here we walked across to the Reichstag, which because it was probably the one monument open in Berlin that day, had quite a lengthy queue and extensive security screening to get in,. By now it was 5:30pm and we had come to the end of Tracy’s walking tour of Berlin (aided by the lonely Planet encounter guide). We decided to walk along Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz and catch the train from there to the Hauptbahnhof. If we looked at the map more clearly, we would have realised that we could have walked from the Reichstag to the Hbf in about 15 minutes. The stroll down Unter den Linden, though enabled us to purchase tacky souvenirs and a 1960s map of the division of Germany.

Our plan was to sit and warm up with a hot chocolate at Starbucks in the train station and then maybe grab some dinner on the train if we were still hungry. That plan went off the rails when Starbucks was closed. Dan decided to grab his final Bratwurst (which came with chips instead of a roll) and I went and looked at shoes in the only retail store open in Berlin. I almost bought a pair too but decided that perhaps carrying another pair of shoes for a week or so on and off trains would be a bad idea. I am also sure I will find at least one pair I like in the Boxing Day sales in London.

So it was here we bid Berlin and Germany (and the Christmas markets) farewell and boarded our overnight train to Paris. The train compartment was a lot more compact than the one I had on my journey from Berlin to Zurich. There were two bunks on one side and a compartment with shower and toilet a door width away. The basin in the bathroom swung one way to allow use of the toilet and the other to allow you to shower. It was cramped but still usable. The water only came on for a minute or so at a time, presumably to encourage you not to use too much water and soap up without the water running. There was space up the top for our bags but it would have been a herculean effort to get them up there so we just left them on the floor. That was a bit of a blunder come morning because the bottom bed folds up to become three seats and the breakfast is delivered with a table that hooks on near the window and stretches in front of two of the seats, exactly where our bags were. The breakfast wasn’t stellar but it was OK – a basket of bread rolls, to share – two orange juices each, a sweet pastry and some spreads – liverwurst, Philly cheese, butter and raspberry jam.  It also came with what I thought was yoghurt but turned out to be a yoghurt sized container of apple sauce and a filter coffee. It was reasonably satisfying and readied us for a day in Paris.

Christmas themed activities – 24  War museums and model shops – 2.5  Design experiences – 2

Some google searching (that I probably should have done a couple of days ago) told me that shops in Germany are only open until 2pm on Christmas Eve and then closed on Christmas day and Boxing Day. I wasn’t expecting the Boxing Day closure – I thought everyone in the world had Boxing Day sales. Thankfully restaurants and bars are mostly open on the evening of Christmas day and on Boxing Day.

What this meant of course is two things – 1. We had limited time to buy each other Christmas presents and 2. Given most of the little boutiques and independent shops around Prenzlauer Berg open at 12pm, there was little likelihood I would get to visit any of them. Knowing that only one of the presents I had in mind for Dan would likely be acquired in Prenzlauer Berg, I made the sensible decision to head into Alexanderplatz, the main shopping plaza around Mitte with Dan. (White Christmas – Bing Crosby – It wouldn’t be Christmas without Bing)

This was our first foray into the public transport system in Berlin which is an intricate web of U Bahn (train network with lots of stops) S Bahn (train network with fewer stops), trams and buses. Just imagine what a challenge it must have been 25 years ago to piece together the two separate city systems to form the new public transport system. A lot of the stations have the old station names on the wall in tiles and that often gives you some indication which network they were originally part of.  Some of the U Bahn infrastructure is underground but quite a lot of it runs a level above the street on an elevated rail track which you don’t really see in our part of the world. The U Bahn is by far the easiest way to get anywhere from our part of the city – it is about five minutes walk to the Eberswalde Strasse station. We grabbed a day ticket (about 6 Euros) in the belief that we might make it further than Alexanderplatz. Also, strangely, there are no return tickets here so a day pass is only marginally more expensive than two single tickets.

As I hadn’t ventured out for dinner the previous evening, I was pretty hungry and obviously needed strength to rise to the last minute shopping challenge. We spied a café as soon as we got out of the U Bahn station. Maybe it was their position right next to the station but in this tired looking café, we ate perhaps the most expensive bacon and eggs since we left Australia – and that includes Scandinavia. One piece of bacon, one piece of toast and scrambled eggs for two, an OJ, a diet coke and a regular cappuccino – 30 Euros!

We steeled ourselves for the inevitable onslaught of last minute shoppers but it didn’t come. We organized to meet at 12pm so that I could go back and have a look if any of the boutiques were open. That plan failed miserably. I ran around through malls and shopping strips putting together quite a swag for Dan. Some leather gloves from the Christmas Market (he has been sizing these up for weeks) a star wars T-Shirt and a Ben Sherman T-shirt (which got put down and not picked up again in a mad scramble to get wrapping paper or groceries later on) a small lego technic set and a pocket revel model kit of an X-wing fighter. Quite proud of myself as that was the first ever model kit I bought Dan. He is usually very particular about what kits he wants.  And last but not least an Ampelmann T-shirt. Ampelmann is the walk/don’t walk sign in the former East Germany. The little guy, who has a hat, is a cult figure here now. So much so that he has his own store.  And Dan had mused that it would be a cool thing to have – a T-shirt with the ampelmann, so that’s exactly what I bought (and a bag for me). There are also ampel girls. Not to be accused of inequality, some of the lights have an ampelwoman rather than man – she has a skirt and pigtails rather than a hat. (Mary’s Boy child – Boney M – I got re-introduced to Boney M by someone I spent a bit of time with about 15 years ago – while they are not a staple on my listening roster these days, their chorus of voices and rhythm is a perfect accompaniment to this particular carol).

Presents in hand, it was off to the supermarket to pick up some extra supplies, including pasta and sauce for Christmas Eve dinner as all the restaurants would be shut while German families had their Christmas  and some alcohol for Christmas lunch. I wandered about the supermarket looking at random things and buying much more food than we needed. Dan wanted to get just two things – Bratwurst to cook at home and an assortment of beers – In the supermarket, the large  (500ml I think) beers were less than a Euro. The curious thing here, despite the prevalence of alcohol and the low price, there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem with public drunkenness.

A short stop for wrapping paper and a candle and we headed back to the apartment about 15 or 20 minutes before 2pm. A number of the boutiques around were still open so after we had deposited the shopping, I went back out for a look around. Unfortunately by this time, they had all pulled down the shutters and closed up for the Christmas break.

We stayed in doors for the rest of the day too. It was cold and windy and Berlin is a bit like a ghost town on Christmas Eve. German Christmas starts with a family dinner and then the opening of presents before attending midnight mass for those who are that way inclined – sort of the reverse of an Australian Christmas. As a teenager, with a boyfriend from a German family this meant that I got two Christmases which was a pretty good way to go. We spent the afternoon decorating our newly acquired Christmas tree with the decorations we had acquired throughout our trip, including numerous toy soldiers, the now wilted balsa wood star, a porcelain angel from the silly castle, a couple of hand painted baubles, retro Porsche and Mercedes models from the museums we didn’t get to visit, a couple of lebekeuchen, a few other trinkets and of course the lego Santa. (Do They Know its Christmas – Band aid – As a child of the 80s it wouldn’t be Christmas for me without this track. It was during a period where I was already very politically aware and it had some of my favourite acts from that time on the roll call. I even have the original single in its pink paper sleeve at home.)

Then we just chilled for the day listening to Christmas carols on my awesome phone interspersed with the ringing of church bells around us. As German families nearby and our friends and family in Australia were winding up their Christmas, we were going to sleep to wait for Santa.

In the morning we did our traditional thing of ham cheese and pineapple croissants (although I had tea instead of coffee this year) and opened our presents. Dan loved all of his. I had only one but it was pretty spectacular – a beautiful Swarovski necklace. Not a glitzy dazzling bling piece like so many of their wares but a simple ellipse with purple and clear crystals and an olde worlde feel. We spent the morning chilling out in the apartment. We had been travelling at such a pace for the past few weeks that it was nice to just stop and relax. It felt a bit odd though. Our Christmases are usually filled with dashing somewhere with a big bag of presents – to my brother’s place for his kids, to Milton to see Dan’s family. This year, rather than a hectic Christmas we had a quiet one.

Our lunch – schinken, salami, cheese, olives, gherkins, a green salad, roast potatoes and carrots, red cabbage with apple, washed down with Dan’s selection of beers and the German sparkling Reisling Brut I had bought – put us in the usual post Christmas food coma so we had a bit of a lie down and Dan had a snooze while I finished the champagne and thought about what else we wanted to see in Berlin that didn’t require anything to be open.

After Dan woke from his snooze, we decided we probably should leave the apartment and undertook to find a Christmas market that we hadn’t yet visited. We found one in the western side of Germany near Charlottenberg. Conveniently, it was accessible on the same U Bahn line.We wandered around, I bought presents for those at home and a knitted brimmed hat for me (looks better than it sounds, had some gluhwein (well I had almost two gluhweins after Dan gave me the rest of his in favour of a beer. Dan had been hankering to have a half metre bratwurst and amazingly finished the lot. I felt rather like something more vegetable in nature. There was a vegan stand but the tomato soup they were serving actually looked a bit bland. I went for the mushrooms, this time with herb sauce (herb actually means with paprika by the way). After a bit more of a stroll around the market we headed back for my Christmas dessert – baked apples (unfortunately what we thought was vanilla custard in the store turned out to be vanilla yoghurt – not really the same. Probably should have tried it or alternatively just bought some eggs and made our own. The apples were quite yummy though. (Frosty the Snowman – Willie Nelson – for my Dad.)

With (overly) full bellies and quite merry from the beer/wine/gluhwein, we headed off to sleep contentedly, the way it should be at Christmas.

Christmas themed activities – 23  War museums and model shops – 2.5  Design experiences – 2

I had planned not to waste too much Berlin time and visit the laundromat when we arrived. That didn’t happen. I also slept in a bit so it was about 9am before we headed down the road to complete our domestic chores. We were a bit smarter this time – a google search and reccie completed before we packed up the bags to go down.  Chores done, it was time to head out and explore Berlin. We decided to walk rather than use the U-Bahn so we could look at the neighbourhoods on our way and explore a little bit.

We wandered north on Oderberger Strasse to Eberswalde Strasse and walked down towards the Berlin Wall Memorial. On the way we passed a Christmas tree sales yard and vowed to return for our Christmas tree. From here we kept wandering until we reached the memorial – one of five or so wall sites that I didn’t visit last time I came. Berlin does an open air museum really well and this one is no exception. As you walk up to the remaining part of the wall at this location, you notice a row of 3 metre high rusted metal poles uniformly forming a fence. If you didn’t know better it might just look like an artful edge to the setback new housing development behind. What it actually is of course is a marker of where the wall once stood. There were explanations of what happened here at various points along the memorial, including recordings (with translations) of the people who lived here when the wall was built and when it came down, The curious thing here was that when the border was put in place, the fronts of some buildings were in the east when their back door was in the East. And people just escaped from one side to the other. The wall itself came later as East Germany lost its brains and brawn to the west. As you walk further along the memorial, with all the other foreign tourists, you come across the part of the wall that is still standing and realise just how wide the death strip in the middle was and how much of a slice of the middle of Berlin the fortification occupied. It is also an eerie feeling standing there in the middle of what was effectively no man’s land and realizing how many desperate people died trying to cross it, many of them in my lifetime. There was one really poignant photo of a young bride and her new husband waving across the wall to her parents on the other side. There have been many tales over the years of how families and friends were cut off from one another when the border went up in the middle of the night.

I have long been interested in this time in history, of the division between east and west during the cold war and the theory, attitudes and practice of communism throughout the world. Partly because the rise of communism marked one of the most divergent political philosophies of modern times but mostly because this – the divide between east and west (Communism and not rather than Asian and European culture – and the cold war existed and ended in my lifetime. I remember clearly when the wall came down. I remember Reagan’s comments a few years before and I remember the Russian attempts and failure to bring their country into the wider world without revolution. I watch keenly to see if China can turn itself into a fully democratized nation without a revolution. I watched these events from afar, having never been to Germany while the wall was here and while I knew Germans who had emigrated to Australia, their memories and what they were fleeing like so many other Europeans who called Australia home in the 1950s and early 60s were the devastating impact of the war and the lack of opportunity. Five years or so after the wall came down, I met some younger Germans who had been here at the time. It was fascinating to hear them talk about the impact it had.

The other thoughts I had rattling around in my brain were those of my mother when she visited here in 1964. As part of her round the world adventure, she and my grandmother visited Russia and East Germany at a time where there was intense security on the border here. Just recently my mother’s letters to my father during her trip came into my possession. Although clearly coloured by the time they were written, the letters gave a pretty clear indication of the hardship and desperation of East Berliners at the time. I imagined what my mother would have seen when she drove through these streets in 1964. Prenzlauer Berg wouldn’t have been littered with hipster boutiques the way it is now, that’s for sure. And the wall would have been a stark grey uniformly neat barrier not adorned with political murals and pondered over by tourists with cameras gracing their necks. (Mayonnaise – The Smashing Pumpkins – maybe not this song but The smashing Pumpkins generally has a real winter feel about to me – perfect for listening in an old Berlin apartment in December)

The next item on our agenda was a far more uplifting slice of history. Last time I had come to Berlin, I had attempted to find The Ramones Museum with the aid of an address and the neighbourhood map in the Lonely Planet pocket guide. I searched for ages, convinced it was no longer there. This time I was determined and I had saved the location in the GPS in my phone. I’m not sure where I was last time because when we rounded the corner suggested by the GPS, there it was in all its glory, completely unmissable. And the boutique across the road from where I thought it was last time had disappeared. In consolation I had procured a rather nice jacket and woolen hat from said boutique on my last visit.

If you are a Ramones fan or even just a fan of music more generally, particularly the period in time on the lower east side of NYC that gave birth to some of the giants of my music collection today (and the almighty CBGBs), do not miss this coffee shop come museum. Out the front is a coffee shop adorned with rare posters not just of The Ramones but The Clash, as well as photos of and messages from artists and bands the world over who have stopped by to visit. But it’s out the back where the real magic is. I think we paid about eight Euros for entry and a coffee but it was well worth i8t.

You had the sense you were walking through someone’s personal scrapbook of Ramones memorabilia. All too often in these kinds of museums the walls are full of things belonging to band members, or items used on stage like guitars. This was not that kind of museum. Almost every item is something that could have been collected by a fan – rare pressings of albums, merchandise including a Frisbee and the Hey Ho shorts I have stashed somewhere at home in my it will fit me again one day drawer (probably should just bite the bullet and frame them like the ones here). These are interspersed with posters and tickets from shows all over the world, including quite a few in Australia and some stellar lineups like the New Years Eve Show in NYC in the 80s with the then relatively unknown Beastie Boys supporting (dream bill) and yellowed newspaper clippings about The Ramones which really did look like they had been sticky taped into a scrap book. The only items that don’t look like they could have been collected in this way are the photographs donated by one of the band’s early managers, who also took pics for some of their most iconic album covers. We had a hot chocolate in the café and wandered around taking it in before bidding the Ramones museum goodbye and headed through Museum Island to one of Berlin’s most well known and heavily tourist trafficked streets – Unter den Linden. (Sheena is a Punk Rocker – The Ramones – one of my favourites and mentioned in the exhibition)

We walked up to the Brandenburg Gate where we were surrounded by statue buskers, horse drawn carriages, tour buses, people selling DDR memorabilia, a wedding party having their photo taken  and even a stretch hummer. That was when we decided we probably should have some lunch. We stopped in what was clearly a tourist café but it wasn’t too unreasonable – I had potato soup and Dan a Bratwurst. Revived we set off back down Unter den Linden to the handicrafts Christmas Market on the edge of Museum Island. It is probably a much more impressive market when there isn’t a building site (yes I mean a huge big hole in the ground building site) in the middle of it. From here we followed the trail of Christmas markets to Alexanderplatz (home of Berlin’s TV Tower) and started buying up goodies for Christmas. Germans celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve so we weren’t really sure how easy it would be to get supplies on the 24^th, especially considering this Christmas Market had a sign up saying it was closed. We grabbed some sugared nuts, some Schinken (best described as Parma Ham or prosciutto) and some cheese – some sort of Ementhal cheese I think. We then headed to the nearest supermarket to supplement out Christmas Market deli purchases.

From here we took a long walk back – by now it was about 5pm – and I insisted that we go back to the Christmas tree sales yard to get a tree just in case they weren’t open Christmas Eve.  Amazingly they were still open when we got there about 6pm. Germans really are fussy about their Christmas trees. The people in front of us looked like they had been there for an hour trying to pick the perfect Christmas tree from a yard of about two or three thousand. We walked in, chose a small one with a stand that looked a little lopsided, handed over our 20 Euros and took it home. I am sure the people who were there when we arrived, were probably still there when we left.

Christmas tree safely stashed in the apartment, we contemplated dinner. About half an hour later I just suddenly crashed and left Dan to wander the streets in search of a takeaway hamburger for his dinner.

Christmas themed activities – 18  War museums and model shops – 2.5 (I’m counting the Berlin Wall museum) Design experiences – 2

We arrived in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof about 5:30pm. It was already very dark outside. The main train station is enormous with about five levels with trains on the top and bottom (and a few in between) and the street on about the third level. We looked for the sign for taxi – given it was about a 10 Euro taxi ride vs two or three different forms of public transport and a bit of walking we had already decided on the taxi.  As the taxi driver weaved his way through the streets to Prenzlauer Berg, where we were staying, I noticed an awful lot of construction on the sides of the road like they were laying a lot of pipes – perhaps they are finally burying the pipes that run through many of the streets in the east about a story up. In some places, they have been lifted as the cross roads, presumably to allow trucks to go underneath. A long stretch about a kilometre from where we are staying is painted magenta.

We arrived at the apartments and collected the instructions from the café next door. First we had to key in a code to the front doors – Dan’s torch that I stir him so much for carrying everywhere came in very handy. The through the front into the communal courtyard – the standard arrangement in this part of Berlin – back into the back part of the building and up three flights of stairs to our third level apartment. Then there was another code for a keybox at the door and then to open the door. Opening the door was the hardest part. It took a few goes before we worked it out. The apartment itself was beautifully furnished but left enough in original condition with hot water radiators running about the walls, the original floors and windows to make sure you felt you were in Prenzlauer Berg rather than the more gentrified part. Like the building next door. The back courtyard here actually has a fence through it. The neighbouring building has been gentried with hedges gardens, new fittings, retrofitted balconies and even an external elevator. After dropping our luggage, we decided to take a walk down toward the U-Bahn station at Eberswalde Strasse to get some dinner. We passed quite a few restaurants on our own little strip of Oderberger Strasse, some of them even open on Sunday. Dan wanted to explore a bit more and eventually we came on a strip of what was essentially cheap eats, gritty bars and 24/7 small grocery stores (well mostly bottleshops with a few groceries really. Kind of like a 711 but with masses of alcohol on sale. I surmised this must be a backpacker area when I saw vegemite for sale in one of the stores. Eventually we came upon an Italian restaurant come cocktail bar. We both felt like pizza after one too many rich German meals. Dan had a meat pizza with olives and pickled peppers. I went really simple and had a Hawaiian pizza. We washed it down with a beer = a lager for me and pilsner for Dan. After dinner we walked back to the apartment and crashed.

Christmas themed activities – 16  War museums and model shops – 1.5  Design experiences – 2

We were staying in the NH Dresden Alrtmarkt – a fairly swish hotel in Dresden’s old town, about a kilometre from the station so we headed up the main pedestrian thoroughfare with our packs on weaving in and out of the hundreds of people milling about in one of the many Christmas markets or finishing a spot of last minute Christmas shopping. It was late Saturday afternoon when we arrived so it was quite busy, especially around the Gluhwein stands, where locals congregate and imbibe the traditional Christmas drink with gusto. Eventually we made it through the Christmas market and to the old town and our hotel.

When we checked in, they offered us hand towels and a refreshing drink. I had asked if possible when I booked the hotel if we could have a room with a view of the Christmas Market. They said the only room they could offer was a disabled room which had a bathroom setup that could be used by a person confined to a wheelchair. We decided to take it – the bathroom was perfectly easy to use and the view over the Christmas Market was spectacular. The Dresden Christmas Market is prettiest I have seen so far. Rather than just simple cabins and so on, it looked more like a Christmas Village. There were three dimensional Christmas scenes, some of the animated, on the top of all of the huts – bakers mixing things in bowls on the roof of the crepe stand – Santa and his reindeer on the roof of a Christmas decoration stand. One of the Gluhwein stands had a working train driving around its roof. It was about 4:30pm by the time we arrived so it had started to get dark and the whole market was brightly lit. It was spectacular. (Live to Tell – Madonna – this is one of Madonna’s more timeless tracks – it wasn’t really one of my faves when it came out – probably because other tracks were much more danceable but I have gained a new appreciation for it in recent years – probably because the only dancing I do these days is in the living room.)

We’d had no wi-fi for a couple of days so we decided to chill in the hotel for a couple of hours or so before getting dressed up to go out for a nice dinner. I pulled on my new dress (bought especially for travelling on the basis that you could probably screw it up into a ball and it would still look pretty good and my new boots from Stockholm and slathered on the war paint and off we went. We wandered down to the waterfront looking for a swish restaurant, preferably with a modern take on German cuisine. All we could find were French and Italian restaurants. The girl at the hotel had mentioned a couple of German restaurants to Dan – we walked past the first one and it looked a bit more like a diner and it was pretty full. We got to the door of the other and were welcomed in without a reservation. The restaurant was down two flights of stairs in the basement of the building. We were looking for something intimate. What we found was probably best described as a beer barn, complete with waitresses in traditional German costume. You can never really predict things when you are travelling and as we were there just the two of us, as we had been for the past three weeks anyway, it was still intimate in a weird kind of way. There was a quite extensive menu too. Given it was a beer barn, we both started with a beer – a pilsner for Dan and a Lager for me. We also decided to order entrees – I had Saxon potato soup with frankfurters – it was a slightly sour herbed potato soup with slices of frankfurts and Dan had the pork ragout, which tasted like a pork version of tuna mornay, complete with a grilled cheese crust. I chose off the Christmas menu for mains – roast Goose with potato dumplings and one of my favourite things ever – red cabbage with apple. When it arrived, it was huge – I am pretty sure it was a whole goose thigh and leg, with two rather large potato dumplings – needless to say there was no way I could finish it. The waitress looked concerned that I didn’t like it there was so much left. Dan chose the bohemian goulash (which was really tasty) and came with bread dumplings. Dan had another beer and I decided on Gluhwein (without the added rum).  The trick to Gluhwein is to let it cool slightly so the pungent alcohol flavour steams off the surface. It is really quite enjoyable once you have done that.  We decided to wander around the Christmas Market for some more Gluhwein and dessert – Dan had spied a crepery and was keen to tuck in.

What we forgot was that the Christmas Markets usually close about 8pm. And that is really when they close. As soon as the clock hits 8pm, the shutters start coming down. We wandered for a bit longer in the vain hope that one of the stands would still have something Dan felt like but eventually we gave up and retired for the evening. The lights from the Christmas market stayed on for a while and made a restful backdrop out the hotel window.

Next morning we checked out of the hotel, stowed our bags and went out to explore Dresden. First stop was breakfast at the crepe stand in the Christmas market, Dan had one with Nutella – mine was the (for me) traditional Zitrone und Zucker (lemon and sugar). Then it was off to Neustadt. I had read a bit about the youth culture in the outer Neustadt that had grown out of the seeds of the peaceful 1989 revolution that brought down the wall so we set out across the bridge, leaving Dresden’s rebuilt Baroque era buildings behind.  Unfortunately I had lost the hand drawn map where I had scrawled out a walk for us to go on and at one point we turned the wrong way and missed the last part but it was nonetheless a really interesting window into the current (less hipster, more real) cultural life of the alternative part of Dresden, Firstly this area had that same unkempt look about it that Sydney’s inner west used to have 25 years ago before it became an address to have. The post re-unification squats may have disappeared here but that vibe and the aesthetic seemingly lives on.

As we wandered up the street we saw mural after mural – we walked past the youth centre – operating here since 1951, although I imagine it was a quite different looking place – much less Bohemian before 1989. There was an installation of incredibly long bicycles and Katy’s Garage, an infamous club that is set in what looks almost like a series of shipping containers – but which I understand used to be a garage. From here we kept wandering up to Kunsthoffspassage which leads into a courtyard of townhouses that are an artist’s canvas of murals, sculptures and outdoor artworks hanging on the walls. One wall famously has a pipe arrangement that works as a musical instrument when it rains, and another has brass metal strips protruding in semi circles from the wall so from the ground it looks like someone threw gold confetti in the air and some of it stuck to the side of the building. It was an amazing sight and you imagine one an energy charged, creative and exciting time it would have been in this part of Dresden in the months surrounding the fall of the Berlin wall. We wandered further down the street past the Lebowski bar – and yes it is inspired by the film as is evident from the bars logo. This corner is known as the Bermuda triangle because of its plethora of bars. There is a gay bar called Kings and Queens and if the name wasn’t enough for you to realise, the place is helpfully adorned with a rainbow flag. I haven’t seen one of those for a while. Instead of turning left here and seeing more of the street art, we took a right which led us back to Katy’s Garage. It’s a pity but that’s what happens I guess. We3 saw a lot of interesting work at any rate. The other thing you notice is that this area has not been spruced up and gentrified like the Aldstadt. Either by circumstance or design it has retained its gritty character without recreating it the way hipster districts across the world have otherwise. This feels like the real deal – a moment captured in time. (The Wild Rover – Dropkick Murphys – The Dropkicks are pretty good at reinterpreting classic Irish folk songs and this is no exception)

We wandered back through the local Neustadt Christmas market that looked quite a bit more authentically local than the flashy (but really pretty) Christmas market in the Aldstadt. It was while tents like you see at all Australian markets including the Multi-cultural festival. This market was a bit multicultural too with Finnish Glogg, African curries and even Vietnamese noodles on sale. Dan had stopped and bought a Bratwurst on the way through to the Neustadt. From there it was back across the River Elbe and the many, many photo opportunities that presented. Including, by the way, a Cinderella princess style coach being pulled by horses. Funnily enough it was Japanese people riding inside.

Then we came upon the transport museum, complete with a collection of aircraft, that I had pointed out to Dan. Amazingly he decided not to spend the 10 Euros or so that it cost to go inside and preferred to walk around Dresden and look at things. So I can’t really be blamed for the low count on war museums and model shops. The blame for the amount of Christmas themed activities does lie squarely at my feet though.

We decided it was time for a break from walking so we sat inside a little, traditional style café and had coffee and hot chocolate – at about 4 Euros each it was possibly the most expensive coffee I had so far. But it was expected given the location of the café right next to the Frauenkirche, the church in Dresden that was destroyed by allied bombing in the Second World War, left by the DDR as a memorial of war and then painstakingly rebuilt from the rubble. It is a curious building, mostly because they obviously needed to intersperse some new materials to rebuild it so it looks a bit patchwork. Burt it is amazing how much of Dresden has been rebuilt. Dan, who reads a lot of war history, said that more people died in Dresden in a series of allied bombing raids than were killed by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. That and then they endured four decades of soviet rule. It’s a wonder anyone in Dresden over the age of 25 even knows how to smile.

After we had our fill of the rebuilt baroque skyline of Dresden, we headed back to the Christmas market for some lunch and a Christmas decoration purchase. Dan tried the first kransky looking sausage he had seen – it turned out to be more or less a pretty boring frankfurt. I opted for the traditional bratwurst, which is a herbed pork sausage with German mustard. I have always thought Germans made the best mustard and since eating so many sausages in markets, I am even more convinced. I had spied earlier in the day, a dessert treat that had been one of my favourite as a child – I had no idea it was a German delicacy although it probably fairly obvious – baked apples with custard. The apples are cored and then filled with butter and brown sugar and baked until soft (except my Dad made them in the microwave – he also made cakes like that too – I didn’t grow up in a gourmet household, let’s just leave it at that. Now baked apples probably aren’t that good for you but they taste incredible. Bellies full and tastebuds satisfied, it was time to procure a Christmas ornament – a silver advent candle like we had seen in the windows of all the houses throughout Scandinavia and often in Germany too – and then bid farewell to Dresden as we boarded the train for our final German destination and the place where we were to spend Christmas – Berlin.

Christmas themed activities – 16  War museums and model shops – 1.5  Design experiences – 2

For me visiting the Bauhaus in Dessau was an essential part of any trip to Germany and when I found out we could stay in the original student accommodation I was thrilled. Dan wasn’t as keen on the idea of shared bathroom facilities but I convinced him it was worth it. When we arrived in Dessau it was sprinkling rain and Dan was pretty tired so we headed straight for the Bauhaus bistro to pick up our keys for the room. The building, which has been kept extraordinarily well, is exactly as you’d expect a Bauhausian building designed and built in the 1930s to look. Simple, uncluttered and functional. Built well before there were elevators, the Bauhaus foundation has maintained the building in largely original condition. Our room was on the fourth floor so that meant four flights of stairs. The stairwell, as you’d expect was all tubular steel balustrades and concrete floors. There were four rooms on the floor with a small kitchenette at one end and bathroom facilities at the other. There was a separate toilet. And next to it was a communal shower. There was a wall dividing the room. On one side there were three steel basins and on the other what I imagine was originally a row of showers like you see in gym rooms in American movies. Except now it was just the world’s hugest shower space with a massive rainshower head above it and a wall of windows behind. It was the kind of bathroom you could imagine people paying big bucks for. The room itself was also quite large with a simple double bed a sink in the corner. A table with Bauhaus style cantilever chairs, a simple shelving unit and coat stand and industrial style lamps. You can go out onto the balcony but the brochure does warn it is totally at your own risk and that the balustrade remains as per original specifications so without the safety features required today. The windows, which can be opened, are really heavy as they are made of steel. This building was completed before aluminum became a cheap and reliable building material.

Dan wanted to chill for a while so I went to check out the exhibition in the main building. Unfortunately it shut at 5pm but I did have the opportunity to look in both the book store and the gift shop. Of course I bought a couple of things to bring home including a book on design-a collection of 500 objects that have shaped the way we live that are all still in production today and a collection of post cards that can be cut out (if you are good enough with a scalpel to form design objects including the Barcelona chair. There was a huge range of books, although only a fairly small English section. And I don’t think my German will be good enough to read design philosophy. I have a hard enough time with the likes of Said and Umberto Eco in English thanks.

After that we decided we should probably head into the main part of Dessau to find some dinner. We walked through the main train station to find ourselves in a park, with quite a lot of trams about and just one eatery for what seemed like miles in any direction – a quite expensive Greek restaurant. The town looked very East German and incredibly desolate. We decided that if we walked for a while we had to find something, especially considering we had already seen posters for the local Christmas Market – called an Advent market here. Eventually after seeing some lights in the distance and walking through another quite dark park, we found it.(Run to the Hills – Iron Maiden – the most well known metal track of all time (with the exception of ACDC’s Long way to the Top and Metallica’s Enter Sandman – all of which are must have tracks on any playlist I own)

Part fairground with quite a few rides and those stupid games where you have to use a mechanical arm to win stuff, there was also a number of food stalls and gluhwein, of course. Dan’s first stop was the crepery for a crepe with Nutella. I had a little piece – it was really yummy. After that we headed for the more traditional fare. The local specialty appeared to be some kind of bratwurst cooked in spinach – we both gave that a miss. Dan had a Bratwurst in bread, we both had fried potatoes – Brat Kartoffeln- and I had the cooked mushrooms I had seen in a few places. My effort at ordering in German faltered when it came to the part where the lady asked what I wanted on them – what I got I’m pretty sure was crème fraiche. It tasted good though. Then we needed a drink. It is really hard to get still water here. The Germans all seem to prefer sparkling mineral water. In any case the only place that had any kind of water was also selling Gluhwein so of course we decided to have some. The girl serving, who spoke really good English, asked whether we wanted the good one. We chose that. It was really strong, possibly because the alcohol dissipates as it steams away. Or maybe it’s because you get used to it. It does get easier to drink. You get served the gluhwein in cups or glasses. Part of the price for the first one is a deposit on the drinking vessel. If you return it once you are done you get the deposit back.

After the gluhwein we headed into the nearby mall to find a supermarket to get some still water. First we found a toy shop. And wouldn’t you know it, they had model kits… After that episode we found the supermarket –nit was a lot like Aldi but it was called Normas. The supermarket opposite had a bakery and well displayed fruit and vege – it looked more like a coles. Water and OJ in hand, we headed back to the Bauhaus. On our way through the train station, we saw our first annoying drunk person. A man in maybe his 50s or 60s, he was being hauled away by the police. After that it was back up the four flights of stairs to our room and bed for the night.

We awoke to a magnificent sunrise through our top floor window in the Bauhaus apartments and just laid there for a while enjoying it. Eventually we got up, dressed and showered and headed to the bistro in the Bauhaus to access a locker to store our gear while we walked around and to have some breakfast. Dan had bacon and eggs which came with a bread roll and was quickly turned into a bacon and egg roll. I had the salmon breakfast which came with smoked salmon, spring onions and horseradish cream. The horseradish cream was awesome. Just the right amount of horseradish zing yet still mild enough to enjoy for breakfast. It also came with a roll and Dan donated one of his three eggs so I could make a salmon and egg roll. Almost like my standard Tilley’s breakfast but not quite. They love their butter in Germany. The little butter packages that you get with breakfast here are about two-three times the size of the ones at home. They don’t really make Espresso coffee though. While Filtered coffee is available everywhere and you can get a latte or cappuccino but it is not made barista style. It comes from one of those prefab machines – not a George Clooney – the ones you used to find in the Qantas lounge before they realised the popularity of a real barista. I am sure if we found a good coffee shop, we would find a good espresso here. I haven’t been bothered so far – I don’t mind good percolated coffee – reminds me of childhood. This morning I felt like a milkier coffee though – of course it was a pre-fib cappuccino. (Here me Out – Ben Keller – I discovered the then teenage Ben Keller about a decade ago when he toured with Ben Folds and Ben Lee on the three Bens tour. I haven’t heard much from him since but still really love this album)

After breakfast I couldn’t find the map of where all the Bauhaus sites were so we just started wandering, using the GPS on my phone to find the Elbe – the Cornhusk Restaurant, one of the remaining Bauhaus sites in Dessau sits right on the edge of it. As we wandered we took note of the new housing developments – a mix of recreating old Germany and some heavily influenced by what became known as the Bauhaus style – and t5he many ways in which the Bauhaus heritage had been ripped off – including a new apartment block in Bauhausian style and colours called Haus Elbe and an art gallery called Bau Art.

The restaurant was not as well looked after as some of the other buildings – Lonely Planet said it was empty when they put together the latest guide but it now has a restaurant trading from it. The outside could do with a paint and it could use some other repairs. The Bauhaus sense was still there. The rounded building was sited to take full advantage of views of the Elbe River that flows through eastern Germany and the original fittings, including straight glass windows angles appropriately to provide the circular vista, were still intact. Thankfully there was also a map of the other Bauhaus sites so we could work out where the Masters houses were. We thought we had missed them but they came up on us along a street. That is the thing about the Bauhaus structures – while they are instantly recognizable, they are also sympathetically designed and so don’t jump right out at you. There was clearly some construction going on when we were there. It was hard to tell if they were rebuilding Masters Houses that had been destroyed or whether they were just refurbishing. We chose not to go and do the tour as I was keen to visit the permanent exhibition in the Bauhaus.

For me the Bauhaus is more about a design philosophy and an approach to design education than it is about a particular style. That was what it was always supposed to be about but because the school itself lasted only such a short amount of time, the style of architecture and products that it produced is very similar and really marks a point in time. Of course the design it produced was revolutionary but that was as much driven by the philosophy of form follows function and integrity of materials. It is a philosophy that has lasted almost a hundred years and has produced products and architecture in many different styles. One of the most interesting things about the exhibition from my point of view was the leading lights of the Bauhaus that aren’t household names – designers like Marianne Brandt, who stayed in Dessau and East Germany following the war and who taught in design schools behind the iron curtain. It is the Bauhaus masters who fled to the US, to try and set up a similar school in Chicago – who we recognize as influencing 20^th century architecture and design – names like Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe. (We Got Two Jealous Agains – NOFX – the closest thing to a love song from the album War on Errorism. ‘I knew you were the one.. .’ Seems appropriate for today – our anniversary – half spent at the Bauhaus and half in the baroque Christmas fairytale of Dresden)

There were three things I found in the museum that were really interesting to me. And no, none of them were the collection of designer chairs or indeed any of the actual design pieces. Let’s face it I’ve seen a real Marcel Breuer chair before – even sat in one and even Aldi now sells replicas of the Barcelona chair – intellectual property rights don’t actually last as long as you’d think (except when it’s the flute solo from ‘I come from a Land Downunder’. The three things that interested me most were to do with the Bauhaus philosophy of education that guided my own design studies (too) many years ago.

The first was the journals of handwritten notes of one of the students – they looked like a cross between the sketch books that I and my contemporaries scribbled our idea in 30 years ago and my father’s notebooks from his scientific studies in the late 40s and early 50s. This was partly because my father’s notes were almost as old as the ones in the museum and partly because the Bauhaus had an emphasis on science and technology in its teachings.

The second was an assortment of (recreated) projects from the foundation year studies – like my own foundation year studies, the Bauhaus focused on creativity rather than technology during this period (They also reportedly used it to ensure only the best students progressed past this point – something I am probably glad wasn’t a focus in my own studies. The project they had chosen to recreate was a paper task – taking a single piece of paper and a scalpel – create a three dimensional structure. There were some fabulously creative pieces. While we weren’t asked to complete this particular task, we did have to create a usable chair out of corrugated cardboard and in high school I was asked to make a 3D sculpture out of a single disc of aluminum and a pair of tin snips.

The third item of interest was a diagram of the course structure –the tenets of the foundation year, which included technical, historical  and scientific studies– an apprenticeship in a particular discipline – metalwork, textiles, photography etc, including scientific and technical studies and then a number of years studying architecture. (Dirty Deeds – You Am I with Tex Perkins – recorded for the Australian movie Dirty Deeds, this is an excellent cover that’s worth seeking out.)

We didn’t make it to the unfinished housing project in the South of Dessau but I was much more interested in seeing the Bauhaus itself and learning more about the philosophy. The housing project though was a mark of what the Bauhaus design principles were founded on – egalitarianism, harnessing the tools of mass production and the ability for everyone to have their everyday lives improved by good design. Ironically the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930s dismissed the Bauhaus and their philosophies and the Bauhaus tradition was lost to both the East and West for decades. Where it did find a new home was in the US but the nature of US society meant that while the Americans embraced the architectural style and the mass production of the Bauhaus, the egalitarian ethos disappeared in what later became known as the International style that was adopted by American architects that followed the exponents of the Bauhaus.

After the exhibition and one last look at the buildings it was there that we left the Bauhaus and Dessau for our next stop, Dresden.

Christmas themed activities – 15  War museums and model shops – 1.5  Design experiences – 2

Just before the train pulled into Nuremberg, I got the mother of all blood noses. It just wouldn’t stop. Now I’ve never had a blood nose before so needless to say it was freaking me out a bit. There I was with a mountain of blood sodden tissues trying to negotiate our way off the train, through the train station and to our hotel, with a (by now) very heavy backpack and trying to stop the bleeding. Fortunately the hotel wasn’t far away and after a little while I managed to stop the bleeding. The thing about hotel rooms in this part of the world is that they are really hot in comparison to outdoors so you need to immediately remove a couple of layers to feel mildly comfortable. That was a struggle in this circumstance. By this stage I was both a little light headed and freaked out so I lay down calmly for a while  

Eventually we decided that it was time to venture out and find the reason for our stopover in Nuremberg – the Christmas Market. In all the travel literature you read, the Nuremberg Christmas Market is heralded as one of the best in Germany and the Nuerembergers obviously think it is too because you can buy souvenirs for the Christmas market at the Christmas market. It did have a much larger array of stands selling Christmas decorations than other markets we had visited. I bought a balsa wood Christmas decoration for our tree. And I did see a stand selling babushka dolls – that had a Madonna doll, that presumably ages as you open each doll,  and a Gorby doll – my question here – is who is inside Gorby? The chocolate tools too were a step above those we had seen elsewhere – there was a very intricate antique iron for a start. (Shout – Tears for Fears – well before emo existed, there was already angst ridden music for teenagers who hated the world. Tears for Fears were my version of that. And better. It also seems the appropriate soundtrack as I type this on a train on a rainy day hurtling through the former DDR)

The food choices were more limited though. There were waffles and there was one place selling potato cakes. Other than that, every time you turned a corner there was a place selling one type of hotdog – the nurnberger bratwurst. The local delicacy was pretty good though. Three little sausages (herbed pork and beef I am pretty sure) on a crusty roll with mustard. Dan liked them so much he went back for two extra serves. I followed my hotdog up with another local delicacy – fruit bread. There were heaps of stalls selling it and it was really yummy. What bread there was, was a sort of rye bread but the bread itself was mostly fruit, including dried figs and plums I think. It was awesome. There was also plenty of Gluhwein as well but given the nosebleed episode, I thought it was probably better to leave getting liquored up for another day. Dan was looking for beer but couldn’t find one – probably a good thing for his cold.

We decided to head back to the hotel about the time the markets were starting to close up – 8pm – so we and our various ailments could get an early night and sleep in a bit in the morning. There was plenty to see in Nuremberg, especially in the Aldstadt but we also both needed the rest. We got up with enough time to wander for an hour or so before we caught the 11am train to Leipzig. (Before too Long – Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls – I wrote Paul Kelly off somewhere back in the late 80s, early 90s but about 15 years ago I re-listened to him and have gained a whole new respect for his ability as a singer-songwriter)

First stop – a quick breakfast in a café near the hotel – croissants with ham and cheese, coffee and hot chocolate and a good dose of OJ. Then we wandered through the main market place where the Christmas Markets were just starting to open for the day’s trade. We, though, were marveling at the array of gothic churches and other buildings surrounding the market. The markets open so early you could have Gluhwein for breakfast. Or bratwurst for that matter. I am not sure which would be worse. Although I could probably stomach both if I had been imbibing all night.

Dan spied an Aldi on the corner. We hadn’t been in one so far and we did need some basic supplies like tissues and deodorant that we could likely procure there. Unfortunately the ability to buy small packets of tissues at Aldi was only possible in lots of about 60 packets so we opted for a bo9x instead. At 50 Euro cents that is even cheaper than Aldi at home, a point Dan was happy to point out. We chose some deoderant. Unfortunately with a stuffed up nose, it’s hard to tell it offensive a fact we subsequently discovered before we binned it after one use. I guess we’ll know if people start sitting at the other end of the train. Dan also procured some pretty tasty feta filled olives for a Euro and some OJ. After our Aldi foray, we grabbed our bags and headed for the station. We actually had to find the right car this time (instead of just looking for a train carriage with a big 1 on the side) as we were riding with a reservation for the first time in days. A good thing too as the train was pretty full and nearly all the seats had reservations posted for some part of the journey – the train was going to Berlin and then on to Hamburg after we got off. (Stain – Narco Wendy – off the local Canberra album Legoland Strikes back – this was a band some friends of mine put together for fun. They did a few gigs at the long defunct Terminus. Forgot this was on my MP3 player actually – gotta love shuffle.)

This train trip marked our first foray into the eastern part of Germany, the former DDR. While Germany has been reunited for a quarter of a century now, there are still hallmarks of the DDR everywhere, especially the advertisements for museums for those looking for DDR nostalgia. Also much of the infrastructure – pipes and bridges have that utilitarian look about them. Perhaps it is just German engineering, noting that we have spent the past few days in Bavaria which doesn’t have that same functional feel. But the countryside does look a whole lot more mean business and damn the vista than we had seen previously.

There were also plenty of the German man caves that had littered the side of the train lines over the past few days. I guess they are most likely called summer houses here. At any rate they are often near the rail line and feature a small shed with a vege plot – sometimes outdoor furniture. They are obviously plots for people who live in apartments to be able to have their own outdoor space to grow produce. But over time they seem to have developed into man caves with barbecues and other man style tinkering toys. Some even have kids play equipment and small pools – I am guessing these are probably more family caves than man caves.  I am glad our man cave, which I am allowed to enter, is a bit closer to home or chances are there wouldn’t be any real point having a boyfriend because I would never see him. The difference as you go further east is that these plots look more like shanty towns where people live. Perhaps they are just more elaborate sheds.

Christmas themed activities – 14  War museums and model shops – 1.5  Design experiences – 1

Day two of our Bavarian adventure was to visit Schloss Neuschwanstein the castle designed by a theatre set designer and built in the late 1800s as a fairytale castle for Bavarian King Ludwig II and copied by Disney as the blueprint for the enchanted castle at Disneyland. (Which explains why it is such a popular place to visit.) You can get to Fussen, the town where the castle is, by train so once again we were aided by our trusty Eurail pass. From the station, they let you know where to go for the bus to the castle complex. And I call it a complex because there are restaurants, cafes, hotels and gift shops everywhere here. Fromm there it is a relatively short stroll to the ticket box. The castle is so popular that the only way to see it is on a guided tour. There are two ways to buy tickets – from a tour company as part of a tour from Munich, and most of those were around 100 Euro and took 10 hours, or by coming to the ticketbox and taking your chances. Knowing this we had left Munich about 8am and arrived here a little after 10. Thankfully it is less busy in winter although we still had to wait until 11:55am for the next available English tour. The tour was 12 Euros each so pretty reasonable. (The Rascal King – Mighty Mighty Bosstones – like all the Bosstones best tunes, you can’t keep your feet still while listening to this, which I guess is why the band, like other favourite ska bands of mine, includes a dancer.)

From here, as the shuttle bus wasn’t running, there were two ways up to the castle – about 1.5 kilometres up a quite steep road – on foot or by horse drawn carriage. Usually anything connected with a horse pulling a carriage would set you back at least $50. The horse and carriage ride up the hill here was six euro and it cost less to come back. There was quite a line for the horses so we used shanks’ pony (our feet) to make it to the top. It was definitely a bit of an effort. The reward was worth it though – we could see the castle in all its glory. Just like the Disney replica, this castle looked like it had been built yesterday. And because it was built in the late 19^th century, after the invention of the telephone, it almost had. We wandered around outside the castle for a while and snapped away before lining up for our tour. The amount of people going through here suddenly became apparent. A tour left the front gate every five minutes and each tour had about 30 people. The tour went for about three quarters of an hour but you still felt like you were shuffled through quite quickly.

The inside of the castle was where the real eccentricity and ostentatious decoration can be found. Decorated mostly in a baroque or byzantine style with plenty of gold everywhere, it is completely over the top   when you consider it was built in the late 19^th century. As Dan commented, it was basically a copy of something else. A 19th century version of building a suburban home with Greek columns. Dan is now calling it the silly castle.

The absurdity of it didn’t make the interior any less impressive. The first room we entered – the throne room without a throne was heavily decorated with gold leaf and religious murals and all the candle chandeliers were bejeweled and shaped like crowns. In fact the crown lights were a feature throughout most of the castle. He also had a thing for opera and there were plenty of murals inspired by his favourite operas, including in the singers room at the top of the castle, designed for performances that never happened. Apparently the acoustics are pretty awesome – they hold a concert here every year in September. The only room that wasn’t all gold and showy was the King’s bedroom although it was completely over the top. It was modeled in the gothic tradition with a mass of intricate dark wood carvings, especially above the king’s bed. It took 24 carvers four years to complete the carvings in that room alone. (Time to Build – The Beastie Boys – this is from their awesome post 911 concept album – To the 5 Boroughs. If you don’t own it already, buy it now).

Of course like all good museums and attractions, the passageway out funneled you through not one but two gift shops, including one that had been there since the castle opened to the public in the 1920s. With our fill of King Ludwig, we weren’t minded to visit the castle constructed as an abode for his parents. We waited for the bus back to town, made a quick trip to a bakery – tip pretzels taste really good when split and buttered like a bread roll – and caught the train back to Munich to collect our bags from the locker and head to Nuremberg. The delay with the tour meant we missed the Nuremberg train we had reserved by a couple of minutes. Thankfully there was another train to Nuremberg just over half an hour later and this one even went through Augsburg.

Christmas themed activities – 13  War museums and model shops – 1.5 Design experiences – 1

Our two days in Munich would allow us to get out of Munich and experience the two things we were going to do by car by driving into Austria. The first of these was to visit Zuspitze at the top of the Bavarian Alps. After checking out the train timetable, I worked out a way to do it. We took a regional train from Munich to Garmisch – Partenkirchen. The trip was picturesque as we passed through heaps of little Bavarian villages and towards the snow fields. One of the things you notice as you travel around the country here is the amount of green power generation. Windmills dot the countryside and so do solar farms. Even in the regional areas, where there is snow beneath the solar panel arrays, they are harnessing the sun’s energy for power. And that begs the question – why aren’t we doing the same?

When we arrived in Garmisch – Partenkirchen, we wandered over to the Cog railway station to get us up the mountain and purchased our tickets, just missing the train. We had to wait an hour for the next one so we went for a wander. The tix to get to the top are quite expensive in comparison to most of the tickets in Germany – $41 Euros each to get up to the top and back. It sounds like a lot of money but I guarantee it is worth it and if you are a skier or boarder, the ticket actually includes a lift pass. The cog train takes almost an hour to get to the Zugspitze platform near a glacier, much of the journey quite steeply up hill. When you get there and look down, you can see plenty of people skiing and boarding in the fields below. From here it is a quick cable car ride to the summit. The cable car itself is one of those really huge ones that carries about 30 people.  When you arrive at the summit station, you still have a couple of floors to go up in a lift before you reach the summit. The first thing you notice out of the window is a wooden hut that seems built into the rock face. Now a hotel, that includes a building carved into the rock, the original wooden building was constructed as a refuge at the summit a century ago. (Sunny Afternoon – The Kinks – I first got introduced to the Kinks in the mid-80s and it was quite a revelation to me about the wealth of music that had come before the Brit new wave and ska world I was so entangled with. This is one of their more relaxed tunes but still a bit alternative for the 60s)

When you step out onto the huge viewing platform, the view and the feeling you get looking out over the rails is breath taking. We thought we may not be able to see very far but up here, at the top of Germany, the sun was peeking through the clouds and shining on the snowy peaks. You could see for miles into Austria, Switzerland, and I’d wager probably even France. The colours were spectacular all white and icy blue with the dark green of the pine trees breaking up the vista. It was cold, especially when the wind blew and at a few points I felt li8ke I was at risk of blowing over. Looking down was a challenge but it was also a spectacular experience. Standing here all the horizons you could see were below you and I really did feel like I was on the top of the world.

Once we had endured all the cold winds we could handle we went downstairs and had a hot chocolate in the café in the part of the building that was in Austria (according to the alert I received from Telstra). Apparently in the days before the EU, they used to have a border crossing up here. The vista from the café was still pretty amazing – you felt a bit like you were in a space age pod sitting far up in the sky – Jetsons style.

For the descent, we chose a longer cable car ride on the other side of the station that allowed us to meet up with the cog wheel train almost at the base of the mountain. It was a smaller gondola, holding about 12-15 people and it rocked a bit more on the descent. Sadly I was reminded of the movie Chalet girl but then quickly distracted by the amazing views on the way down. The ride was only a few minutes but it was spectacular. I have used the word breath taking a number of times in describing this journey – that is partly because being tired tends to limit my vocabulary but mostly because there is no better adjective to describe this experience. If you come here, do it – it is amazing.

The journey back through the villages was also quite interesting and we spied quite a few oddities – the houses that look exactly like you’d expect in a Bavarian fairytale and in at least a couple of places we saw crucifixes with boxes around them. Dan joked that you had to keep Jesus warm and it has had me in stitches ever since. Yes I have a very strange sense of humour.

After the two hour journey back to Munich we chilled out for a while before heading out to find dinner. Suddenly I remembered that I could us Trip Advisor to look for decent restaurants close to the hotel. I found a German restaurant wi8th pretty good reviews – Alt Muenchener Gesellenhaus – so we headed there. It was really cheap with authentic Bavarian offerings – Dan had a pork Cordon Bleu with chips and I had a proper veal Weiner Schnitzel with fried potatoes and bacon, just like one of my friend’s German mum’s makes. It was magnificent. We both thought that in the interests of getting rid of our colds, we should give the beer a miss – which took a bit of willpower in a German pub style restaurant in Bavaria. We did however try dessert. Dan opted for a breaded dumpling and custard. What arrived was a huge bread dumpling with a moat of custard – a German version of bread and butter pudding. We couldn’t finish it but it was really good. After dinner once again it was time for bed. I am sure we will get out and enjoy some night time activities soon. (One More day – The Descendents – I finally got to see the Descendents a few years ago and grew an even greater respect for them, despit5e the poor sound in the venue.)

Christmas themed activities – 13  War museums and model shops – 1.5  Design experiences – 1

We took the same train back from Rothenberg. O. d. T to Steinach. That is where our plan for the day unraveled. We were waiting on the platform for the train to Augsburg with connecting train to Munich. Ever since I had booked the reservations that had us going through Augsburg, I kept thinking of the scene from the West Wing where Danny, chasing the Omar Sharif story, is falling asleep and saying he just got back from Augsburg, Germany. We wouldn’t be getting back from Augsburg because we wouldn’t be going there. There had been some kind of accident and someone had died and the train we wer4e waiting for wasn’t coming. The two American ladies on the platform suggested the next train to Wurzburg as an option. We did that – we figured that anywhere we reached from the tiny two track station at Steinach was more likely to get us to Munich, our final destination for the day. While we were sitting there, a train engine was shunting between tracks to pickup two lots of carriages. So it wasn’t completely boring sitting there waiting for the train to come. When we arrived in Wurzburg, we easily found a train heading for Munich via Nuremberg. The Eurail pass has turned out to be a stellar investment. Not only was I able to re-route our journey easily after the hire car cancellation at little cost, it also meant that we could just jump on the train when it came and find a seat that didn’t have a reservation. (God Hates us all – Slayer – when I started listening to metal I had never heard of Slayer. Hang around metal dudes for any length of time and that will change quickly. Metal royalty and this track – a bonus on Disciple is enough to demonstrate why.)

We arrived in Munich quite a bit later than we were expecting and headed straight for the hotel. A whole day of jumping on and off trains had taken its toll on Dan’s cold and he just wanted to snooze. The hotel was once again in what appeared to be the dodgy end of town. We passed quite a few Gyro shops, gambling establishments and neon signs offering table dancers. Eventually we found it and after the complex entry procedure – the reception was on the first floor through two locked doors, we checked in and chilled out. The hotel reminded me of a hostel without the dorm rooms. They seemed to have a communal room that served Gluhwein and there were welcome messages scrawled across the mirrors in the breakfast room in several languages. Even the staff gave off a hostel vibe.

After some downtime, we headed out to find some food. We walked for ages and the first place we came across that wasn’t a dodgy looking gyro shop was a Chinese restaurant. Chinese restaurant menus are pretty much the same the world over so new felt like a good meal of Chinese might be a bit comforting. The restaurant looked a lot like the fancy yum cha places I had been to in China – booths and red velvet with wooden interiors. A bit more full on than the shops at home where a huge mural on the wall is the most decadent decoration (think Happy’s Chinese). We decided the wang Tan soup on the menu was more than likely short soup so we took a punt. It was indeed short soup, quite tasty and just what the doctor ordered for our colds. Dan was disappointed there was no lemon chicken so in a bid to avoid pork entirely, we ordered sweet and sour chicken, I’ll just say this – sweet and sour was made to go with pork. We also had beef and vegetables. It wasn‘t by any means the best Chinese we had ever had but it was reasonable and did feel comforting. After dinner we headed back to the hotel to sleep. And you know what, for the first day in quite a few, we didn’t come across a Christmas market. (Stay – Belly – the perfect track for when you are drifting softly off to sleep on a train crises-crossing the German countryside.)

Christmas themed activities – 13  War museums and model shops – 1.5 Design experiences – 1