Berlin Biker Chic: Day 1

I had planned on taking an overnight sleeper train from Austria to Berlin.

Turns out I had booked an overnight non-sleeper train that had not one but two layovers at remote German train stations at 3 and 5 am. Fun times.

I got to the enormous Berlin Hauptbanhof at 6:30 am, and was subsequently blown away. My five ND friends were staying at a hostel a bit far from the train station, and I had to figure out how to get there. It was a bit overwhelming at first, and I thanked God that I'm an anglophone (another post on that later). I asked an information stand how to get where I needed to go (something I learned from my Mom: ALWAYS ASK!) and soon I was on my merry way.

I got to the hostel, and my friends were just coming downstairs for the continental breakfast. Even though I was exhausted and just wanted to sleep, I joined them for breakfast. Unlike dinky toast and jam often served as the free breakfast in American places, (or nothing in French places) this place did NOT scrimp: cheeses, heavy flat German rye bread (volkornbrot, I think it's called), five different cereals, milk, tea, coffee, juices, cucumbers, tomatoes, and yogurt. Just one reminder that the Germans are not the French!

We decided to go on a Fat Tire bike tour of Berlin, which turned out to be an excellent idea. For 17 euros, we went on a really enjoyable 5 or 6 hour bike ride, hit all the major Berlin attractions, as well as a stop at a Beergarten for a nice break. We walked to the meeting place, in East Berlin and all of picked bikes with cute little bells (ok, squeakers)

and with a random name of some famous person. Mine was Merkel (as in Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany). Other bike names were "Mary J. Blige" and "Christina Aguilera." I don't know if the bike company just wanted to keep track of their bikes or wanted their clients to be really entertained by saying things like "Merkel needs to go faster" or "Shit, I forgot to lock up JFK!"

We started out in East Berlin, at the TV Tower, which was built as a sign of Soviet innovation back in the Cold War.

Along the same lines, we visited Marx and Engels themselves in Alexanderplatz.

The downside to taking a bike tour is that even though we learned more about stuff we were looking at from our bike leader's informative talks than we would have with a guide book or by ourselves, some of the monuments, churches, and historical sights simply blur together in my mind. Beautiful, nonetheless.

This was a memorial commemorating the burning of books authored by Jews by Hitler and the Third Reich:

The photo isn't very good, but you can make out an empty bookshelf in a completely white room below. It was very, very chilling.
"Where they burn books, they will ultimately end up burning people" -Heinrich Heine

Next was Checkpoint Charlie, one of the crossing points between East and West Berlin.

There was also a memorial to the thousands of victims of the Berlin Wall. I guess I hadn't really thought about people dying to escape East Berlin that much; my history books probably had a few sentences about it. But it was astounding reading the stories of how desperately people tried to escape: disguises, fake identification, riding in car trunks, even zip-lining to freedom. It also struck me how fundamentally the world has changed since just 20 years ago. As much as I have studied history, I still cannot really understand how it felt to live at a time when the world was divided into US vs. USSR, capitalist vs. communist. We're more likely to hear about Iran or Iraq in the news than Russia today. The world I've grown up in has been one of ever-increasing globalization and international reliance, of multinational corporations and the internet. I can't really remember a time without computers of some sort.

I was born the year the wall came down, and now only small pieces of it remain intact around Berlin.

Our bike tour group then went to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. It covered an entire city block and consisted of hundreds of rectangular stones representing the lives lost during that horrible time.

Each rock was placed close to others so that you have to walk by yourself, isolated from other people, through it. It made its point very clearly without being too overt.

I don't have any pictures of it, but we did see Hitler's bunker, an underground, highly-fortified concrete complex where Hitler spent his last few days, eventually committing suicide. The bunker has walls of four meter thick concrete, and about 30 rooms. Both the Soviet army and the East Germany government tried to destroy it, without much success, and it was eventually filled in. Today, it's in a residential neighborhood with things like nail salons and Chinese restaurants surrounding it, and there's only a small sign noting that the small grassy square was the Führerbunker.

The bike tour continued to Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate in English), where both Kennedy and Reagan made famous speeches (the latter's being the "Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!"), and where thousands of people gathered during the fall of the wall (and, where David Hasselhoff performed!...I think Berliners are much more excited about that than are Americans) . Brandenburger Tor is an all-around Berlin icon, and as are all iconic things in Europe, it's become a tourist trap, complete with really German things, like:

American Indians

Storm Troopers

and large bears approaching children in bike helmets.

Really, what more do you need in life?

Right next to the Brandenburger Tor is the Hotel Adlon, which besides being famous for its hotel rooms that will set you back a thousand or so a night, was also the place where Michael Jackson (RIP!) caused quite a brouhaha by dangling his baby out the window a few years back.

We biked through the HUGE Tiergarten (akin to Central Park in NYC),

to get to the Beergarten!

Where we refreshed ourselves with malt beverage and nourishment in the form of sausages (for everyone else), pretzels, sauerkraut, and couscous. Delicious, and a great pit stop for a bike tour.

The second half of the bike tour included some native wildlife:

(kidding)

The Reichstag. Possibly the coolest state building ever, and it played such a central role in 20th century Germany history. More on that tomorrow.

A one-man sausage machine (Only in Germany!)

A museum and a famous church (I know I'm awful for not remembering more about them, but there ARE a TON of both famous churches and museums in Europe!)

That night, we met up with my friend Laure's German friend Christian for dinner

and some posing at Potsdamer Platz.

Side note: I know it looks like I wore the same outfit (my dark blue coat and my white lacy scarf) the entire spring break, but I swear I changed my clothes a few times over spring break! Promise. Just get prepared for seeing more of Adventures of the Girl in the Navy Blue Coat!

Love, Claire

Prost! We're in Austria! Wait, You Don't Know Who AL BUNDY IS?!??

Just two short days after getting back from Roma, I was on the road (well, train tracks)again, to Austria! By now, most of you know that I've been involved in couchsurfing (couchsurfing.org, join! It's free and you'll never regret it!), which is "an international non-profit network that connects travelers with locals in over 230 countries and territories around the world. Since 2004, members have been using our system to come together for cultural exchange, friendship, and learning experiences. Today, over a million people who might otherwise never meet are able to share hospitality and cultural understanding.Our mission as an organization is to create inspiring experiences: cross-cultural encounters that are fun, engaging, and illuminating. These experiences take many forms. CouchSurfing's initial focus was on hosting and "surfing" (staying with a local as a guest in their home)."

Basically, you stay at someone's house or host someone at your home, for free. How does all of this relate back to Austria? Well, back in 2007 (I think?), Niki, a girl from Austria, couchsurfed with my family for a month, and I went to go visit her!

My Tour-de-Europe started with a sleeper-train ride from Paris to Munich. I was settling into my tiny couchette when a girl came in and asked me if I would take her place in another compartment so that she could be with a friend. I happily agreed, only to find that I was switching into a compartment with five German fourteen or fifteen year olds, who asked me to turn off my light so they could sleep, and promptly spent three hours poking each other and talking in German. It made me wonder if the girl who I switched with actually had a friend coming or just didn’t want to be with a bunch of annoying teenagers! I somehow managed to fall asleep, and the next morning, I was in Munich! I took a regional train to Freising, a smaller town where Niki picked me up. I got to see a little bit more of the countryside since some roadwork was going on and we couldn’t find the right way at first :)

Niki took me to Regensburg, Germany where she’s studying medicine. It’s right on the Danube (which really isn’t all that blue!). I met her little gerbil, then we went to walk around. Regensburg is where Pope Benedict is from, so they had a few pope-themed stores (Buy your Ratzinger candles here!) that were rather entertaining. Niki and I climbed up the tower of an old church there and it was really beautiful. We went to have lunch at a little Indian place there, which was delicious. It was funny seeing an Indian menu in German, but I guess it’s just as strange as seeing an Indian menu in English. Overall, the town was really pretty and it was a beautiful day. We met up with Niki’s boyfriend Thomas, and the three of us drove to Niki’s hometown of Hartkirchen, in Upper Austria, about an hour and a half from Regensburg if I remember correctly, just down the Danube. It was a really really pretty drive (mountains! Hills! Rivers! Deer! Forests!ahhh!!), and I soon discovered that there are no speed limits in Germany :)

It was funny listening to the two of them tease each other about their countries (Thomas was from Germany and Niki is Austrian) and to try to remember to speak English so that I could understand what they were saying haha! I finally met Niki’s family: her mom Doris, her dad Franz, and her sister Daniela. We relaxed at the Schöppl’s house, exchanged hilarious youtube videos (Thomas showed me this absolute gem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T_obaO46Bo ), said hello to my mom over skype, and had a late dinner:

beer, wine, bread, cheese, tomatoes, sliced meat, and eggs. We played an egg game, where each person takes an egg, and you hit them together; whosever egg doesn’t crack wins!

The next morning Doris, Thomas, Niki, and I drove to Salzburg! When most Americans think of Salzburg, we think of one thing:

The Sound of Music!

When Austrians think of Salzburg, think think of...

well, not The Sound of Music. How can this be? I didn't get it either until Niki's family explained it to me: It's an American film made in the 1960s about an Austrian family that left in the 1930s, with American actors, in English. So the only people who know about it are a) people who work in the Salzburg tourism industry b)People who lived in Salzburg around the time of filming and c) Americans.

Nevertheless, Niki's mom Doris was an excellent tour guide around Salzburg, and we ended up seeing a lot of the film locations anyway.







Salzburg is a really beautiful city with three sort of recurring themes for me (well, besides the whole Sound of Music thing for Americans):

1) Mozart.
Wolfgang himself grew up and lived there, and there are references to him everywhere, including a delicious candy-thing called Mozartkugeln, which I tried when Niki brought some to the US with her. It's a pistachio marzipan, nougat, chocolate bonbon.

2) Their kaisers. I guess I would probably name everything after them too since they once governed a humongous empire.

3) Lederhosen and dirndls. I thought this was a COMPLETE American stereotype of Bavarians and Austrians, but people actually wear them and they're actually pretty pricey (easily $200 or more for the outfit). There were lederhosen and dirndl stores everywhere, both traditional ones and more "stylish" types too. We also saw a band playing dressed in their traditional garb. It kind of made me wish I had a cultural outfit, but then I realized that it would probably amount to wearing a potato sack or something.

We had lunch at a really old Austrian restaurant (it was from around the 16th century, I think), which was really great, and they introduced me to radler, which is beer mixed with soda (7-UP, Fanta, or this Austrian soda pop called Almdudler, an herbal fizzy drink that's actually really good but not sold anywhere else!).
It was quite tasty, and from that point on I frequently ordered it in Munich and Berlin, and impressed all my American friends by knowing the name of this drink in German haha. We walked around some more, and went to a really beautiful cafe, where I had some delicious apple strudel and tea!

Later that day, one of the Schöppl's relatives (Niki's uncle I think?) was having a birthday, so all of us went to his house, in the same village of Hartkirchen. Even though most of them didn't speak English, it was still a good time, and Thomas translated a lot for me. They were all such friendly and welcoming people, and offered me copious amounts of schnapps. I learned the German word for "cheers": Prost! You must also look the person in the eyes when you say Prost. I don't know how it came up, but the stereotypes of Americans was discussed, and someone mentioned Al Bundy as a stereotypical American. Al Who? AL BUNDY! I may live under a rock, but I had absolutely no idea who Al Bundy was. They tried giving me hints: from the American tv show! Maybe from the 80s or early 90s? I was still clueless. (Note: I later wikipedia'd him. He was a character on Married...With Children). They just could not believe that I didn't know who Al Bundy was. It was really hilarious case of cross-cultural confusion. The night finally ended in a really interesting walnut-flavored schnapps, accompanied by a story: if you drink too much of the walnut schnapps some kind of walnut fairy follows you home!

Luckily, the walnut fairy didn't follow me home and then next morning Niki, Thomas, and I went to....the Grottenbahn!

The what?

The Grottenbahn! It's a sort of fairy-tale land theme park for kids. Were we the only ones who weren't either parents or six year old kids? Yes. Was it completely awesome? YES.

We first got into a little dragon roller-coaster kind of thing (it's a bit hard to explain: it was like a rollercoaster but without going fast or up any hills. Both were unnecessary, the next part was wayyy too exciting).

The little dragon ride took through a cave where different gnome/dwarf scenes would appear and lights would flash.

Downstairs was a little mini-town where you could go visit life-size scenes of famous fairy tales. I was familiar with some of them grace à Disney, but I was surpised how many Austrian/German fairy tales Americans have co-opted. There were some that I was completely unfamiliar with, but luckily Niki and Thomas were excellent narrators.

We visited a really beautiful church up on a hill overlooking Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.

After the three of us returned from our voyage, we found Doris busy in the kitchen making a traditional Austrian meal for us.

It was a lot: rice, salad, schnitzel, peaches with a cranberry sauce, potatoes, and a cake to top it all off!

After relaxing for a bit (and letting all of that food settle!), Niki and Thomas and I drove back to Regensberg, and I took my train to Berlin. I had an excellent time in Austria, and it was great getting to see Niki again and meet her family.

Prost!

Claire