Auf wiedersehen

This will be the final Germany post until I go back and write something more detailed for a couple high points, like the time I flew a plane (pun intended), or meeting the apiary colonists.  The day we left Berlin was mostly a lot of time in the car. I'd already decided to try fighting a vicious European head cold by then, so I was relatively content to sit in the back, stare out the window, and try to remember what it felt like to breathe.

The Bridge of Spies

Our drive took us to Potsdam, with a stop at the edge of town to see the Bridge of Spies. I was excited about that, because I'd heard of it already, but I honestly didn't have any idea how it had gotten that nickname. The only sign explaining why it was the Bridge of Spies was in German, so I didn't find out until I got home and had Wikipedia access that it was used during the Cold War to exchange captured spies and political prisoners because it served as a physical link between East Germany and West Berlin.

One of the statues on the Bridge of Spies: a swimming centaur strangling a fish.

We had no particular plan (that I knew) for Potsdam, but it's a nice town for wandering. We looked in a few small shops, and walked down streets full of pedestrians and cafe furniture, with little to no room for auto traffic. I liked those streets.

Residential Potsdam.

A long row of these tiles were the only indication of the route of a bike path across a wide plaza.

I later learned that there was a plan for Potsdam, but it had been plotted in German, working on the assumption that I would, as always, go with the flow. They were right.

At some point, the King of Prussia (not the town in Pennsylvania) built a palace here. I was led to believe that it was his summer home. Not a bad place to hang out with some lemonade.

You can tell it's a grand palace because my camera lens didn't have a wide enough angle to photograph all of it.

Now the palace grounds are a public park, and you can get tours of the buildings for a small fee. We still had to get to Frankfurt, so we were content to walk through the grounds looking at fountains, gardens, statuary, and immaculately groomed paths. It's good to be king.

Google Awesomed this photo. I'm ok with that.

I think this statue shows how to harvest Sea Babies. Honestly, I was just impressed at how much negative space is in that net. 

The rest of the day was Car Time. We checked in to a tiny hotel which turned out to be literally (correct usage) around the corner from Ginko's building. We met him again that night for dinner, and he got up early to join us for breakfast as well (at a cafe which was on said corner. We planned well for Frankfurt).

In Germany, it's legal to walk down the street drinking a beer. We tried it. It felt strange.

No mints on the pillows here. Germany is weird.

Berlin

Last week was a break from Germania because I was out of town for a few days, and I didn't get a chance to write more about our recent trip to Europe.  I've been busy with a couple other things, one of which may become a Pretty Big Deal soon. Are you excited? I know I am!

Meantime, want to see some pictures of Berlin? We spent a few days there, seeing what we could manage in the time we had. The Girl's cousin (second cousin, whatever) served as a tour guide and a translator for those of us who can't get by in German (me).  As luck would have it, he's a bit of an expert on the division and later reunification of Germany, and the Berlin Wall.  I joked that we could take him blindfolded anywhere in the city, remove the blindfold, and he'd know whether we were in East or West Berlin, and how far we were from the wall, but I really think he could have done it.

Berlin's official past time seems to be graffiti. Almost every building is covered up to about eight feet. This wall is set up specifically for graffiti; anyone can come and paint it whenever they like.

We saw a LOT in Berlin. On one afternoon, we took a bike tour of sites with a historical connection to the wall and reunification.  We visited an art museum, an Allied History museum, and a German history museum.  It was all fascinating, but it was also pretty heavy. I never realized how much empathy I had until I tried to digest a steady stream of Berlin history for four days straight. As I told our guide/second cousin, "It's no wonder you people drink."

Tiny wooden people helping each other in an alley.

A sculpture outside the Allied History Museum celebrating the liberation of Berlin.

There are still a lot of reminders of World War Two and the division of Germany. Older buildings (and a few monuments) still bear bullet holes and scars from heavier artillery. We saw at least two prominent churches which had suffered heavy bombing, but the damaged remains are still standing today--and mysteriously free of graffiti, as though there are some lines nobody will cross.

After the Nazis were defeated and Russia occupied East Germany, they built a monument to the Russian forces in Berlin. When they left during reunification, part of the agreement was that Berlin had to preserve and protect that monument. It's surrounded by an eight foot chainlink fence, and a gate that closes each night. It doesn't get many visitors.

The view from the top of one of Berlin's tallest buildings.

The Brandenburg Gate.  The tiny vertical line in the distance is the Victory Column.

One afternoon, we had a tour of the Bundestag (or the Reichstag, depending on your generation). This is like touring the Capitol Building in DC; it's their seat of government. It's been bombed, burned, and rebuilt. You can see the styles of three different architects, but the most prominent feature is the enormous glass dome on top. It has a separate access from the rest of the building, so you can see it just by getting in line and going through a security checkpoint. We went up there before taking a tour of the rest of the building.

The mirrored funnel shape reflects heat and light through a large window in the floor to the legislative assembly chamber below. The sides of the dome are glass, but the very top is open to the elements. It's an amazing structure.

The Bundestag.

The Jewish Memorial. The ground level drops as you cross, so the columns eventually block your view. It's meant to show how families were separated, and didn't know where their lost people had gone. It's very effective, and a little creepy.  The building in the background is the American Embassy.

A set of wings outside the Mexican Embassy, perfectly designed for photos.

Scweinshaxe, the manliest meal I've ever had. It broke my knife.

Sparrenburg Castle

Sometime in the thirteenth century, Sparrenburg Castle was built to watch over the trade route through Bielefeld. It also held the mighty coffers; safe passage required a toll, and all that money had to be kept somewhere.

It's not pertinent to the tour, but I liked these plants.

Foundations of the old armory buildings. Tunnels connected the armory (and adjacent barracks) to the two nearest towers.

Naturally, it became a bit of a target.  It was attacked and besieged numerous times in its past, but it was never, in all of those engagements, captured.

Part of the wall of one of the corner towers. A tree has spread its roots across the wall; that small alcove is full of votive candles, like a tiny shrine.

A model of the castle's original structures.

I got most of my information about Sparrenburg from The Girl's cousin, who doubled as our able tour guide for the final few days of our German trip.  He got the information from the official tour guide at the castle, who conducted the tour in rapid, detailed German.  My translator did his level best to keep up, but there was a LOT of information to convey, and I eventually assured him that I was paying very close attention to where we were throughout our tour, and if he could remember later where he was when he got the tidbits he parsed out to me, I could connect them to their rightful places in my mental files.

Armory foundation and the central tower.

The Girl demonstrated tower wall thickness, and window smallness.

We climbed the tower ourselves, before the tour began, for an aerial view of the city below us.  The base of the tower, in local custom, had at one point been used as a prison, and was later converted for use (a door was installed) as a store room.

Tower stairs

The view from the top.  (click to enlarge)

Most of the castle has been rebuilt and restored from the rubble left at the end of World War II, among other destructive conflicts in the fortress's past, and the restoration continues.  Today, only the foundation remains of some of the outbuildings , but the castle's main walls show the overall size of the structure, and the central keep has been rebuilt and is used as a restaurant.

At one time, there really was a drawbridge. Entry by that entrance was strictly for the VIPs. Everyone else had to come in through an opening at the base of one of the walls, passing by five thick oak doors. Each of those doors would be barred when the castle was under attacks; vertical shafts would allow castle defenders to pour rocks, hot oil, and other unpleasantness on encroaching attackers.

Our tour took us through the grounds, and later underneath them, to tunnels which served two of the towers at the fortress's corners.  Cannon emplacements to protect from ground troops are at the lowest level, as is the bakery which fed the forces protecting the castle.  Our favorite nugget of castle knowledge: although bread was baked fresh every day, it was stored until it had begun to stale before serving it to the troops.  Fresh bread is delicious, and you want to eat a lot of it.  Stale bread is more of a chore than a pleasure, so you eat less.  Feeding the soldiers old bread meant feeding them less bread, which saved a lot of money.

Note the hole in teh ceiling directly above the fire ring. This room (well under ground, beneath one of the corner towers) is where defenders fired cannons at attacking ground troops. It is also where defending troops would stream out and attack any attacking forces which made it past the cannon fire.

Shelves in the bakery.

One of the vertical shafts above the commoners' entrance tunnel.

When we finished at the castle, we walked through town for a little while before dinner. It became a running joke that Germans love pizza, because we kept finding (and eating at) places that specialized in it.  It was a little strange for us Yankees, because when a pizza arrives at your table in Germany--even one meant for a single person--you notice two things. First, it is enormous. Second, it is never cut. You do that yourself.

Classy, totally non-threatening table lamps at an Italian restaurant in Germany.

See the common table knife beside this huge pizza?  And people think American portions are too big.

Idstein

As I've already mentioned, The Girl did all of the planning for our trip to Germany and Iceland. My only contribution was asking, "Can we see Ginko?"  He's the only person I knew in Germany, a fellow thru-hiker who I met very early in my trip last year, and who ended up hiking with me and two other thru-hikers for the last month or so of the Trail.  We managed to see him twice in Germany; the first was when he met us in Idstein.

There used to be leather production in Idstein; this statue represents the workers... and the vat of chemicals. 

This is the sort of old-world architecture Americans go to Germany to see... and which Germans, we learned, go to America to escape.

There are lots of unique carvings and ornamentation on the houses. The Girl and I started collecting pictures of architectural features like these that we want to incorporate into a house someday.

Buildings like this one made us wonder whether those old-world builders ever used levels.  The tower in the background is the Hexenturm.

Cobbles, and a nearby school.

After we met Ginko (trailname, not his real name) at the train station, we wandered through town for a little while, working our way to the Hexenturm, or Witch Tower.  At its base is a plaque with the names of witches condemned during the witch trials of 1676.  It's a long list for such a little town.  When they first told me the translation of Hexenturm, I had high hopes that the tower belonged to the witch, but the tower was part of Castle Idstein (see previous link), used primarily as a watch tower.  The name comes from the prison in the base where they put condemned witches, or those awaiting trial.  It was built like an oubliette (a type of medieval prison with only one access point, in a high ceiling, rendering escape impossible unless assisted by someone outside), and it is still visible through a window in the floor of the tower's ground-floor room.

Hexenturm

This view shows how thick the walls are at the base; I was just inside the door, looking into the ground-floor room.

Climbing the Hexenturm.

Inside of the roof.

There were nice views of the town from the top of the tower, but I readily admit to being more interested in the structure and its history than in what I could see from the windows.  At lower levels, the windows felt more like tunnels, because the glass was set at one end of long horizontal shafts in the thick walls.  The top of the tower was wooden, and the walls were much thinner--like someone had put a treehouse on a stone column.  A stone column with accused witches locked in the basement.  I don't know how that place isn't riddled with ghost stories.

Ginko and Treefrog

After we returned the key to the Hexenturm (you guide your own tour up the tower, after getting the biggest skeleton key I've ever seen from whoever's in charge. I don't know who that was, because all the signs were in German, and one of our hosts retrieved the key while the rest of us waited), we spent some more time walking through town, looking at neat buildings, decorated lamp posts, and streets clogged with people, but almost devoid of motor traffic. Then we got some lunch and applewine.

It seemed like every lamp post in Idstein was decorated like this. Fascinating, and pretty cool.

Potato pancakes with lox.

The next day, we moved on to our last set of hosts in Germany.  The Girl's second cousin and his wife, who came to visit us in Virginia last year.  Most of the day we were stuck in cars, but when we arrived, we got a tour of his family's rose farm, then went to dinner in a converted church.

Germans really know how to pack car snacks.

Inside one of the greenhouses.

I really liked the optic effect here. See that donut of light just to the right of the window?  It's coming from behind me...

...Through this window. The blue section in the middle blocked enough light that you only see a ring projected on the opposite wall.

We returned to the rose farm the next morning and toured the proprietor's beekeeping operation, but that was so much fun that I'm saving all of it for a separate post.  After that, we were off to Sparrenburg Castle... but you'll have to come back next week for that.