Gotzis, Austria, Zurich, Switzerland, Munich, and Berlin, Germany.
Hey everyone,
Hope you are all well, sorry for the delay in updating you all. I managed to write a draft version of our trip up until Germany while away that I have now finished. You will have to wait for Amsterdam and Paris, but we did have a very good time and are now back in England. I watched Police 10/7 and Motorway Patrol this morning on Sky and enjoyed the Kiwi accents.
Previously though, on our last day in Gotzis, Sigrid offered to take us to meet Winfried's sister, Heidi, in Zurich. We drove the 5-minute distance from their house to the Swiss border and headed to Zurich, with a short drive through Liechtenstein. We met Heidi, who is very nice, much like Winfried, and she forced much Swiss chocolate on us. Lindt chocolate is produced at a factory at the end of her road and the Lindt Chocolate Balls she insisted we took tasted good. Heidi also took us out for a night walk round Zurich for an hour. Zurich is incredibly clean; the river that runs right through the CBD is actually swimmable in summer. The city consists of narrow, cobblestone lanes winding through the centre and old, lopsided houses in amongst massive civic architecture.
The next morning we sadly said goodbye to Sigrid, Jessie, Robin and Kevin before beginning our trip into Germany. We had to catch a train to Bregenz, Austria and swap for another train to Munich. While we waited at the station these two dodgy-looking men started standing too close and looking at our luggage. The tall one with the especially dodgy-looking 70s moustache suddenly asked Ollie:
'May I see your passport'.
Ollie replied with a 'huh?'
Moustache flicks open a wallet with an unrecognizable gold medallion 'I am police I need your passport'.
Ollie ‘huh?’
Moustache shows what looks like my school ID with Polizei written on it 'hand over your passport'.
Man without moustache whips out a laptop and scanner.
Now we have read the advice on never handing over your passport, never trusting people who say they are police but aren’t in uniform etc etc plus they just did not act very formal like you expect policemen to act so I asked the Austrian woman next to me:
'Are these men really police'?
Austrian woman 'I have no idea'. She then argues with the two men in German and is still not sure if they are police.
Therefore, Ollie says 'we would like to go to the police station before we hand over our passports because you are not in uniform and we don't know what Austrian police IDs should look like'
Moustache then gets all mad about us not believing his ID and threatens to arrest us for refusing to show our passports. Anyway, longer story shortened, we went to the police station, they were police, moustache threatens to have us arrested a couple more times but he disappears and man without moustache lets us go after scanning our passports. The best thing was I did not even cry until after we left the police station without being arrested. Also, luckily, Austrian train tickets are valid for all trains any time so we just caught the next available train.
Two hours later, we arrived in Munich, managing four countries in 24 hours and avoiding being arrested by a grumpy, moustached Austrian policeman. After a 200m walk from the train station, we reached our hotel, opposite the Candy Bar - the kind of bar with a curtained doorway and red neon lights flashing. Munich’s city centre features a number of posh and not-so-posh hotels, cheap Asian stores, strip clubs, casinos and Turkish takeaways all in one compact area. The city looks pretty though with a river running through it and old buildings everywhere. We went to Munich to drink beer, as Munich is supposedly the beer capital of the world. It has Oktoberfest in September and beer gardens for the rest of the year.
We had some 500ml glasses of Weissbier, white beer made from wheat, which is about the only beer I have ever really liked the taste. When in Berlin, our guide informed us that no British beer, and most probably everything you get in New Zealand, cannot be sold in Germany under the title beer, as it has so many preservatives and extra crap that the government will not allow it to be called beer. Even I could taste the difference and Ol prefers the German stuff too. We also ate frankfurter sausages and giant pretzels with mustard, the specialties of a beer garden. Afterwards, we wobbled a bit round the massive park the garden is in and saw some more of the city.
The next morning we had to be up bright and early, well before the crack of dawn, at 4.45 to get to the airport and fly to Berlin. Munich was the first airport where we have not had a liquids check to ensure no more then 100ml of liquid goes on the plane. Instead, Ollie had to take out his camera bag, show the camera and prove it really was a camera. The most sensible security check yet because if I was a terrorist I would rather disguise my bomb as a camera than hide it in my drink bottle.
We arrived in Berlin at 9.40am, got our luggage within 5 minutes, left the airport, caught a bus immediately, then a tube immediately and walked straight to the hotel. The easiest arrival of our trip so far, with Berliners being the most helpful so far.
We enjoyed ourselves greatly in Berlin and it is my favourite city. I am a history nerd so that is partly why I loved it. We did a free walking tour of the city, you can see the photo here: http://www.newberlintours.com/nbt/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,7/lang,en/. The tour is free but you can choose to tip what you like at the end of it if you thought the tour guide did a good job, the tours are aimed at backpackers with little money to spare. We had a British tour guide who had lived in Berlin since before the Berlin Wall came down and he was excellent.
We saw the Brandenburg Gate, the only surviving gate from the Medieval city, which is now covered in a patchwork of marble to fill in bullet holes and shrapnel dents from World War Two. In newer history, opposite the gate sits the Hotel Adlon where Michael Jackson infamously hung his baby out the window.
We saw the Reichtag, German parliament building where Hitler took advantage of a fire in the building to blame the Communists and get the government to agree to his enabling act, which allowed him to begin arresting all his political opponents and then seize power. We later on went into the Reichtag, which is free but takes a while to queue for as you go through sets of closing doors and an x-ray machine before you get in. On top of the building is a glass dome/beehive shape that you can go up to look down on the members of parliament. The architect built the glass dome to remind those in parliament that, as a democratic government they are answerable to the people, unlike under Hitler’s dictatorship.
Our tour took us to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, aka the Holocaust Memorial. As our guide pointed out it is rare for a country to create a memorial remembering people they themselves caused the deaths of. The memorial is on a large bit of land right in the centre of Berlin, and consists of concrete grey stones, apparently the same grey of burnt bones, of the same width and length but varying height - some millimetres from the ground, others over two metres high all placed on an undulating ground surface in a grid pattern. The meaning is open to interpretation but they resemble graves, a cityscape, or a bar chart to most. Underneath the memorial a museum exhibits the stories of some of the murdered victims.
The tour then moved on to Hitler's bunker where the place has only recently been officially marked when the Government placed a sign showing the bunker’s design. Our guide actually contributed to the content of the sign and his name is on it. Other than the sign, the area consists of only a carpark and will soon have an apartment block built on it. As our guide described ‘Hitler's bunker is historically unimportant, even if historically interesting’ and for obvious other reasons the Government is therefore reluctant to remember it.
We then moved on to the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall consisted of two walls, one on the east of Berlin and one on the West - the zone in between known as the killing zone. The Communists secretly constructed the Wall, initially fencing and barbwire, in one night to keep East Berliners, those under Communist Russia from leaving for the West and its democracy and capitalism. No one could visit the West anymore even if their mother, wife etc was on the other side. Those who tried to cross were shot in the killing zone or escaped hidden in anything from car boots to cow suits. In 1989, the wall came down when the East German Minister of Propaganda misread a memo he had not bothered to read beforehand, announcing that people could now freely cross the border. People immediately demanded the access he spoke of and Berliners tore much of the Wall down. We visited the Eastside Gallery after the tour, where 1.3km of the original wall and its graffiti survives.
We visited Checkpoint C aka Checkpoint Charlie that linked the American sector to the East, where many of the escape attempts took place. We saw Berlin’s pink military building, the memorial for Hitler's book burning, a glass window in the ground at the site of the burning with empty bookshelves below. We visited the area where a protest against the Berlin Wall took place and soldiers shot thousands of people who tried to escape but still stuck to the paths through the ornamental gardens. This apparently prompted Lenin to say you cannot have a Revolution in a place where people obey the keep off the grass signs.
On one of our days in Berlin we paid for a tour with the same company to go to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, just outside Berlin. The camp was the first of its kind to be built and set up initially to house the ever-growing group arrested by Hitler as political opponents. They were followed by petty criminals, homeless, homosexuals, disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses (because they refused to join the army) and Jews. A concentration camp, I learnt, is different to a death camp (all death camps were in Poland) as its primary function is as a forced labour camp. However, many people died from this forced labour and, as Sachsenhausen was the main model for all camps, they still had to do some mass extermination.
The camp was interesting to visit, in some ways it made it even harder to realise the reality of Hitler's world. It is so hard imaging 500 men sleeping in the one room you stood in, or standing outside in cotton pajamas for 16-hour days in the freezing cold, grassy patch you in a million layers are freezing in. Or imagining men being shot in the room you can see and going into the ovens in front of you. However, at least 100,000 men did die doing so in this one camp.
Berlin was fantastic to visit because I am a history nerd but also because it is by far the cheapest city in Europe and has interesting shops, bars and culture. We finally could eat some great food, American burgers, Turkish kebabs, Asian noodles and drink some excellent beer, mainly Weiss beer. The next stop on our visit was Amsterdam…
From Sophie and Ollie.
