Subject: Hello from Germany
Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2000 22:53:46 -0700

We have arrived.  All is well so far, but we’re both kind of sleepy.  There’s free Internet service at the airport.

We’re about to get our car and take off for Goslar in the Harz Mountains.

More later.
 
 

Subject: Greetings from Lubeck
Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 08:14:45 -0700

Hello everybody.  We spent yesterday and this morning in Goslar and enjoyed it tremendously.  It’s a beautiful city dating back to the 16th century, filled with buildings artistically covered in overlapping patterns of slate, some with wooden clapboards on the lower stories.  (Wooden houses are very rare in Germany.)  There are over 2000 buildings from the early days still intact, and the street patterns in the old town are unchanged from Medieval times (i.e. tiny and crooked).  The symbol of the town is a wooden carving from the front of our renaissance era hotel...a maiden churning butter while lifting her skirt to scratch her plump bottom (as it says in the guidebook). These Germans are lusty folk.

Food and drink are easily up to the standards we had expected.

We left Goslar at noontime and drove north to Lubeck, on the Baltic coast, almost over to where the old East-West German border used to be.  The old city where we are staying is on an island.  We´re just starting our exploration and will report more in our next message.
 
 

Subject: Hello from Berlin
Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2000 12:37:57 -0700

Hello to everybody from what used to be East Berlin.  Since we last wrote we have wandered all over Lubeck, which proved to be a very pleasant place.  Architecture there is stunning, and almost entirely of brick.  Lubeck was a major port in the early times, until the discovery of the New World and the shift in the major maritime trade routes from the Baltic to Hamburg on the North Sea.  Food was easily up to our standards of a great German meal.  We ate, as we frequently do, in the Ratskeller (literally the restaurant in the cellar of city hall), and Lubeck’s Ratskeller certainly did the city fathers proud.

Among our wanderings in Lubeck were a visit to a many centuries old hospice (also brick) with an extraordinary entry way of soaring proportions, filled with religious art.  We wandered through a local farmers’ market, purchasing a bag of natural flavored and colored gummi bears, and had lunch at stalls at the fest which was taking place at the market square.

We left Lubeck via a very typically German forest road.  Within a few minutes we were at what was once the East-West border.  But now it was simply a typical state line sign.  This was quite an emotional moment, made even more so by the fact that there was nothing there to commemorate what used to be.  It was just ordinary, though it wasn’t difficult to realize that the long green field to the right and left of the road was once the death strip.

The trip across the former East to Berlin was uneventful.  It looked pretty much like the rest of Germany, perhaps a bit shabbier in some places, but with new development, particularly in commercial buildings.

We made a grand entrance into Berlin via the grand parade route into town, leading up to the Brandenburg Gate.  A few quick u-turns and we were parked right in front of the Pension where we will be staying for 3 nights.  It’s on the 3rd floor of a formerly grand (c1890) apartment house.  This part of the building has been recently restored into a combination pension and art gallery.  The proprietor speaks excellent English and makes a good breakfast.

It rained our first night, but we headed off to the part of town where we lived in the summer of 1972.  Much was as we remembered it, and some things had changed.

Today was mostly dedicated to exploring the developing area in the former East Berlin, which was indeed the original center of government and culture in the city.  There has been a lot of spectacular construction since 1989, but much is still in transition.  The construction crane has been described as the German national bird, and that was certainly what we observed.  We walked through the Brandenburg Gate, which used to be on the other side and totally unreachable.

Then we walked to the museum at the former Checkpoint Charlie, the major official route between the two sides of the city and the location of the standoff between American and Russian tanks in 1961.  I had been to the museum many years ago when it was much smaller, but now with the fall of the wall it has grown tremendously.  It features photographic documentation and actual articles employed in many of the successful, and unsuccessful, escapes during the 28 years of the Wall.  The ingenuity of people who want to be free is unstoppable!  The museum featured many examples of art by children and adults which was motivated by the impact of the wall, or by the memories of the wall after it fell.

A quiet dinner tonight in a local restaurant.  We lucked into finding an Internet cafe right in our neighborhood.

Bye for now.
 
 
 

Subject: Hello from Berlin, Day 2
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2000 13:24:50 -0700

Hi everybody.  Another fun day in Berlin.  We spent most of today in the Kudamm area of the former West Berlin, where we lived for a time in 1972.  Visited the big department stores, took bus tour around both East and West.  It took us to a number of familiar places along with many ones we hadn’t seen before.  And it gave us a chance to sit down for an hour and a half.  Spent quite a bit of time in a very interesting multi-media, installation art exhibit on the history of Berlin.  It was spread over a number of floors within a city block.  The eeriest part was descending many flights of stairs into the beginning of World War II.  The redemption came when we took the elevator to the 14th floor for the final installment, the fall of the Wall.

Dinner at a Russian restaurant which Bruce remembered from previous times here.  Subway back to our hotel, with a stop here at the Internet cafe.

A bit more touristing in the old American sector of Berlin tomorrow, and then on to Meissen.
 
 

Subject: We’re home
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 16:26:30 -0700

We’re home!

Left Berlin Tuesday morning, after a tour of the Allied Forces museum, which is located in the former American military area of the city.  Final departure from the city was via the Glienicke Bridge, scene of a number of spy swaps during the Cold War, the most notable of which was Rudolf Abel for Francis Gary Powers.

Drove cross country on regular roads to Meissen, south of Berlin.  Countryside looked quite typical of the rest of Germany except for some abandoned and decaying military installations which we took to be left over from the Russians.  Arrived in Meissen in mid afternoon, found hotel without much difficulty except for a skillfully executed 270 degree turn.

Meissen turned out to be a really wonderful find.  It’s just about what you would imagine of a very old, extremely tiny, city with crooked streets and cobblestones, built into a hillside along a river, although there is some reconstruction going on as we found throughout most of the former East.  It was fun to walk the winding streets and the stairways, wondering where we would end up.  We forsook our normal practice of eating dinner in Ratskellers and ended up in a restaurant at the top of the hill, with a great view over the rooftops of the town.  Restaurant was quite elegant, though attire of customers was very casual, food was delicious and in the normal price range we had come to expect ($10-13 or so for main course).

We retraced many of our steps in daylight on Wednesday morning when the shops and the 12th century cathedral were open.  Then we hit the road for Frankfurt, over 250 miles away.  Scenery was very pleasant, with many sweeping vistas of lightly occupied valleys.  It was Autobahn most all the way, but traffic ran quite a bit more slowly than the customary 75-100 mph due to a lot of reconstruction of the original East German roadway.  Couple that with a heavy rainstorm as we approached Frankfurt, a navigation error, and two world class traffic jams, and we didn’t get to our hotel till after 9.  Good dinner, good night’s sleep, final packing of all the stuff that we had been carrying in our car, short drive to airport, and we were on our way home.  Wide body Airbus A330 to Pittsburgh and then a regular plane back to BWI.  Sarah and Nick the dog were waiting for us.  Home now.

Hope you’ve found our journal interesting.  The real travel junkies can check our Web site http://bottomley.homepage.com in a few days for more stuff and possibly some pictures if I get our scanner hooked up again.

Bruce & Sue