The trip from Ulm to Berlin takes about 7 hours by train, which I found to be actually quite nice. The train is very nice. It's like flying but with more legroom and no snacks, but you can get up and walk around whenever you want. It's a good idea to make a seat reservation in advance to make sure you get a seat, but you can also sit in the restaurant car, provided you buy something to eat or drink. For this leg and most of the others, we reserved our seats well in advance, so we had a couple of nice comfy seats. It was a nice change of pace to be able to sit for a long time instead of walking around to different places or carrying a huge backpack. I could listen to music or watch videos on my ipod - no, wait, my headphones decided to stop working on one side. It's just not the same to listen to half the song, knowing there's a lot more you're missing in the other ear.
We eventually made it! The Berlin Hauptbahnhof is for some reason the most confusing train station I've ever been in, and I've been there twice before so you'd think I'd at least have a general idea. Wrong. It took us about 20 minutes to figure out which level, which train, and which ticket we needed.
It's New Year's Eve, right, so everybody is getting antsy. A party of 20-somethings got on the train a couple of hours outside of Berlin with backpacks full of "milk," (shout-out to my MIT friends if they're reading) and by the time we hit the suburbs of Berlin they were singing either a drinking song or some soccer team's fight song, I couldn't really tell. Fireworks are legal everywhere, and you can sometimes find them in grocery stores. Firecrackers, bottle rockets, mortars, groundflowers, and little pop-its were flying around wherever you looked. In a way, it reminded me of driving by the Native American reservation's fireworks lot at home - you drive by, trying not to jump every time something goes boom, but you're really paranoid something is going to explode a little too close.
As we were coming out of the subway near our hostel, a firecracker came bouncing down the stairs. Now, those are loud to begin with, but you put it underground in a subway station and it is LOUD. So with ringing ears and increasing paranoia, we head for the hostel.
Most common actions of the night: flinching every time a firecracker blows up in the street/ checking the apartments overhead before walking underneath to make sure another firecracker isn't about to be tossed into the street.
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On Unter den Linden, a major street near downtown Berlin
where the "Party Mile" is at. |
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| Our spot for the party. Brandenburger Tor in the background. |
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| Happy New Year! |
Other destinations in Berlin: the Jewish Museum, Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe (and visitor's center), Musical Instrument Museum, Checkpoint Charlie, Potsdamerplatz, the Sony Center, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the Bauhaus Museum, and others. We also tried to go to the Reichstag, but they only recently made it so you have to reserve tickets ahead of time and the wait was three days. So we just admired from the outside.
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Bust of Kaiser Wilhelm. Come November, I think I'll try
the sideburns/mustache combo. |
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| Siegessäule, or Victory Column. |
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| Reichstag, the capitol building of Germany. |
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| Same spot as New Year's Eve, two days later. |
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Left: Döner. Right: Dürum Döner (in a tortilla instead of flatbread).
If I could only eat one food for the rest of my life, I'd choose Döner. |
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Beer, brewed right in the alehouse at the Sony Center.
Delicious. |
Four days in Berlin was a great choice. We knew we couldn't do everything there is to do there, so we chose several things we thought would give us a good feel of the city and not worry about the rest. We were able to take some time to relax and sleep in a bit as well as take our sweet time doing things. By the time we left for Lutherstadt Wittenberg, we were feeling pretty good.
Lutherstadt Wittenberg is a lovely small town an hour or so south of Berlin. It's where Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses and lived for many years with his family. His wife was apparently an excellent beer maker!
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| 95 Theses |
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| Margaret meets Luther. |
After Wittenberg, we spent a night in Halle, the birthplace of Georg Friedrich Händel. There's also an interesting museum about the work of August Francke, who started an orphanage and school for the poor that eventually became one of the leading schools in the area. We spent the afternoon there, and unfortunately missed the Handel House, a museum located where Händel was born. But we enjoyed our time there anyways, and managed to play a bit of cards in the basement of the hostel.
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| I think I was winning. |
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| Statue of Handel in the market square. |
Leipzig: the city where Bach spent almost 30 years as the cantor at the Church of St Thomas. Also the home to many other composers, from Wagner to Schumann to Mendelssohn.
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| At the Bach Museum. |
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I think this is the inside of the church of St. Thomas but
I can't remember. |
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| Bach's final resting place. |
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| Yup, that's Bach. |
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| Wagner. |
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| Mendelssohn. |
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| Leipzig University and the City-Hochhaus (high-rise). |
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| I think this is self=explanatory. |
We had planned on seeing the St. Thomas boys' choir on Friday afternoon, because they normally perform/sing for a service, but it just so happened that the one Friday we were there the schedule was changed. So we changed our plans a bit to stay later in the afternoon on Saturday to hear them sing. Worth it! They performed a short piece by Telemann before a short sermon, but the main attraction was the 6th Cantata from Bach's Weihnachts-Oratorium.
After that we hopped on a train to the last stop on this crazy trip: Eisenach.
We stayed at a hostel that was (again) not all that close to the train station, so it was a good 30 minute hike across town in the rain and dark to get there. However, we had the place pretty much to ourselves. I mean that in the most literal sense too-after reception closed, there was no one but us to be seen. Margaret and I were enjoying a bit of wine and playing cards in the lounge at about midnight when somebody knocked on the window...just a bit sketchy. But we talked to him through the window, and then I went to the door to talk to him and it turned out that his wife had called ahead to say he would be arriving late. I guess she only left a message, because nobody was waiting for him, and even after calling all the numbers we could find for the hostel, we couldn't find anybody to help us. He didn't speak a word of German, just some English, and he was pretty pissed. I would be too, but I didn't know what else to do for him since it was impossible to get ahold of anybody in charge. I called another hotel from our Lonely Planet guidebook to see if they had a room for him, and then called him a taxi so he wouldn't have to walk all the way back into town.
It made us wonder...if there was a fire or a break-in, who would Margaret and I call? It was lucky we were downstairs to help this guy, or he might've had to sleep on the porch until somebody showed up the next morning.
Anyway, we were only there for one day, so we had to make our time count. We got up early to cram in as much as we could, and we checked out but left our stuff there to keep it safer and so we didn't have to schlep it with us. In this case, I think the term "safer" is pretty fluid since the lady working there didn't really want to hold onto it in the office for us, so she had us stash it under the staircase in the basement...nothing got stolen, but that's the only city where I would ever do that. I don't think I'll stay at that hostel again.
Several influential Germans have strong ties to this small, yet colorful town. Johann Sebastian Bach was born here, and the oldest museum dedicated to the composer is only a short distance away from where his house used to stand. The museum has lots of interesting information about Bach and his life and works, and also has a small performance/lecture hall filled with several historical instruments, from a harpsichord to small house organs, which are all demonstrated every hour for free to visitors of the museum.
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| Winning with the Bach House |
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| Listening stations inside the museum. |
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| Part of the old city wall. |
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| Talk about squeezing in a house! |
On a hill just outside the city lies Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German in a matter of weeks while "kidnapped" and excommunicated from the Church. If you take a tour of the castle, you can see some pretty cool rooms, including a room covered in mosaic tiles depicting the life of St. Elisabeth of Hungary, who also lived there for a number of years. You can also visit the room where Luther worked separately from the tour, and walk around the grounds. On a clear day, the views from the castle would be spectacular, but we missed that and visited on a day with lots of rain and fog. Nevertheless, it was worth the hike.
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| Me and the castle. I'm a bit soggy at this point. |
Since we didn't really know what time we'd be all finished at the castle, we didn't reserve any seats on the ICE train back to Cologne. By the time we wanted to, there weren't any left. We spent our train ride in the on-board restaurant making a cup of coffee last 3 hours so we could sit in a booth instead of standing in one of the doorways. But we made it safely back to my apartment by about 10:00.
After over two weeks of carrying our packs around, our shoulders were pretty tired. Margaret had a lot of trouble getting her pack to stop sitting crooked, try as she might to adjust straps and shove things around. I think I still have knots that I can feel if I roll my shoulders. We did buy a few things along the way, so by the end of the trip I just wanted to arrive someplace so I could take off the danged thing. We weighed our packs when we got back: mine was 65lbs, hers was 60lbs, which was odd because hers felt way lighter than mine.
We got back to Cologne on a Sunday. Margaret's flight was on Tuesday morning, so we had all day Monday to do stuff. At that point I was still going to the literature class at the university, so while Margaret climbed the Cologne Cathedral tower I did my reading. When we both finished, we went over to the university district to find some genuine German food for lunch. The Schnitzel place I wanted to go to turns out to be closed on Mondays, so we had to settle for a different place, but their Jägerschnitzel was also delicious! We wandered around for a while after that, stopped for cake again, and then it was time for me to go to band practice out in Bergisch Gladbach. When I got back, we made dinner and Margaret finished packing, and went to bed.
My Tuesday morning teacher emailed me to let me know she wasn't going to be in, so I was able to take Margaret to the train station and make she got underway okay. We got her on the train just fine and I waved her off.
What a fantastic trip! I'll admit, I probably wasn't the best traveling buddy the whole time, but I am sure grateful that I had someone to travel with me for two weeks. It's always more fun to be able to share an experience with someone, and this trip will be one I'll remember for a long time. We had a ridiculous amount of fun taking pictures and sampling the cake in different cities. We climbed a lot of stairs, walked miles upon miles just to find our hostel, tried our luck with unknown dishes and won more than we lost, and most of all just lived the dream - two siblings just going where the train takes us with just a backpack full of dirty clothes and a couple of cameras.
