Eine Reise nach Berlin und Hamburg (A Trip to Berlin and Hamburg)

There are still a few major cities in Europe that I had yet to visit and Berlin was one of them. I booked three and a half days to visit the city, but then decided to use one day to take an excursion to Hamburg for some variety. I think it worked out well given that I saw all of the sites on the top of my to-do list, while (as usual) missing out on some of the lower priority sites due to scheduling constraints.

Berlin

At this point, I've visited most of the major landmarks around Europe, but one of my glaring misses was the Brandenburg Gate. Step one on day one was to visit the gate and check out the surrounding area.

Built in 1791, the Brandenburg Gate was originally the city gate of Berlin on the road to Brandenburg, but was later used as a triumphal arch in the 19th and 20th centuries, as a checkpoint between East and West Germany during the Cold War, and is now a symbol of German unification.

The Neue Wache is a memorial to the victims of war and dictatorship. The exterior uses classic Greco-Roman architecture, while the interior (pictured) contains a sculpture, Mother with Her Dead Son, by Käthe Kollwitz, which is exposed to the elements by the gap in the ceiling. One of the most elegant and poignant memorials that I've ever seen.

I walked further down Unter den Linden street and saw the Berlin Cathedral from the outside (why do they charge admission?), Friedrichswerdersche Kirche from the outside (it appeared to be under renovation and closed), and Museum Island (I would visit the museums another day). Somehow I found myself looping south and visiting Checkpoint Charlie, but there wasn't much to see there aside from some information panels, a small segment of the Berlin Wall, and a kitschy border crossing booth where two men were dressed in American and Soviet military officer uniforms and getting their photos taken with tourists. From there, it was convenient to just take the subway to the East Side Gallery.

The East Side Gallery is a surviving section of the Berlin Wall which contains various artwork on its east side. Unfortunately, fencing has been placed in front of several sections to prevent vandalism. The west side of the wall contains common graffiti, as it always has from its beginning.

I slated this particular weekend in Berlin because the football scheduling meant that I could watch Bayern Munich one more time, this time playing in the historic Olympiastadion. The stadium is large but old, so the seats are a bit further from the field due to the running track on the grounds. Plus, the views in the upper deck seats are partially obstructed by support beams. With Hertha BSC being the primary football team in Berlin and having a good sized fan base, I often wonder if this team could be a powerhouse in Europe if they ever built themselves a proper stadium.

Olympiastadion at the beginning of the match between Hertha BSC and Bayern Munich. The area on the left with the flares is the visitor's section with the Bayern fans. The Hertha supports are on the opposite end and some of their flags can be seen in the bottom right.

What made this match a bit different from the one I saw in Mainz was that the Bayern fans appeared to be more vocal, active and even aggressive (several Bayern fans were kicked out before the match even started). This differed markedly from Mainz where the fans from both teams intermixed without any problems (that I saw anyway). I was also surprised that the Bayern fans somehow managed to get flares into the stadium. Anyways, Bayern Munich held possession for most of the match and while they looked a bit sloppy in the first half, they still won the match 2-0. The second goal by Douglas Costa was one of the most impressive goals that I've seen live, when he cut in from the right wing and drilled a medium range shot into the far left top corner.

After the match, I went back to the central area of Berlin to visit the Reichstag and the Tiergarten.

The Reichstag building is home to Germany's parliament, the Bundestag. At the top of the building is a glass dome, which contains a tower of 360 mirrors that redirect sunlight into the parliamentary hall below. A screen slowly rotates around the tower throughout the day in order to reduce glare in the hall. You can walk along a ramp to the top of the dome to get a good view of the surrounding area.

A pond in Tiegarten, one of Berlin's largest city parks, during the evening. At the other end is a memorial to the composers Beethoven, Mozart and Hayden.

I spent the second day of my trip in Hamburg (see further below). I started the third day by visiting the Fernsehturm, a large television broadcasting tower standing at 368 meters. The observation deck is about two-thirds of the way up the tower and provides a comprehensive view of Berlin. The other convenient aspect of this tower is that I could see it from just about anywhere in the city, such that I always had a reference point to quickly get my bearings.

A view from the Fernsehturm, facing west. The street running west is the Karl-Liebnecht-Strasse, which veers right and turns into Unter den Linden. Further down this street you can see the Bradenburg Gate and the Tiergarten in the distance.

I visited the Marienkirche below the tower, but the interior was very modest. Further west were the five museums on Museum Island, although three of them were closed on Monday (doh! why don't they rotate their off-days?). This wasn't a big problem, as the museum that I wanted to see (Pergamon) was open that day. I should also point out that the Altes Museum (which was closed) is housed in a beautiful building with Greco-Roman architecture, although it looks like it would benefit from some restoration work.

One of the main exhibits in the Pergamon Museum is the Ishtar Gate, one of the gates to the inner city of Babylon. On the other side of this gate is an equally large exhibit of the Market Gate of Miletus.

The Neues Museum focuses on artifacts from Ancient Egypt and Greece, although there are exhibits from Ancient Rome and the Middle Ages. Pictured is a stele from Egypt. The most famous artifact in this museum is the bust of Nefertiti, but photos of it were not allowed.

After Pergamon and Neues, I was museumed out and went for a more outdoor experience in the Berlin Wall Memorial. After already seeing pieces of the wall at Checkpoint Charlie and the East Side Gallery, I was surprised to see even more segments at the memorial. However, this site was more enjoyable as it wasn't overcrowded with sightseers and the park in which it was located provided a relaxing atmosphere.

The Berlin Wall Memorial contains surviving sections of the wall, with and without concrete, as well as several memorials including one for the people who died attempting to escape from East Germany over the wall.

The final half-day started by visiting Charlottenburg Palace, the largest palace in Berlin proper. There's a large garden behind the palace which isn't fancy but makes for a pleasant stroll along the river or around the ponds. The interior of the palace is slightly more modest than its counterparts in Versailles, Stockholm and Madrid, but still elaborate. This was a good replacement site for me as I didn't have time to go to the fancier palace in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin.

The gardens behind Charlottenburg Palace are well-trimmed and elegant, although the trees and some flowers were not in bloom yet. There is a large pond on the opposite side of the garden and the Spree river runs along the east side (to the left).

Charlottenburg Palace has countless rooms linked in the Baroque style of having one room lead directly to another. Pictured is one of the more ornate (but less furnished) rooms, the Golden Gallery.

One of the reasons that I extended my trip to Tuesday was to take the opportunity to see the Berlin Philharmonic. While I didn't book a concert for the full orchestra, I managed to take in the free concert they offer every Tuesday, in this case with a trio playing chamber music by Monteverdi, Bach, Orlando Gibbons, Schulhoff and Vivaldi. The trio was comprised of a cellist, violinist and a musician playing a sheng (it sounded a bit like an oboe) and I got the sense that they picked the compositions for that day with the intent of demonstrating what each instrument could do, not only solo and together but also with different playing techniques.

A trio from the Berlin Philharmonic playing a free concert in their building's lobby.

I ended the trip by visiting the Holocaust Memorial, which is unique in that its concrete slabs have been placed on a slope and they appear to be the same height at the top, but as you descend further into the grounds the slabs grow in height.

The Holocaust Memorial contains 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid fashion. The slabs are on a sloping field but vary in height, such that they tower over you if you walk to the lower elevations.

Hamburg

The train from Berlin to Hamburg takes about one hour and 40 minutes. Like most of Europe, the countryside between cities is mostly forest and farms, but the notable difference in this area is that some of the farms have several wind turbines (I also noticed this on a train between Vienna and Bratislava).

One of the more picturesque sites in Hamburg is its Rathaus (City Hall), although it was too large for me to take a good single photo of it without other buildings getting in the way. There are also several large churches around the city, and visiting on a Sunday I noticed that their masses were well-attended as most of the churches appeared to be near capacity. I didn't expect this, but Hamburg appears to be one of the more religious cities in Europe.

The interior of St. Michaelis Church (after a mass had ended). This is the largest church in the city and most brightly lit, as the other moderately-sized churches have fewer windows and tend to use stained-glass.

Like Venice and Amsterdam, Hamburg is a city filled with canals and bridges. Apparently, Hamburg has more bridges than any other city in the world, although this record might depend on how you count bridges, as some of the bridges that I saw were either incredibly short or they could be counted multiple times as they traversed several small sections of land divided by the many canals in the area. Nevertheless, I walked across several bridges in HafenCity, the port area / warehouse district of Hamburg.

Within the HafenCity district of the port of Hamburg, is Speicherstadt, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The area is comprised of warehouses (constructed in the late 1800's and early 1900's) surrounded by canals. The warehouse district looks plain, but it is undergoing long-term redevelopment which will repurpose the buildings for residential and office space.

Despite being more of an industrial city, Hamburg has a diversity of natural sites, including a botanical garden and various city parks. The only downside was that the weather wasn't cooperative on that day: there was wet snow in the late morning and it hailed twice in the afternoon.

The Alter Botanischer Garten Hamburg is comprised of several greenhouses with a wide variety of tropical, desert and moderate climate plants. Pictured are a variety of cactuses from one of the desert greenhouses. The plant with the red needles is a Mexican lime cactus.

Planten un Blomen Park is a large city park with a wide variety of trees and flowers (as its name implies). I wasn't entirely sure, but I think the area in the photo is supposed to be filled with a running stream, but it is empty for the season. In the distant background is the Heinrich-Hertz-Turm communications tower.

One of the more iconic landmarks in Hamburg is its Bismarck Monument. The statue is 35m high and is featured on various postcards and tourist brochures in the city, but it is tucked away in a lesser known park (Alter Elbpark) with high trees that obscure the view of it. So most people wouldn't notice it if they were in the area. Unfortunately, due to the lack of attention, the statue is covered in graffiti at the base. I'm hoping the city cleans this before tourist season hits full gear.

In general, I found Hamburg to be somewhat plain. It has some pleasant parks, a wide variety of churches with well-decorated interiors and a multitude of canals and bridges, but there was nothing that really stood out until I visited the Miniatur Wunderland. This happens to be the top-rated place to visit in Hamburg and I could see why. Miniatur Wunderland contains the world's largest model train set (measured by length of track) among a multitude of interesting models of cities with different events taking place. The most impressive model is actually a model airport, with various maintenance vehicles cruising around the airport terminal and model commercial jetliners taking off and landing on a runway. The other cool feature is that the whole building is lit on a daily cycle every 15 minutes, so you can see the cities, trains and airport illuminated in a simulated night.

Miniatur Wunderland contains the world's largest model railroad sets, as well as an impressive model set of a working airport. There are various models with themes of Switzerland, Austria and individual German cities. Pictured is the model of Hamburg. Just outside of this shot to the left is a model of the city's football stadium.

I've posted one video to YouTube of the Switzerland train model (below or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mriIf_xPlXs), but if you're interested in model trains then it's worth searching YouTube for "Miniatur Wunderland" and checking out the other videos that have been posted. It really is a fun and unique experience (or maybe I need to look for places like this more often!).

So that was Berlin and Hamburg over three and a half days. Berlin offered more sites than I could see in even a week, but I felt like I saw all of the major attractions in the city (excluding Potsdam). Hamburg was a more pedestrian visit, except that its Miniatur Wunderland made the trip worthwhile. The videos don't do it justice; those models were a lot of fun to watch up close.