On a trip to Central Europe in 2008, we began and ended the tour in Germany. We went in late March, which was actually a little too early as we encountered both cold and snow during the first few days of the trip. When we arrived in Frankfurt, it was snowing. It was also Easter Sunday. Very little was open. Only one restaurant in the hotel (which was a modern high rise) was open and offered an overpriced Easter Buffet. We piled the food on our plates to make that our one real meal for the day and rolled ourselves out of the restaurant afterwards.
Feeling like we were possibly going to explode, we went for a walk afterwards to settle everything and found a gas station with some snacks that we purchased in case we got hungry at dinner time. We had a fridge in the hotel, so we also bought some liquids. We never did get hungry again that day, but the liquids definitely came in handy. We ended up just taking the snacks with us to use a little later on the trip.
Our tour director was a Croatian named Wenceslas (Wence). We had an Italian driver named Franco, from Sorrento, and a trainee tour director from Hungary named Esther. Franco didn’t speak much English, but both Wence and Esther spoke Italian, so no problem. We met them that night at an introductory gathering with wine and a few appetizers. The tour left the next morning for Berlin.
Our morning break was at Eisenach at the former East/West border. Eisenach was where Martin Luther translated the Bible to German and where Johann Sebastian Bach was born. I got some photos of the East German border crossing and guard tower as well as one of the town of Eisenach.
We had lunch in Weimer. Although Bach had been born in Eisenach, he spent a lot of time in Weimer, as did Liszt, Schiller, Goethe and Nietzsche. Martin Luther also used to hang around in Weimer and later hid out at a nearby castle. The Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald, was located not far from Weimer. It was one of the first and the largest concentration camp on German soil.
In the afternoon, before reaching Berlin, we had a break in Leipzig. Leipzig has been around for a long time and was first documented in 1015. It has the oldest remaining trade fair in the world. In 1813, it was the site of the Battle of Leipzig during the Napoleonic Wars. It was also bombed pretty heavily during World War II.
The province of Brandenburg (which used to be the core of the Kingdom of Prussia) completely surrounds the city of Berlin. Potsdam, which we visited later, is the capital of Brandenburg. We arrived in Berlin fairly late in the afternoon and had an orientation tour of the city before arriving at our hotel, which was in the former East Berlin. We had opted not to do the dinner that evening, so we had picked up some fruit, cheese and bread during our afternoon stop to have a light dinner in our hotel room. Just down the road was a small shop where I could get some cold beverages, so I took a walk down there shortly after we arrived. There were a couple of other people from our tour who apparently had the same idea.
The following day, we explored Berlin in earnest. We drove all over the East side and the West side. The book burning square, the Pergamon Museum (Greek & Babylonian antiquities including the Ishtar Gate and the Pergamon Altar), the Altes Museum (more Greek, plus Roman artifacts), the Nues Museum (containing prehistoric pieces and Egyptian art – including the bust of Nerertiti), plus two other museums with paintings and sculptures, the Berlin Cathedral, the Victory Column (which commemorates early Prussian victories), Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust Memorial, the Reichstag, and the bombed out Kaiser Wilhelm Church were all places that were pointed out as we went by.
We stopped off and spent a short amount of time at the square containing the Berlin Opera, the French Dome, and the German Dome. The square is called the Gendarmenmarkt and was created at the end of the 17th century as a market square. The two churches (the French Dome and the German Dome) were built in the early 18th century on either end of the square as enhancements. The Opera House/Concert Hall was built in the early 19th century at the center of the square.
We also spent some time at the Berlin Wall, parts of which have been preserved as a memorial. At the Brandenburg Gate, erected in the 1730s, it began to snow. If you look carefully at both the photo of the Brandenburg Gate and that of the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament) you can see snowflakes.
After lunch, we visited Potsdam, where we toured Cecilienhoff Palace and visited Sansouci Palace. Cecilienhoff Palace was the location of the Potsdam Treaty Conference in 1945, which was signed by the US (Harry Truman), the UK (Winston Churchill), and the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin). We were able to tour most of the palace. At Sanssouci, the summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, only the gardens and the gift shop were open. Fortunately it was no longer snowing.
After visiting Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, and the Czech Republic, we returned to Germany, arriving in Munich in the late afternoon. Mom was feeling a little under the weather, and I had to admit that I was tired. So, after an orientation tour on the coach, we looked around for a bit and went to the hotel to rest up before the next day.
We spent the following day on the Romantic Road, stopping first at Nordlingen, an intact medieval town with walls, gates and buildings which was built inside of an impact crater in 898AD over a Roman settlement that dates back to 85AD. Then we went to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, another village with intact walls, founded in 1170. We had lunch there at the Golden Lamb on Market Square. The fare was traditional German — bratwurst, sauerbraten, potato pancakes, sour cream, and apple strudel. That evening, we arrived back in Frankfurt for a farewell dinner before our flight home the next day.
Next time – Poland.
