My article on Berlin was featured on St. Christopher’s Inns Newsletter! Pretty sweet. (via Berlin - St Christopher’s Inns)
When we visited the East Side Gallery (one of the few remaining sections of the Berlin Wall), we also ran across a group of German school children. Which led me to wonder…what do Germans tell their children about World War II and the Cold War? What’s the national sentiment?
This mural states “He who wants the world to remain as it is doesn’t want it to remain at all.”
How do these children relate to the holocaust? Neo-Nazis still exist in Germany (as they do in some parts of the U.S.); what do they learn about it?
Just discovered a few more photos from our visit to Berlin that were never posted. Ironically, these were some of the best parts of the trip: our visit to the East Side Gallery and our exploration of the Frederichstadt neighborhood near our hotel.
I just won two free nights in a hostel for my picture of Cologne. Awesome! (via Snap for a nap - St Christopher’s Inns)
When you think of a romantic city, Cologne is probably not the first one that comes to mind. However, for the past four years, lovelocks have become all the rage here. Couples inscribe their initials to a padlock, lock it to the Hohenzollern Bridge, and throw the keys in the Rhine. Although the tradition was started in Italy, it’s really taken hold in Germany. (There’s something that seems very German in the idea of “locking it down,” isn’t there?)
Regardless, the quantity of locks has been something of a controversy, as they add a significant amount of weight to the bridge (and may compromise its structural stability.) Despite threats to take the locks down, Deutche Bahn has left them up, “in the name of love.”
I was very glad I didn’t hear about the stress these locks put on the bridge until after our train arrived safely…
This city was proud of its beer, and we were proud of their beer, too, considering it was almost the only thing we bothered to consume. This place must have been huge in the 1990s, when everyone was eating tons of carbohydrates; the diet in Munich (at least for travelers) consists of buttered pretzels and steins of hefeweizen.
