far away places: April 2006

Keine Idee

Muenchen

We left for Muenchen (Munich) at about 8:50 Saturday morning. There was a soccer match going on there, so a lot of people were headed into town. We stayed at an Australian hostel called Wombat. It had an atrium in the center.

Then we went to the Pinakothek die Moderne. Its a museum that only opened a few years ago, but it already aquired many masterpieces. I had seen many of the pieces in art history class. They had several Picassos, two Dalis, masterpieces by modern German artists like Kirchner and Heckel. They were also holding a large exhibition of design from modern times back to the 50s and so on.

Design exhibition with BMW bikes and, well, I don't know exactly what that is. But it sure is interesting.

On Sunday morning, we took a trip out to Schloss Nymphenburg, which was a summer home for Bavarian rulers. It was a massive palace; an addition to it made it big enough to wrap almost 360 degrees around a huge courtyard.

The Rathaus or town hall, a magnificent gothic building.

Hofbrau beer

Castle Schwaebisch Hall

We recovered some bikes from the basement of the school. They were all in various states of disrepair. You have to break very early and inflate the tires every half hour. I took one of the through the park here in town and to a castle outside of town. It is a quite beatiful castle on a high hill.

Castle seen from the park

I was happy to be able to walk right into this castle after paying 14 pounds to go into the Tower of London. There wasn't any historical information, but the castle is just as beautiful.

They were doing some repairs on the church towers, so I couldn't get the shots that I wanted. It looks like they might be opening it to the public some day.

Schwaebisch Hall seen from the castle. There are actually pieces of castles all over Schwaebisch Hall, but the town has had several major fires. So now they are mostly integrated with the houses. This hilltop castle is the best preserved.

Berliner

The Brandenberg Tur

Standing Above Hitlers bunker. There is nothing to mark the area and most of the bunker is destroyed and buried. Two of its former entrances are today a Chinese restuarant and a gay sauna.

The Berlin Wall

Kirche (Church)

The Nazis book burning took place in this square.

Kathe Kollwitz Memorial to the Victims of War.

The soviets tore down a beautiful baroque palace in East Berlin to build this "dazzling" piece of architecture.

The Fehenseher Tower in the back is being decorated like a soccer ball, though the Europeans insist that I call it a football. All the world cup games are in Germany this summer.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

It looks like a bunch of blocks from the outside. The architect got his idea from an old Jewish cemetery, where the graves were packed together and sinking into the ground on angles. He also stated that he didn't think one memorial could commemorate something like the holocaust, so this is more of an experience.

As you walk into it, the ground begins to drop away. The slabs become higher and surround you, 15 or 20 feet tall. Everything is silent as you walk through it and it seems to go on infinitely.

Berlin is probably the most heavily graffitied city in the world. And the government decided they didn't want swastikas showing up on these stones. So they hired a company to treat the stones with anti-graffiti coating. To the governments embarassment, they later learned that the same company had supplied zyclon b, toxic gas, to the Nazis.