The best Sunday brunch I’ve had in a long time was at the Markthallen am Gleisdreieck. The combination of market stalls, international foods, and live swing music just made me happy. » Read the full post
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This year we kicked of the Christmas market season in Berlin, where I fell in love with the market in front of the Rotes Rathaus. » Read the full post
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Our recent trip to Berlin included the Lange Nacht der Museen. Long museum nights are popular in many cities around Europe (we’ve also been to them in Zurich and Munich). Berlin has two a year, with 100 museums around the city opening their doors from 6pm to 2am. Special events for the evening include concerts, demonstrations, and things like the opportunity to destroy your evil things with a special machine (after first attending the Dinge-Sprechstunde, during which an expert will evaluate your thing for evilness).* » Read the full post
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After almost three whole months (oh, the horror) of sleeping in my own bed, I finally got out of Munich for a few days in Berlin. Berlin is one of the few places I go back to over and over and over again, because I will never get enough of it. It’s so big and diverse and… atmospherey. You know what I mean?
A highlight of the trip was getting to meet Snooker and Sweet No (oh yes, and Mimi!). And I get to see them (minus Mimi) again this coming weekend at the blogger meet-up. Woo hoo!
We met them at the charming Ampelmann Restaurant and ‘beach bar’, where I could indulge my Ampelmann fetish to my heart’s content. Later Snook took us to the kind of place you just don’t find in Munich: an Indian restaurant with a large outdoor terrace populated with glowing neon-pink plastic palm trees. The food was delicious, too.
We found a couple other new (to us) restaurants we liked this trip, too. MaoThai was yummy, cheap Thai food in big portions. In street food, we enjoyed falafel at a small döner kebab place along Karl-Liebknecht-Straße across the street from Alexanderplatz.
2009 marks 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and naturally the city is celebrating. There’s a great temporary open-air museum up at Alexanderplatz which chronicles the history of the Wall and the revolution which toppled it.
Speaking of museums, we hit a lot of them this trip. More in a later post.
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Germany is all abuzz today as Obama prepares to speak in Berlin. He is on the cover of magazines such as Der Spiegel and Stern. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung is chronicling his every move throughout the day. The televised pre-game show began hours ago.
He will be speaking in front of the Siegessäule, a good 2 km away from the Brandenburger Gate, his first choice of venue. This move was supposedly to appease Merkel, who was not happy with Obama’s first location choice. As much as I love Obama, I too found myself questioning the idea of this speech. Presidential performances in Berlin are the stuff of legends, but Obama isn’t exactly president yet. Why is he trying to trick me into believing he is?
Regardless of my initial skepticism, today I find myself eagerly anticipating this evening’s speech. » Read the full post
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Home again after a lovely Easter weekend in Berlin. One of our stops this trip was the Brokers Bierbörse, a relatively normal bar with a small twist – beer prices vary over the course of the evening based on demand. Prices are displayed on flatscreen TVs around the bar, and you pay the price listed at the time you place your order.
The highlight of the evening, naturally, was the market crash.
7 commentsI meant to write about this in connection with our trip to Germany in December, but I guess it got lost in the holiday shuffle. At any rate, Ampelmänner are back on my mind, so today you’re going to learn about them (or stop reading this post – unfortunately I haven’t found a way to force you to pay attention to me yet).
The Ampelmann, simply put, was the man on the pedestrian traffic lights in East Germany. He came into existence in the 1960s in East Berlin, and lights with his likeness were soon installed all over the country. He stands out amongst other pedestrian crossing signs because of his big hat, dramatic gesturings, and all-around adorableness. The Ampelmann was so popular that he made the jump from traffic symbol to film star in the 80s, coming to animated life in road safety movies that were compulsory viewing for school children. Thus the Ampelmann became even more loved by the East German people. » Read the full post
Of course we did more than visit Christmas markets in
To start off our second Berlin trip of the year, we first went to the ever-fascinating Checkpoint Charlie museum. The museum has expanded a lot since the last time I went through it, but it still contains all the exhibits I remember from years ago, like cars and suitcases and shopping bags modified to sneak people over the border. Outside of the museum, in the middle of Friedrichstrasse, a replica of Checkpoint Charlie has been erected, complete with actors dressed as American soldiers who will stamp your passport for two euros (I know this because my mother-in-law excitedly got a GDR visa stamped in hers; I was mildly amused but don’t have enough room in my passport for novelty stamps, even with its extra pages).
We spent a lot of time walking around the east, from Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburger Tor and down Unter den Linden to Museum Insel and Alexanderplatz. These are my favorite parts of the city, where the streets are dotted with cute little Ampelmänner (more on them later). I think the Berliner Dom is my favorite building in
We also took a trip over to the west on bus 100 (which is fun because it is double-decker and passes by a big chunk of the sites in both halves of the city). We visited the Gedächniskirche (the ruins of a church destroyed in WWII that have been left standing as a memorial) and the KaDeWe (a gigantic, famous department store where you can buy a tiny vial of vanilla extract for 25 euros).
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Berlin
The last couple days of Glühwein tourism brought us back to Germany – specifically, Berlin and Dresden. I’m pleased to report we had great success in both cities, which offered up a variety of hot, seasonal beverages in a variety of Christmas markets.
First we headed to the ‘nostalgia market’ at Gendarmenmarkt, a relatively new Christmas Market that was specifically designed to be as cute and perfect as possible. Instead of Glühwein, many of the stands were advertising Feuerzangenbowle, which my extensive research revealed to be remarkably similar to Glühwein.
We also hit many other Christmas Markets around Berlin, including one on Unter den Linden and the one around the Gedächtniskirche. So many that after a while, they began to run together a little bit. One that stood out, at least by name, wasn’t a Christmas Market at all, but rather a Hanukkah Market. This took place in the courtyard of Berlin’s Jewish Museum. 
We had to go through a metal detector to reach it (as everyone does to gain entrance into the museum). Around the market there were plaques in English and German which explained about Hanukkah and the holiday traditions of German Jews, which had developed into a sort of ‘Chrismukka‘ (‘Weihnukka’ in German) – a combination of Hanukkah and Christmas traditions that incorporated both their religion and the local celebrations that were mainstream in their country (something that occurs in the US, too). And of course, there was Glühwein.
The first time I heard about Street Parade (Striitpareid in Swiss German) was in my Swiss German class. It was listed in the ‘Holidays in Zurich’ section of our textbook, right next to Christmas, Sechseläuten, and Easter. That seemed wacky given that it is, at the end of the day, a giant outdoor rave. But I guess a tradition doesn’t have to be old to count as a holiday (this one has been around since 1992), and when you think about it, aren’t the costumes associated with other holidays (Santa suits, carnival costumes) just as silly as platform shoes and feather boas?
The description of this ‘holiday’ sounded suspiciously like something I had experienced years before while living in Berlin – the Love Parade. A little internet research reveals that the two are indeed related, as the guy who started the Street Parade got his inspiration from the Berlin version.
So as I mentioned, I went to the Love Parade once, many years ago. Apparently I was already an old woman in my early 20s, because I wasn’t that impressed. Sure the costumes were fun to see, but the techno music got old after about 5 minutes. The sun was pounding down on us all day, and the only beverages available were warm cans of beer being sold by some entrepreneurial types out of their clearly ineffective coolers. And standing in the middle of a crowd of a million people, being randomly smushed and moved along in no particular direction… well, less fun than it sounds.
The best part of the whole experience was the video made by a couple of my normally shy Swedish friends. Armed with a camcorder, they approached the ravers in the most outrageous costumes and asked if they could interview them for Swedish television. As the day went on (or I should say, as the beers went down), their ‘interview’ questions got bolder and weirder, and the resulting tape was a masterpiece that would unfortunately never reach a TV audience. A good title for it would have been ‘Everything you wanted to know about the man dressed up like a giant winged dildo but were afraid to ask.’
Anyway, back to the present. Given my memories of the Love Parade, I can’t say that I was thrilled to experience Zurich’s smaller-scale ‘demonstration in support of love, peace, freedom, generosity and tolerance,’ but I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on it, either. So we armed ourselves with the camera, bottles of water, and some rain gear (thundershowers were forecast for the entire day) and headed out. After all, according to my Swiss German textbook, go luege mues mer daa sälber!
To be continued…
(if you just can’t wait until tomorrow, you can go see more pictures here.)
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