die Schweiz: Part III

Switzerland is a great country.  I may be over idealizing it, but I absolutely love it every time I go back, so I don't think so.  This was my third time in the alpine nation, and, as with the other time, I visited the Hersberger family in Aarau.  This was a very low-key visit with no particular plan in mind.  Aside from some general hanging out with the family, we made three stops: Freilichtmuseum Ballenberg (an open-air Swiss museum), Aareschluch (Aar Gorge), and the Vindonissa Legionärspfad (legionnaires field) and amphitheater.

Freilichtmuseum Ballenberg

This open-air museum in the Canton of Bern is a cool place in the mountains filled with old buildings from all over the country.  Different sections of this 'village' correspond with different regions of Switzerland.  All of the buildings are from the the 1700-1800's.  How they carted whole buildings into this faux mountain community, I don't know.  Some of the museum even had, umm, I guess actors?  They weren't really pretending to be the people of the period, but they were doing old-timey stuff.  (Note: That link is to a whole episode of South Park, which is not appropriate to or wanted by some viewers.  I included it because there's a scene where some bank robbers are at a pioneer village in South Park, and the pioneers won't acknowledge anything they do as they don't want to break character, even after the bank robbers start killing them.  That's dedication)  Anyway, here are pictures and stuff...

This woman was weaving using some absurdly complicated machine.  It really confused me.

This guy was making cheese.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of him taking the cheese out of the water,
which was a pretty cool process.

Lizard!  Not part of the actually scenery.  He's a pretty cool lizard, so he gets a full-sized picture.

This picture comes with a story.  Once my sister asked my Oma to help her learn the German alphabet. However, when
she went through it, my sister noticed she had not included J. When she asked about this, my Oma thought about it and
eplied, "I guess we just never learned it." Apparently, this is true. Back in the day, they did not learn J as part of the
alphabet. How they spelled words with a J, I'm not sure. Perhaps with an I?

Swiss cow!

Heinz trying on his period garb.

Not only was the village itself pretty cool, but it was also in a really pretty area.

Aareschluch (Aar Gorge)

Laziness has driven me to shameless quote Wikipedia for a description:

The Aar Gorge is a section of the river Aar that carves through a limestone ridge near the town of Meiringen. The gorge is an indirect product of glaciation; 10,000 years ago, just as the Ice Age was coming to an end, torrential runoff water from melting glaciers eroded a deep, narrow chasm through the limestone barrier. Although barely one mile long, this passage is bordered by sheer cliffs up to 165 feet (50 m) high on either side. At the bottom of this steep drop the river is only a few metres wide.

The gorge has been opened to the public since 1889, by building walking paths along the Gorge. Before then, the only way was to go through the dangerous river torrent, which provided fables by travellers, who claimed to see large snakes and monsters. Since then, the gorge is a popular tourist attraction for many visitors who like natural beauty and are attracted by the Reichenbach Falls, which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle selected as the proper set for Sherlock Holmes' murder by Professor Moriarty.
It was a really cool place.  It was so cool, that I decided to make this relatively crummy video for you guys to get a lackluster idea of how great it is!  You're welcome. ☺

For those of you wondering what I said, it was superaffenmegaturbogeil, which, no matter what anyone tells you, is standard German slang.  Trust me.

Here's a picture for those of you who got sick from my shaky camera skillz.

The beaches of Switzerland!

Hey!  How did this hairy cow get into the Aar Gorge section?  Silly Scottish Highland cow...

Vindonissa Legionärspfad and Amphitheater

The last stop in Switzerland was at some Roman ruins.  To date, I've seen Roman stuff in seven countries: Rome, Greece, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Israel, and England.  Man, those guys were busy.  At one point, Vindonissa was a bustling fort at the northern frontier of the Roman Empire.  However, once the boundaries were pushed north, Vindonissa lost its purpose and it eventually fell into obscurity, remaining little more than a village to this day (and was a great village it is, in case any citizens from there are reading this).

The Legionärspfad (legionnaire path) was pretty cool; it is where the Roman soldiers live while stationed at Vindonissa.  There's a large arch erected where the southern gate of the fort used to be.  Apparently, the remains of the southern gate are beneath the modern arch.  Every time they are excavated, they are covered up again when the archaeologists are done.

There is also an amphitheater, which was obviously not covered up.  Did you know the Romans once crowned a kiwi bird emperor?

A special thanks to the Hersberger family, who have welcomed me into their home three times now, I'm sure against their better judgement.  Vielen dank!

As always, more photos are posted on Facebook.  (For those of you without a Facebook, you can still see the photos.  That is a public link that everyone should be able to see.  The same goes for every other post I've made.  Let me know if that's not the case.)  As my time here in Germany winds down, I'm going to try to post in this blog more often, reflecting on what I've learned and experienced both in Germany and Europe as a whole.  That was the original purpose of this blog, so here's hoping I can squeeze out a few good posts between now and August 2.  Until next week!

Berlin

From 16. May to 20. May, I visited what once was for decades one of the most heavily defended/guarded/militarized cities in the world: Berlin.  The capital of Germany, it was the headquarters of Central and Axis powers during World War I and World War II, respectively.  During the Cold War, it was the only place where American and Soviet troops actually stood face-to-face, despite the proxy wars all over the globe.  Since Germany's (and Berlin's) reunification, it is once again the capital of Germany, which is yet again proving itself to be very powerful (although now Germany is taking the more peaceful route of just being better than everyone else economically).  Basically what I'm getting at is that it was really cool to visit.

Obviously, I needed to get there first.  Totally by coincidence, I was going to Berlin the same weekend as another American studying at Eichstätt.  We decided to head up together Wednesday night, and we got in a little after midnight.  This is where th fun began.  Due to some confusion regarding dates, the friend I was visiting in Berlin thought I was coming the next day and, as such, was a bit surprised when I called him to tell him I had arrived at the Berlin train station.  Then, as I tried to make my way to a station a bit closer to where he was, his phone decided to turn off and I was unable to contact him for about 30 minutes.  Ultimately, we were able to meet up, but basically this is just another example of how I am so bad at travelling, but not necessarily because of anything I do.

First off, part of my reason for going was to visit friends I had met in Israel.  This came with the added advantage of having someone who knows the city.  One of the first things we did was visit an adandoned U.S. military radio installation 15 minutes or so outside of Berlin.

An abandoned U.S. military radio installation.  Out of use since the mid-90's, it was official abandoned in the early 2000's.

Out of use by the mid-nineties and formally abandoned in the early 2000s, it strangely enough has security patrolling it at random times. Sometimes you can explore it to your heart's content, and other times you get thrown out. Unfortunately, visit number one resulted in our getting thrown out.  We did leave as per his instructions, but we took the scenic route, allowing us to see a bit more of the compound as we made our way to a hole in the fence.

After getting thrown out, we took a long way out through the
overgrown grounds of the station.

After getting thrown out, we took a long way out through the
overgrown grounds of the station.

I was very surprised as to how green Berlin was.  The radio installation was on a hill in a forest a little bit away from the city.

A view of the station from a nearby hill.  The taller tower is the highest point in the vicinity of Berlin.

Following our abortive attempt to tour the city, Joram gave me a tour of the more touristy parts of the more touristy parts of the city.  But hey, touristy parts are touristy for a reason: there's usually something pretty interesting about them.  The Reichstag, home of the German legislature, was a pretty nice building.  It did not house the legislature for the duration of the Cold War.

Supposedly, the glass dome that makes the roof of the main room is open to tourists.  It's purpose is if the legislators ever
forget who they are working for, they can simply look and and be reminded - that American tourists dicate what they do.

Brandenburger Tor was also a pretty impressive structure.  It's interesting to think that the Berlin Wall was only several feet away from it during the Cold War.  The New York Times did a very cool interactive feature about the wall on their website.  Check it out.  Anway, it was apparently very easy to go back and forth between East and West Berlin prior to the Berlin Wall's erection.  In fact, many East Germans did exactly that: they casually walked across the street into West Berlin, went to a government building, and asked for West German citizenship (according to the West Germany constitution, all Germans were citizens of West Germany).  After a few days, they had all of their papers and didn't have to go back.  This resulted in a massive outpouring of the intellectuals, businessmen, and skilled workers from East Germany, as well as average people who didn't like where things were going.

When asked how they were going to deal with the situation, a high ranking East German official said, "We're not going to build a wall."  Um, who said anything about a wall?  Very discreet, East Germany, very discreet...  Literally overnight, policemen from the east surrounded West Berlin and erected a fence around the entire city.  This was eventually expanded into the hugely fortified wall we all know today (officially an anti-fasisct barrier to defend East Germany from all of the Nazis hiding in West Germany).

Brandenburger Tor was built to commerate one of the German victories over the French.  If you follow the statue's line
of sight, you'll find that she's looking at the French embassy, keeping an eye on them just in case.

Right near the Tor is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  This is a very large (ariel view, courtesy of Google Maps) and rather odd monument built in 2003-2004.  Accoding to the artist, there is no intended meaning, and everyone can take from it whatever they want.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Beaky's photo-op for Berlin was at the Jewish Victims of the Holocaust memorial.

Hitler's Bunker was actually a two minute walk from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  It's actually a rather unassuming place, because...

A piece of the Berlin Wall was moved to the site of Hitler's bunker, which
was a pretty impressive building to behold...

...except for the fact that all traces of Hitler's bunker were removed by the Soviet Union  following World War II.

That's right.  All there is to look at is a packing lot.  After the war, the Societs demolished any above-ground parts of the bunker, filled in the below-ground parts with sand, and paved over it.  They did this to prevent it from becoming some kind of pillgramige site for any remaining Nazis, similar to the U.S. military's defacement of the Nazi rally grounds in Nuremburg.

The church you see below has some kind of cool story behind it, and once I remember the details, I will relay it to you.  Basically, the church in the vertically-oriented picture was built by [ruler] for [people] fleeing persecution in [place].  [People 2] then complained that they didn't have a cool building dedicated to them, so [ruler] built them an identical building across the street from the first (only a tiny built taller) as a show of fairness.

The Deutsches Historisches Museum was pretty cool, and had a well-made self-guided tour through the history of Germany, going allll the way back.  I want talk about it too much, but one interesting exhibit dealt with German inflation between the world wars.  I'll let the picture below tell you the rest.

Just so you know, there's a really big stack of money just outside the fram of this picture.

Remember the abandoned radio installation from earlier?  Well, we went back to check it out, and this time no one threw us out.  There were tons people people there, and, as you'll see in the upcoming pictures, a lot of them seemed to be there for some kind of official purpose.  They had driven cars onto the property and several were cleaning up a roof.

I would like to point out that this well lit room of which I am taking a picture
is only so well lit due to my use of flash.  It was rather scary to walk around.

Mysterious people doing mysterious things.

Trespassing: it's fun for the whole family!  These guys were actually Swiss.  How they just drove their car in here, I have
no idea.  It was all very strange.





Berlin had a lot of cool graffiti, much of it relevant to the United States, Nazism, and/or the Cold War.

As I found out before I left for Berling, FC Bayern was playing in the final match of the Champion's League while I was in Berlin.  Fortunately, Joram, Joram's friends, and I still went out to a bar to watch the game.  It was probably much more exciting to watch in Bavaria (Eichstätt was apparently nuts; I can only imagine Munich).  Joram's friends were a pretty cool group.  They all spoke English, making it very strange to be with a bunch of Germans who could all easily go back and forth between the two languages.  And they weren't just doing it for my benefit.  Joram said they do that all them time, speaking both languages whenver they hang out.  It's a very interesting contrast to the (predominately) monolingual American society.

That's about all for Berlin.  No clubbing or bar hopping, like I had done in London and Dublin.  Just a lot of hanging out and touring, which is fine by me.  One major highlight was the dner.  Have I spoken about döner yet in this blog?  It's so good.  It's a Turkish-style dish originating in Berlin, which obviously meant that I needed to, as Mike Vitiello would say, "EAT ALL THE DÖNER!"  I ate at Istanbul Imbiss (Eichstätt's döner place, and my favorite thus far) so that I could make an informed decision as to which was better.  I proceeded to have döner every day I was there.  Was this a good decision?  No.  It was a great decision!  Joram's favorite place was as good as Istanbul Imbiss, but I wouldn't say better.  They were equally good in different ways.

Berlin was a great city; so much better than I had originally thought it would be.  It turns out it's a city I could actually live in.  This seems to be the running theme of cities I visitin in Europe.  I would never want to live in the majority of American cities.  Very rarely have I ever thought, "I could live here."  I have, however, thought that about a lot of European cities, particuarly those in Germany and Switzerland.  I look forward to one day returning to Berlin, at the very least so I can continue trying out the döner places.  For, you know, science.



This wall in one of the main Berlin train stations (not Berlin Hauptbahnhof) was covered in foliage.  There's no story here;
It's just a pretty cool wall.



That's all for now.  Bis später.


More pictures can be seen on Facebook.