Jonathan Neufeld Outdoor adventure photography and mountain life

Hey all, I’m home again (c: Who wants to go hiking?

I got my return ticket today, I’ll be back home on the 9th! whoo!

Also, check out the Google directions from London to Calgary.

Two questions: Why do I have to go through France? and How long will the swim across the Atlantic Ocean take? (#37)

(c:

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I’ve gone through now and added captions to the pictures below, I think it’s enough to tell the story.

This is the inside of the Hauptbanhof (main train station) in Leipzig, and the most likely start of our Journey!

The front of the train we rode on, sadly the guy wouldn’t let me drive, somthing about fahrting on the train…

Also, note the really cool steel structure in the background

We arrived in Berlin about an hour after we left Leipzig, the train travelled around 200km/h! (If you want to see a blurry picture of the posted speed go to the Gallery link at the top) In Berlin the Starbucks was selling coffee from Papua New Guinea, if that wasn’t fate talking I don’t know what was!! I got a cup and burned my tongue on it, it’s quite possible that was fate as well.

Outside the Hbf in Berlin. We waited here for quite a while for our tour to begin. It wasn’t bad though, the morning was excellent and there was a youth orchestra warming up on a band stand just off to the side. They were really good, and were clearly enjoying themselves.

Here is a cool bridge just outside the Hbf, I sat on another bridge and read the map while waiting for our tour bus to come around.

The tour we took was a Hop-on/Hop-off tour that had busses running by every 15 min or so and you could get off at any of the attractions you wished and explore it and then get back on the bus. This was a castle we stopped at, we didn’t go inside, but what are vacation pictures without the I-didn’t-go-here picture?

This church was destoyed during the war… I cant’ remember the details now but it was a very interesting story… sorry, I know you hate that, I hate it too.

This was inside the Jewish Museum, they had a few large buildings and inside the buildings were Voids, areas that cut through the entire building from the bottom to the top of the 3rd floor. One of them, called the Void of the Holocaust, was accessed through a large, black, steel doorway that was irregularly shaped. The room itself was roughly triangular, three stories tall, unheated, featured black painted walls and was lit only by a narrow window at the very top. It produced a tremendously uncomfortable and hopeless feeling. The Void in the picture below was similar, three stories tall and concrete walls but this one had iron faces scattered about the floor and the designer wanted you to walk on the faces. Doing so created a really loud clanking noise that was impossible to hide and the whole situation was amazingly uncomfortable, very well done.

Here are some pictures from the website of the Jewish Musem of the two voids I mentioned

source: Jewish Museum of Berlin

This is “Checkpoint Charlie” named for the NATO alphabet and is the (in)famous checkpoint between the east and the west side of Berliln. It is here that Westerners could cross into the East and was also the site of a massive standoff between the Americans and the Russians with tanks on both sides. Now it is mostly a tourist trap and i think a lot of the significance is lost.

This is a picture of my beer with the old path of the Berlin Wall visible in the pavement. Checkpoint Charlie is just off to the right of the picture

This is me in front of the last standing piece of the wall… an amazing experience.

Me in front of the Brandenburg Gate; I really wish I wouldn’t slouch in pictures

This is me at the Holocaust memorial (Officially the Memorial for the Murderd Jews of Europe), a series of grey towers covering 15,000 square meters. It is an amazing site, I’m going to quote another guy‘s site becuase I think he put it perfectly:

“That trick is that, of course, the visitor is pretty much drawn to go and follow the paths between the blocks. And that is where the surprise comes. Indeed, what one cannot see from the side of the memorial is that not only are the blocks of different height, but the paths are not flat either. They usually go down toward the centre, though in a somewhat irregular fashion. What this means is that, when going “in” the grid, one is surrounded by fairly high stelae (some of the are more than 4 meters) very quickly on a path that is smaller than a meter. And the surprising effect comes from the fact that this happens much more quickly than one would expect just looking at the stelae from the side. I can tell you: it is a fairly discomforting feeling.

And then, I got it. This is a Holocaust memorial, not only a play with blocks. Remember what happened? First, only very small steps were done (you know, jews had take a special section of the tramway, they may have been banned from some governmental jobs, these sort of things). And people thought: that is not so bad, one can survive that, things will get better. (It was just like those small blocks on the side of the memorial: nothing really exciting.) And then things went downhill. Fast. Very fast, just like getting submerged by those big blocks in the middle of the memorial. We all know what happened next. Maybe this is my imagination, and this is not what the artist wanted; but I do not care. It worked for me… And it was a fascinating, though slightly discomforting experience.“

This is me trying to take a picture of myself on the timer but clearly failing at “acting normal”

Take 2, same result!

All in all it was a very good day in Berlin, we got to see the most important sites in the city and got a real feel for the history of it. I wonder though, at what point do the citizens of Berlin and Germany, need to allow the past to become the past; everything is a reminder of the past and the war and I think that while we must remember history, lest we are doomed to repeat it, we must not burden the son’s with the crimes of the father.

We arrived in Leipzig yesterday and were pretty bagged after a long long trip here. Being the Germany the first thing we had to do was to find a bratwurst zum essen! With the help of the front desk girl we made our way down the street and found a little butcher shop that had wurst and also potato salad and all sorts of goodness.

It feels really good to be out of PNG, it was becoming very stiffling. Here I have spent a few hours just walking around for the sheer pleasure of it! We are in a very residential area but it has a really good feel, very European for sure.
We took the tram downtown today, our hotel stay comes with a free pass for the transit so we are making the most of it. The streets there have all been rebuilt since they were destroyed in the war, but they did a really good job.

We picked up SIM cards for our phones and then what else to do? Beer of course! There is a great outdoor beergarden there, where we enjoyed a few pints.

There were two guys sitting and playing accordian too, they were really good.

Right down the street was a church that Johann Sebastian Bach was the choir master in for 26 years. We went for a walk and had a good look at the place.

We couldnt’ go in because a concert was going on so we went for a walk up the tower instead

What a view !!

On the way bach we saw a bus with a strange ad on this side:

“Never ending lovestory— our womanizer veggie bagel”…. huh?
For dinner we’ll probably head to a pub down the street, strangely it’s an Irish pub, but it’s outside and they have beer and schnitzel… mmm schnitzel

well, I’ve arrived. 34hours of travelling and 5 cities later, I’m here. Went for a walk today, it was nice.. I’ll write up a better story later, now i need some sleep!