Quirky Traveller's Tales

Guest blogger Alvina Labsvirs attended one of The Quirky Traveller Blogging Workshops.  As a result she is now pursuing her love of writing and travel on ‘Reasons To Go North‘ site.  In her very first guest post, she shares her enjoyment of one of Europe’s most vibrant and exciting cities.

Where would you choose to meet up with a Texan, a New Yorker, two from the UK and a Berliner?  Berlin is the ideal place! With our friend and guide Linda in charge, we had a weekend packed with interesting history, fantastic entertainment and wonderful food.  Seeing everything in three days was to prove impossible but with little sleep and Linda’s help we packed in a lot of the main tourist attractions and sampled some slightly off the beaten track.

The Wall is high on the agenda for any tourist.  But little remains, with only a line of bricks snaking through the city at ground level. The East side gallery is a stretch of 1.3k along Muhlenstrasse, decorated by artists from around the world.  The images resonate with the message that the division of East and West should never reoccur.

 East – West history is abundant and being of partial Eastern European descent, this was something I was keen to see.  The Topogrphie Des Terrors was the site of the former headquarters of the Secret State Police, now a harrowing information centre on the persecution and terror of the ‘Third Reich’.  The grey sarcophagi of the Holocaust Memorial are a perfect representation of coffins of those who had had their dignity stolen, even in death.

At the Brandenburg Gate, the symbolic end to the cold war when the wall came down, Linda recounted was how scared she was on that day. Two days after the crossing was opened she ventured to the west, but was terrified.  In her world no one had left the East and returned.

So from the sobriety of the SS, Check Point Charlie, an altogether lighter experience.  No longer manned by armed guards willing to shoot at the slightest misdemeanour, actors man the post in somewhat questionable, period uniforms and will invite you to pose with them, for a fee, of course. 

Berlin is a melting pot of cultures and so eating can be as diverse.  If you don’t mind queuing for your supper and enjoy the company of others, the long wooden tables at the Cafe am Neuen See, in the Tiergarten, are a good place to relax and meet other travellers.   After a sobering glimpse into all too recent history of the city, the option of beer and pizza can be a perfect antidote.   Alternatively Oraienburger Strasse is an area of restored communists’ residential blocks.  Previously run down and dilapidated inner city housing; now expensive apartments, with wonderful gardens and seductive restaurants.  We ate in a Turkish cafe, Hasir, which did delicious lamb and not so delicious chardonnay.

Less known are the ‘beach bars’ along the Spree, complete with sand and deckchairs.  A place to linger over a beer on a hot summer’s afternoon, or sample the bohemian nightlife.

A trip out to The Potsdam palaces and gardens, left by the Kissers of Germany, and now the summer playground of Berliners, is worth a day.  Try a bike trip with Fat Bike Tours.  A bike on trains and escalators has its challenges but the charm and beauty of the gardens will overcome that problem, and the hunky guides are adept and carrying a couple of bikes at a time up and down stairs.

Insider knowledge produced an unexpected last night.  The Berlin summer music festival builds a temporary concert hall between the two cathedrals and this was the last night with the London philharmonic playing.  By a stroke of luck, for us, the wind blew the rain off a canopy and caused a table’s occupants to flee and we secured a restaurant table.  A somewhat expensive meal, but with the opera thrown in who could complain?  Even for an uneducated non-opera listener this was an exquisite treat.

The Berlin experience is one of juxtapositions.  Glass bridges across the Spree sit uneasily with communist blocks and magnificent museums.  Outside a brightly lit synagogue you will find hookers legally plying their trade, and on the next street eat the best ice cream in town.  You can dance most of the night on riverside dance floors and drink cocktails till dawn.  Don’t worry too much about your hotel.  You won’t be there for long …

Alvina Labsvirs says, “With my photographs and blog site Reasons to go North developed from my love of The Lakes, walking and travel,  I hope to  inspire visitor and residents to enjoy the Lakes, to get out and appreciate all that it has to offer.”

You can also find Alvina on Face Book

Much as we associate travel with leisure, for some of us that journey overseas can be more about work. Going abroad with a business head on can be a whole different world, quite literally.

Whether you have meetings in Munich or a corporate event (firmenversanstaltungen) in Cologne, there’s always the possibility of making some sort of gain for your company – whether financially or just to boost relations. So it makes sense to do your homework prior to departure. But don’t worry, if it’s efficient yet fun Germany you’re heading for – we’ve already done some fact-finding for you.

Culture:  On first meeting a German business acquaintance never be too familiar. Always use their surname preceded by Herr or Frau (the term Frauline – or Ms – is no longer used in Germany). Bear in mind too that a German businessman – or woman – will automatically shake hands on meeting (and continue to do this for the rest of your working life probably – colleagues who’ve been working together still do so every morning!).  Your German counterpart will nearly always be dressed in a sombre manner. So don’t bother with the pink shirts, stripy tie or reindeer socks. Business is treated very seriously here too so forget about cracking jokes throughout your meeting.  Business titles are important and home life is sacrosanct so it’s not a good idea to ring a German business colleague at home unless it’s absolutely essential.

BMW HQ by Graur Razvan Ionut

Accommodation: In Germany it’s possible to rent a room in a real live castle (there’s hundreds of them) but they can be pricey so chances are you’re more likely to be put up somewhere like the Holiday Inn, which has all the facilities any businessperson could wish for, such as 24-hour internet access and access to a scanning and fax machine etc.

Punctuality:   This is a big deal in Germany. Business folks here aren’t just on-time, they usually arrive ten minutes before the meeting is due to start!  Being late in Germany isn’t just incredibly rude it’s also regarded as extremely unprofessional.  And if you think the people in Germany are punctual – check out the trains…

Language:  It’s worth remembering that all German nouns have capitals (especially important when trying to make out signs!) In terms of speaking, the letters ‘ch’ are pronounced with the tongue behind the teeth.

Getting around:  If you’re taking a taxi ALWAYS take the first car on the stand; German taxi drivers are very strict about this protocol – as you’ll soon discover if you don’t.  When renting a car bear in mind that most cars – or autos – are manual.  When it comes to the speed limit, in cities the maximum is 50 kilometers per hour, on motorways, rather disturbingly (or depending on whether you have latent racing driver yearnings or not) there is NO limit!  Another thing to remember when driving in Germany is that you’ll very rarely spot a police car on the road.  That’s because most speeding fines are by camera which, incidentally, are everywhere in Germany.

This article is brought to you by Holiday Inn. Find perfect meeting rooms in Germany with Holiday Inn Meetings: we’ve thought of every little thing!

Germany and France have very different approaches to hiking.  Here’s what experienced walker Michael Schuermann has to say about these opposing ways of taking a walk – in the Black Forest or elsewhere …

Germany hiking is considered a serious business for serious people; the Deutscher Wanderverband regularly subjects trails to a range of Standardized Assessment Criteria.

Trails must slip underneath the ceiling of exclusion criteria: if a hiking trail features 3% of busy roads OR if 20% of the trail is covered by asphalt OR if 10%of the trail leads the hiker past intensively used agricultural fields OR past busy roads, the trail is already disqualified.  Once a trail has cleared those hurdles, however, it still needs to win a certain amount of points for other, more loosely defined elements of “quality”: formation changes (from forest to meadow, for example), attractive features of the landscape such as lakes, rocks and gorges, etc.  Civilization? Not considered a bad thing per se: plus points are awarded for pretty villages, castles and even small roadside monuments.

However, by emphasizing and rewarding certain traits at the expense of others, those being tested are just being challenged to come up with inventive solutions to skew the system.  Trails are laid out in the forest then rerouted so hikers can cross a road to get back, 10 metres away, into the forest, earning it plus points for “change of scenery”.

In France, it is a totally different story. Hiking is considered an eccentric pastime. The thinking seems to be: if these strange people want to walk from one town to the other rather than take the train like everybody else, they probably deserve to trudge past endless successions of corn fields. Hope it starts to rain, too.

For another, the idea that beauty can evolve naturally is alien to French culture. Remember, this is a country where gardeners merrily cut trees and bushes into cones, cubes and pyramids, and nobody appears to think this even faintly strange.  Unsurprisingly, French hiking routes differ a great deal from the German ones.  It must also be fair to say that sometimes they work beautifully well simply by not being as over-engineered into “hiking experiences” as some of their German counterparts.

But sometimes … they just suck.  If French hiking trails don’t work, they really, really don’t work.  An example is a hike we took: the Royaumont walk. Its highlight was a medieval abbey that was so remote – 2 miles from the nearest train station and accessible only on foot.  What would the German hiking sages have made of this trail?

Too much asphalt. Too much agricultural monotony. Too much traffic in earshot. Too much traffic snapping at your heels, at times less than 20cm away. Disqualified on all four “percentage” counts.  How many beauty points?  The irrigation ditch next to the potato field – does that count as a gorge? The heap of old tyres on the crossing near Asnières: would that qualify as a mountain? Does the term “formation change” cover the transition from ploughed up, fallow land to a corn field?  Palpable Schadenfreude is in the air as the sages of the Deutscher Wanderverband start scrawling those big fat zeros. Nul points on all counts

The French tourism industry caters for various tastes here.  Hiking, however, seems to be low on their list of priorities; In Germany it is just the opposite…

Michael Schuermann discovered hiking rather late in life but has gotten into it with gusto. He not only blogs about hiking but is also the author of the guide book Paris Movie Walks. Visit his blog Easy Hiker and follow him on Twitter @easyhiker101 and on Facebook.

If you fancy walking in Spain you’ll enjoy reading about a hiking holiday on the Camino de Santiago. You can read about the benefits on your Mind, Body and Spirit when you’re on a walk here.