Category: Blog

Overnight, before we left for Amsterdam, we heard rolling thunder for what seemed like hours.

Because Amsterdam is so close to Rotterdam, Arjan decided to take back roads so we could visit the “Green Heart” (Groene Hart) of Holland.  It is a very pretty area, through small, windy roads that pass lovely country homes with neat gardens and flowered vines, along with the original farmhouses and fields.

As we continued on, we came to areas with many broken branches and strewn leaves everywhere. Eventually, we came to a dead end, with downed trees blocking the roads in all directions. We had to turn back and find another way.  All the sloots and ditches were full of water up to the brim. Later we found out that there had been mini-tornadoes overnight. Although it looked more like the results of micro-bursts to me, the Dutch weather service called them tornadoes (they would know).

Our hotel in Amsterdam is another business hotel, this time a Best Western, with a fairly dark decor and all the usual amenities. It is quite far from the center of things, but it will make it easy to drive out of town.

One of the highlights of our trip has been our plan to attend a concert with Emanuel Ax playing at Amsterdam’s famous Concert-Gebouw (which simply means “concert building”).

After dressing for the concert, we took the tram to the museum square (museumplein), a large open area surrounded by museums. The Concert-Gebouw is at one end, and the famous Rijksmuseum is at the other.

Also on the plein is the Van Gogh museum and the Stedelijk museum. The Stedelijk museum is a historic building with a new wing that looks like a bathtub viewed from underneath.

Before the concert began, we strolled around the plein, dodging raindrops that stopped and started.

The main concert hall (Grote Zaal) of the Concert-Gebouw is famed for its acoustics. It is basically a square box with a ceiling very similar to the one in Boston’s Symphony Hall. Unlike Boston, there are lots more composer names around the hall. In Boston, they couldn’t agree about which composers to include, so they only named Beethoven. In the Concertgebouw, there are composers displayed that almost nobody has ever heard of.

The concert—including Hayden’s Symphony No. 22, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, and Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony—was excellent. I had never heard of the visiting conductor, François-Xavier Roth, but he and the Concertgebouw orchestra did an excellent job of bringing energy to all three pieces. The Concertgebouw is considered one of the best orchestras in the world, and Emanuel Ax is just plain good, one of the best pianists I know. He is so unassuming that I think he is under appreciated. Other people get more credit as the best living pianist, but he is right up there.

The concert hall is intimate, and the stage is tiny. To bring the piano, a baby grand, to the stage, they use an elevator from underneath. Since we had seats behind the orchestra, we had an excellent view of the entire procedure.

The conductors and soloists, on the other hand, have to go up and down a staircase to take their bows. Some of them are getting quite elderly, so it must be quite a challenging activity for many of them.

I really wish we had spent more time in Amsterdam. Although I have been there a number of times, I’d really like to see more of the downtown areas and the concentric canals with their historic houses.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Sunday, June 19, was the best weather day we had while visiting in Rotterdam. It was also a busy day. We started out by driving to Rotterdam Centraal, the main railway station, so we could park for our first adventure, climbing a giant staircase up the side of a building. I just had to stop and take a picture of the commuter bikes. There is nothing quite so Dutch. The question is: How do you ever find your own?

I had no idea what to expect when the staircase up the side of an office building was described to me. It was installed as part of a celebration of the city of Rotterdam, and June 19 was the last day before being torn down, so we couldn’t miss it.

The building it climbs is called the Groot Handels Gebouw, which means “Big Business Building”, or something like that. The building, one of the first ones built after World War II, helped bring post-war prosperity to the city after the center of Rotterdam was demolished by the Germans.

The wooden and steel staircase was eight stories tall, and everyone in Rotterdam wanted to climb it before it was gone. We got there just at 10:00 AM when it opened, and the crowds gathered quickly.  Pretty soon, the staircase was filled with mobs of people happily climbing up and down.

The rooftop offered grand views of the city in every direction, with commemorative plaques about Rotterdam’s history  installed around the perimeter. At the end of the loop was a film that celebrated Rotterdam from its rebuilding in the Forties up to the present day. I hope I got the gist, even though it was entirely in Dutch.

After leaving Rotterdam, we drove to visit Arjan’s friend Koos and his girlfriend, Yuk Ying, in Leiden. Koos is a Sinologist (translator and expert in Chinese) and has just successfully defended his dissertation and received his Ph.D. His dissertation concerns early Dutch translators of Chinese working in the Dutch East Indies. It is written in English, and I once helped to edit one of his chapters.

Koos obtained tickets for us to visit the German bunkers at the Atlantic Wall Museum at Noordwijk, on the North Sea. The museum consists of one command post and one gun bunker. The Germans built a system of such defenses along the entire coastline of France, Belgium, and Holland to prevent attacks by sea, most of which never came.

To view the museum, we joined a group with a guide and walked through the dark, cool, underground tunnels, with just enough light to see. It is frightening to see the tremendous effort the Germans expended to create the tunnels and build the gun bunkers. It took concentration not to get claustrophobic.

A team of 12 men was assigned to each gun, and they manned the guns in shifts 24/7. There were underground barracks and toilets and showers, and even a “swimming pool”. It must have been truly depressing to live below ground in these rat warrens. Today, they warned us that there are bats living there, but we didn’t see any.

The command post, where the officers lived, contains most of the museum information. The officers had bunk beds and much more room than the enlisted men below.  One frightening detail in the museum was seeing a film of Dutch workers doing the work of building the bunkers and pouring the three meters of concrete for the walls and ceilings.

To finish the day, the four of us walked on the beach and across the dunes through a bird sanctuary, listening for nightingales. After that we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant along the seaside in Noordwijk before driving back to Leiden and then Rotterdam.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Our home this week was the Novotel, a business hotel in the business area of Rotterdam called “Brainpark”. Our generous room on the 13th floor provided a grand view to the east of an office park area that Arjan says was just fields when he was a kid.  The room was comfortable and the breakfast buffet was bountiful, so it was a most convenient place to settle into for our visits with Arjan’s lifelong friends.

The weather this week was typically Dutch, which means that it changes from minute to minute. The weather could be called variably cloudy most of the time, with brief showers or downpours occurring quite suddenly, or bits of sunshine breaking through. We had one gorgeous day on Sunday (June 19), and one truly horrendous day on Monday (June 20), when pouring rain and wind blew in our faces, making walking outdoors extremely unpleasant.

Highlights of the week included:

Saturday, June 18: After a quiet day with Arjan’s friends Gerard and Diane, the four of us dined at De Harmonie, an up-scale restaurant in a residential neighborhood of Rotterdam.

Sunday, June 19: In the morning, Arjan and I joined the crowds climbing a temporary outdoor staircase up the side of the Groot Handels Gebouw, an 8-story office building. In the afternoon, we took a day trip with Arjan’s friends Koos and Yuk Ying to visit the German bunkers near Noordwijk. [Since this was such an eventful day, it deserves a blog entry of its own.]

Monday, June 20: We took public transportation here and there to do some shopping and handle administrative details. Not only did we have the worst weather of the trip so far, most of our errands were unsuccessful as well. Maybe we should write this day off!  Well, I did get my own Dutch metro card for the first time, and we had a nice dinner at Gerard and Diane’s lovely home in the Alexander polder area of Rotterdam.

Tuesday, June 21: Arjan, Gerard, and I visited their friend John at his summer cottage in Ouddorp, on the North Sea. We walked on the beach at low tide and had lunch with John in the center of the village.

Wednesday, June 22: Arjan and I walked in a recreation area along the Rotter lakes (Rottemeren) and stopped at an outdoor tea room at the end. On the way out of the park, we drove past “Mount Rotter”, a plastic ski hill that gives us a laugh every time. Dinner was outdoors at a restaurant called “In Den RustWat” (IDRW).

During our stay in Rotterdam, we enjoyed two “dining experience” restaurants with Arjan’s friends Gerard and Diane: De Harmonie on Saturday (June 18), and IDRW on Wednesday (June 22).

What I mean by a “dining experience” is a restaurant where small course after small course is presented so exquisitely that the general emphasis is almost as much on how the food looks as what it tastes like.

De Harmonie was the more formal of the two and the portions were truly tiny. You can order courses à la carte for 15 euro apiece, or leave the choices to the chef, starting at 5 courses for 55 euro.  One of the amuse-bouches (pre-meal tastes from the chef) was a tiny ice cream cone about an inch-and-a-half tall, with corn sorbet and a mint leaf.

At IDRW on Thursday, the evening was so fine that we sat outside. The waitstaff at IDRW is more casual than at De Harmonie, and the portions are not tapas style, but the concepts are just as good. They also served a tiny ice cream cone, this time slightly larger and based on melon. The tiny ice cream cone must be an “in” thing right now. Foam soups seem to be, too.

Photograph © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Everything is under construction.  The Germans can spend plenty on their infrastructure because they do not have a large military and they are not (too) afraid to pay taxes.  They did not have a military after World War II (remember, they were occupied!) until they entered NATO in 1955.  That greatly helped their post-World War II recovery.  After reunification, they inherited a large army from the DDR.  They have been downsizing ever since, and now the military is a fraction of what it was before.

One humorous commentary I heard on a German newscast was about Donald Trump’s remark about Belgium: “Belgium is a beautiful city”.

All of Europe is soccer (football) crazy with the European championships, which are held every four years.  After we walked past the crowds watching soccer on outside TV screens, we strolled to the banks of the river Spree, which in the daytime is teeming with tourists, but now was peaceful and quiet.  Somehow that was a fitting good-bye to the city.

The train trip from Berlin to Rotterdam went smoothly.  We had a scheduled change of trains in Holland.  Our next train was scheduled to depart two minutes after arrival of our first train.  But our first train arrived three minutes early, so we had a whole five minutes!

Today we took the train from Berlin to Rotterdam, in The Netherlands, Arjan’s home town. Due to the day’s rain, we took a taxi to the Hauptbahnoff, the major train station in Berlin.  This station is huge, with S-Bahn, U-Bahn, and train lines all crisscrossing in every direction on many levels.

Here is a warning to all travelers: Don’t get separated! Arjan wanted to take the escalator, but I needed to take the elevator because I was dragging two rolling bags behind me.

Unfortunately, I took the wrong elevator and ended up on the wrong platform. There was Arjan on the next platform waving at me frantically! Time was running out, and I needed to go down at least one level and back up again to get to the correct platform, so I took the escalator down.  Big mistake. My bags were heavy and unbalanced, and I almost fell.

I found the elevator for Track 14, but then I couldn’t find Arjan anywhere. I dragged my bags first one way and then the other, looking for him everywhere. I realized that we had less than five minutes before departure. Luckily, I knew the platform number, but Arjan had a combined ticket for the two of us. Without a ticket, in a country that speaks another language, with no information about what car or seat number, and no way to prove I even belonged on the train, I was in a total panic.

But we live in the age of cell phones, so finally a text arrived from Arjan telling me I needed to be at loading letter A. It was at the far end of the platform, out in the rain, and Arjan was still nowhere in sight. At the last minute, I spotted him waving me down the platform, and so, we found our way into our first class cabin and our train ride to Rotterdam began.

A lot of former East Germany is really flat and plain (in both senses of the word). Later, closer to the border with Holland, we saw more hills. At one point, our cabin was completely full, with all six seats taken, but after Osnabrück, all the other passengers got out and we were joined by a charming Indonesian woman named Vonny, who was a lot of fun to talk to.  I hope she gets to read this blog.

We had a very tight connection at Amersfoort that we were worried about for the train to Rotterdam. At one point our train was up to 10 minutes late, but after the train crew swapped at the border, our Dutch engineer made up for lost time and we pulled into the station three minutes early.

When we got to the Rotterdam Alexander station, our friend Gerard was there to pick us up. In order to get out of the station, though, we needed to scan our e-ticket from the train trip. Because we had two people on one ticket, I had to piggyback on Arjan’s entry. The alarm went off, but we just ignored it.

It is nice to be with friends, in a place where we have been before. We will now be visiting, rather than traveling, so we may abbreviate our blog for a little while and only tell you about special events, but keep coming back. We are only at Day 17 of 50.

Photograph © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

We finally had a lovely day all day. After breakfast outdoors in the Hackescher Markt, we took the train (the underground U-Bahn this time) to Checkpoint Charlie to see what it looked like. No big deal. Three men dressed like American soldiers (NOT) were collecting money, one pound per person, from tourists to pose with them for selfies.

Next we went back to the Nordbahnhof station to see what we missed on Tuesday at the Berlin Wall Museum. First were the descriptions of the “ghost stations”—inside the station itself—of the train stations that had to be blocked up and put out of service at the borders to prevent the citizens of East Berlin escaping to the West. Horrible the lengths the East German government went through to prevent ordinary citizens from leaving their repressive regime.

Then we went to the small Reconciliation Chapel that replaces and commemorates the Reconciliation Church that the SED (the government of East Berlin) blew up in 1985 because it was inside the border zone and a constant reminder to everyone with its high steeple and graveyard between the two walls.

Finally, we went to the Visitors Center to view two short films—one about the history of the wall and the other an animation of what the border defenses looked like.

After leaving the Berlin Wall Memorial, we discovered the Museum für Naturkunde (Natural History Museum) and spent about an hour going through their fascinating displays. They have the largest complete dinosaur skeleton in the world and a T Rex (which they have named Tristan) uncovered in Montana. An hour barely scratched the surface, but we were glad we went.

Next, we took our first tram ride (completing the list of kinds of public transportation in Berlin) and another S-Bahn train to visit the Siegessäule again, so we could climb it this time. We got off the train at Bellevue and strolled through the Tiergarten park and past the Bismark monument to reach the tower in the center of the Großer Stern (Great Star), the rotary around the monument.

Tunnels under the roadway allow you to get past the incredibly busy traffic at the base. We climbed to the first level and stopped to view the impressive Prussian mosaics that encircle the base at close range.

Then we climbed the rest of the circular staircase to the top. The entire monument is about 66 meters high (or about 220 feet). At the top, you can walk all around, viewing the city and the streets approaching like spokes of a wheel (very similar to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris).  You can also look up and see the skirts of the winged angel overhead.

After taking the bus back towards our hotel, we visited the Nikolai Viertel, or Nicholas Quarter, which contains some of the oldest houses in Berlin. In between, there is a construction zone for a new branch of the U-Bahn. In fact, the entire city is under construction. You can’t go three feet without finding a building wrapped in gauze or plastic or scaffolding. There are barricades and fences and cranes everywhere you look. Prosperity brings money to spend.

For dinner, we walked to the Hackesche Höfe and ate at the Hackescher Hof restaurant that shares the tiny courtyard with the Oxymoron restaurant where we dined the first night.

After dinner, it being a fine night, we walked back to the Spree, past all the fans in lawn chairs rooting in every outdoor restaurant for the German-Poland soccer (football) match on the flat-screen TVs everywhere. The collective cheers and groans echoed in unison from every establishment. (The game still ended 0-0.) Fußball is very big here in Europe, especially now in the lead-up to the Euro Cup on July 10th.

To end our time in Berlin, we strolled along the Spree towards our home base opposite the Berliner Dom, enjoying the lovely evening air as long as possible before retiring to our hotel room.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

To avoid the rain, we spent the morning in the DDR Museum, an interactive museum in a bunker below our hotel on the River Spree. The museum brings alive what it was like to live in East Germany between the years 1949 and 1990, particularly after 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built.  DDR stands for “Deutsche Demokratische Republik”, also known as the German Democratic Republic (or GDR).

We heard while I was growing up about the deprivations and shortages that people under Communist rule experienced, but to see and touch the really inferior goods that East Germans lived with was really interesting. To experience the museum, you pull out drawers and open cabinets, and play games, and interact with audios and touch screens. One of the most popular objects is a real Trabant, a truly inferior automobile that East Germans scrimped and saved to buy. Altogether, it was a fascinating morning.

I agree with Arjan that this city is very open about its past, but I would like to qualify it slightly. The Germans are very open about what happened to the people, both during the second World War and the years before German reunification. But there is almost no reference to Nazism, and you hear absolutely nothing about Hitler. The only East German soldiers you hear about in regards to the Berlin Wall are those that defected. But the Germans can be very proud of the rapid recovery from a very troubled history.

In the afternoon, after the sun came out for a while, we took a long bus ride to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the old West German city center at Kurfürstendamm. Due to intense afternoon traffic, we spent over an hour driving past a lot of the same places from the land side we saw on our river cruise the day we arrived—mostly government sites built since German reunification after the Berlin Wall came down.

One of the monuments we passed was the Siegessäule (Victory Column), built to commemorate the Prussian victories in the Danish-Prussian War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870).  It has a striking gold statue of winged Victory at the top.

Our ultimate destination was the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.  The church consists of a bombed out ruin of the original church and two rather ugly appendages, a new chapel and a bell tower.  The original church, one of the most ornate Protestant churches anywhere, was built by Kaiser Wilhelm II in honor of his forefathers.

The church was destroyed by an allied bombing raid in 1943, making a wreck of a formerly glorious piece of architecture. The steeple was broken off, there are mortar holes on the exterior, cracks are visible in the entry hall ceiling, the rose window is a gaping hole, and most of the church is gone forever. Even the statue of Christ from the altar was damaged, a loving, welcoming arm broken off near the shoulder.

Rather than tear the church down, the hull of the entrance hall has been left in the center of the complex as a memorial and a reminder of the cost of war.

We went inside the new church, which has a strikingly blue stained-glass interior and were lucky enough to hear the organist practicing on the new organ, but the tragedy of the loss of the original church left a most powerful impression.

The efficient S-Bahn transit train whisked us back to our hotel in half the time it took us to get there by bus.  I love the metro system here. The cars ride more smoothly than any transit system I have experienced anywhere else I’ve been.

A huge downpour arrived just at dinnertime, so we ate at HEat, the trendy restaurant in our hotel. It was good, but not outstanding, and Arjan said the wine was way over-priced. The weather tomorrow is predicted to be glorious.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Yesterday we left rainy Edinburgh for a two-hour flight with a school group of excitable teenagers who kept on bumping into the back of our chairs.  After we landed in Berlin we took a taxi to our hotel downtown.  The taxi driver, a third generation Turk, was very happy having been born and raised in Berlin.  He reveled in the multi-cultural character of his city and practically gave us a guided tour as he drove us from the airport.

Berlin is a city with a lot of tragic history, which it honestly embraces, like a parent embracing a child after being sorry for hurting it.  I love this city because of that.  We first went to the Berlin Wall Memorial on the Bernauer Strasse.  This street was in the French zone; the apartment buildings on the south side were in the Russian zone.

When East Germany put up the wall, in August 1961, they bricked up the apartment street entrances while people were still living in them.  On August 22, 1961, Ida Siekmann became the first recorded casualty of the wall by trying to jump from her apartment window, three stories up, down into the street where she lived.  She did not survive.  An extreme and poignant illustration of the cruel silliness of building walls to stop people from living where they want to live, and still very relevant in today’s politics.

Next we went to the Brandenburger Tor.  I had fond memories of visiting it three years earlier.  The monument used to be right on the border between the East and West zone and was a symbol of German division.  After German reunification, you could finally walk all around the Tor again, and many interesting historical plaques about its history were erected nearby.  Imagine my disgust when we arrived and found the entire site roped off for a giant TV screen to follow the European soccer/football championships, sponsored by Coca Cola.  I have nothing against soccer or Coca Cola, at least not until now.  Crass commercialism at its worst, and I do not understand how this could have been allowed.  The monument looked much more dignified under soviet control.  Boycott Coca Cola!!!

Next we went to the holocaust monument.  When I first visited it, three years ago, I did not know what to expect.  As soon as I saw it, I was very moved.  It immediately conveyed the magnitude of this monumental tragedy.  Art at its best. These pictures say it best, no further comment needed.

We finished the day with a boat tour on the river Spree, giving a nice overview of the city.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Warning: This post is about luggage and long lines, which you might find extremely boring, but it is what traveling is really like, in between all the glorious sightseeing!

Even before we left Boston, anticipating how to manage the luggage for this particular flight from Edinburgh to Berlin seemed like the most confronting obstacle of our entire trip. Packing for 50 days with such a wide variety of weather and types of travel was difficult enough, but the restrictive carry-on rules for EasyJet (the budget airline my friend Nancy says people call “Sleezy Jet”) put the most pressure on how to pack for the whole trip.

But in the end, it wasn’t so bad. First of all, I shipped my largest bag to our friends in Rotterdam, where we will be going after Berlin. Then I paid to check in two bags, which ended up only costing about $20 apiece rather than the huge fees charged by other airlines. The major obstacle there was that each bag could weigh no more than 20 kg (or about 44 pounds). Thank goodness, once I was all packed, it turned out everything I had with me weighed way less than I thought and I was well inside the limits. Finally, I deconstructed my pocketbook and shoved it inside one of my suitcases. That left one bag for carry-on, because only first class passengers are allowed a personal item in addition to a carry-on bag on EasyJet!

With the luggage nightmare taken care of, we rolled our bags down Cockburn Street in Edinburgh to the AirLink bus stop near Waverley station. Luckily, we were some of the first people to queue up and it didn’t rain! Although very crowded, the bus transported us to the airport in about 30 minutes for only £4.50—a real bargain. Security at the airport involved long lines, but the lines moved fairly quickly. The bin system worked better than in the U.S., because the bins are larger, they pop up in front of you on the belt, and two bins ride under the scanner side by side.

We had a long wait at the gate, because our plane was delayed, but eventually, the plane got loaded, the whole rear of the plane filled with very noisy Scottish teenagers on a school trip or something. Luckily, it was a short flight, and we arrived in Berlin on time.

The wait for German passport control involved another long line, but unlike our entry into the UK, this time there was no separation between EU and non-EU passengers until the last minute, so we all had to agonize together.

Arjan and I struggled with the decision whether to take public transportation or a taxi. In the end, we took a taxi, and I am glad we did. Arjan’s post tells you about our interesting taxi driver and our guided tour through Berlin in a mixture of German and English. Too bad I could only understand some of it.

Our hotel is the Radisson Blu in the center of Berlin, opposite the Berliner Dom. There is a monster fish tank a couple stories high in the lobby and glass elevators running up and down the side walls. Our room is modern and spacious. It will be nice to settle in and not to have to drag luggage around for a while.

Dinner was at a restaurant called Oxymoron, which served beautifully prepared food, in an open-air courtyard called Hackesche Höfe. Arjan’s friend Peter Cohen recommended the square to Arjan when Arjan came to Berlin three years ago on his way to Warsaw. Peter was a playwright who had plays produced in the adjacent theatre.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

After our escape from Strathpeffer, the next evening we ended up in a small boutique hotel in Pitlochry.  I picked that town because it was on the way to Edinburgh, and Fiona Graham, our hostess in Doune, had recommended it for shopping and lunch.  Even though we were going to Pitlochry to sleep and have dinner, I figured it might be a nice town because Fiona had not steered us wrong yet.  We were happy to discover that we landed in a charming boutique hotel with an excellent restaurant. What a difference from the night before!

Now we’re back in Edinburgh for our last night before flying to Berlin, Germany, tomorrow.

Our first six days in Scotland were sunny and warm, the last three days were cool, under gray skies.  Scotland is big.  We did not nearly see everything we wanted to see.  I want to come back and spend time in the highlands, but there are many places in the world I want to see where I’ve never been at all, so we’ll have to see.

Highlights: Staying in the Garden Studio in Doune and just being in that general area.  Our dinner at the Graham’s, beginning with a bagpipe serenade, was wonderful.  I could say the six days of sunny warm weather were a high point, but so was traveling through Glencoe under gray skies.  And going to the dentist turned out to be an interesting experience, something you don’t get from a travel agency.  Only low point: Strathpeffer, but no regrets.  To get the feel of a country you need to have good and not so good experiences. That’s what makes me feel like a traveler instead of a tourist.

Photograph © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.