Holland revisited August 10-2

Up at the crack of Eight O’ Clock to make sandwiches, rolls and so on in preparation for what promises to be a great day – Most of the prepping has been done by Aafke and her Mother. It’s happy birthday for Mr. Aafke and we are going boating!!! The Tall Ships are visiting Amsterdam and Mr Aafke has hired a boat and invited his friends to go for a tootle on the Amstel. There were 25 of us on a converted Norwegian oil-rig life-boat with enough food and drink on board to supply any major disaster. We chugged up the North-Sea canal and slowly as an impressive flotilla formed, we entered Amsterdam harbour. Soon enough the masts of the sailing ships started to rise above the general cityscape. It was a most amazing sight, all tied-up along the quay walls were a collection of the biggest tall-ships in the world, and we were bobbing around looking up at them. Meanwhile the flotilla was now a solid floating mass of all kinds of craft, boats shaped like Aubergines, Barrels of beer, old military craft, sleek cruisers, a floating raft with a brass band playing, the local dudes in a ‘borrowed’ speedboat…The atmosphere was great, there were on-board picnics, discos, people lounging around with Champagne. On the big ships, starched officers sipped gins while entertaining and on deck the sailors supervised bunkering from the barges tied up alongside. The captain of our craft ( ) said that we still had loads of time left so a vote was taken to enter in the Amsterdam canal system – this was the icing on the cake. How many times have you been in ‘The Dam’ and yearned to be on one of those boats cruising past, music on, beers poppin’ and in our case, Spanish Tapas for all. Well, that was us. We had a great tour of the canals and the traffic was something else. The Tour-Barges have right-of-way and those guys can turn one of those things on a Guilder. We started back down the North Sea canal and by this time the music was pure disco and everyone was bobbing away. A wonderful day.

Holland revisited - August '10

Little did I think a week before that I would be sitting in Mr. and Mrs. Aafke’s house at two in the morning sipping a cold can of superior Dutch Heineken. It was Govert’s birthday and I managed to get on the guest list, yippee! I had a cunning plan for the next day and thanks to the generosity of Mr. Aafke, who lent me his super Audi Coupe with GPS in English, I made an early start for Arnhem. This is one of the essential WWII sites and part of a much bigger story covered in the book and film ‘A Bridge too Far’ so I ticked the box on that one. Arnhem is a Saturday Market town and it was buzzing with fruit and veg stalls, Cheese (Gouda) bigger than the wheels on a ‘Monster Machine’ and of course herring, lovely, this season’s herring, beautiful. There was also a multi-Ethnical party going on with an eclectic (been dying to use that word since I read it in an Irish Times Travel article) mix of Orientals and Surinamese – Check out Surinam on Google, it seems like an interesting place to go. I visited the Airborne Museum in The Hartenstein Hotel, http://www.airbornemuseum.org/language/en got the T-Shirt, saw the guns, uniforms, rusty tins and stuff that well, gives you a certain ‘hands-on’ feeling, considering that the final battle happened around this Hotel. A more somber memorial was the Allied Cemetery not far away (I couldn’t find the German one). It contains British, Irish (Irish Guards, another interesting story), Australian, New Zealand and Polish troops. One of the more poignant sights were the headstones of two brothers who had consecutive serial numbers and who died on the same day.

Back to Haarlem, park the motor and enjoy a brew. Caroline (from the June trip) will be arriving tonight and we will probably go into town for the Jazz Festival. The three of us decide to cycle into the center of Haarlem and the town is buzzin’ with major bands on the main stage in the square and all around, the various bars had set up stalls with deejays. After doing several rounds of this as well as revisiting some of the places I went to in June, you’ve got to check to make sure they’re still there, remounted the bikes and headed homewards. We skidded to a halt outside the ‘Witte Zwaan’ by the canal, all very apt, because there was a crowd outside and a classic Dixie-style band playing inside, we stayed for ages, the classic ‘one for the road’ stop, it was a ball. Funnier still was the cycle home and I witnessed that rarest of sights, a Dutch person falling off a bike, the expression I believe is ‘I forgot to peddle’.

Berlin July '09 - 5

After a day of rest, Sunday morning crept up and what better way to spend it than at one of the flea markets – we were recommended ‘Die Mauer markt’ which is in Die Mauer Park’ funnily enough. It was a strange mix of absolute tack and lots of stuff for bicycles, some of which they had been ‘re-cycled’. I managed to get my Inspector Derrick t-shirt and the morning quota of beers and sausages was had, remember this was one of the main objectives of the mission. Apparently the Wall passed through here and on Sunday mornings the East-Berliners would camp out on a hill close-by and oogle and the trading going on, the sausages being scoffed and illicit substances being consumed. In the afternoon we went to Krauzburg, the hoppin’ in-place in Berlin. There were loads of bars, though Sunday evening is not the time to visit. We visited Max u Moritz, a classic bar but this Berlin place looks like a return trip is needed. We ended up back in Alexanderplatz and my attempt to go on the boat trip was thwarted both by Willy’s reticence and the fact it was closed. We ended up in this huge bar watching a thunder and lightening storm. Back to Madrid the next day courtesy of Lufthansa, and what a wonderful Airline, the charming air-hostess made sure I was well stocked with beers but alas, no sausages.

Berlin July '09 - 4

The next couple of days were spent wandering around. We visited the Sony Center again to sample some sausage. We went to the Gestapo headquarters which is right beside the Walter Gropius Building, the former is a plot of waste land and the Latter was housing the Bauhaus exhibition. We visited an art shop (Boesner on Marienbburgersrasse 16) one of the most impressive art shops I’ve ever been in. A stroll back towards Alexanderplatz brought us through some beautiful side streets with excellent cafes and restaurants, this is where the web-designers and ad-people hang out. The sense of interior décor is wonderfully controlled, cool and calm with a great selection of music. We visited a retro place called ‘Scotch and Soda’ and returned to ‘White Trash…’ this time the welcome was not so warm, we upset a very nervous waiter who objected to practically everything we did – sorry for ruffling your hair, bitch. Checkpoint Charlie had to be ticked off the box, though this is a reconstructed tourist trap with dressed up soldiers charging to get their photo taken. The Currywurst Museum is close-by but was closed – a word to the wise about the famous ‘Berliner Currywurst’, it’s crap. The sausage is fine but the only thing that makes it a currywurst is a sprinkling of common or garden curry powder – Come on! I make a demon Currywurst, see www.thepropersausage.blogspot.com.

Another bone of contention were the various recommended bars which were highlighted on the tourist web-sites. Apart from the aforementioned and closed Currywurstmuseum there is the BierKeller which was a bar in the middle of a block of flats and held no attraction apart from the friendly Bierfrau - Oh, and the fact that they make their own beer. The major disappointment I must reserve for the Oscar Wilde on Freidrikstrasse 112. It was billed as the quintessential Irish Pub which saw it’s hey-day in the construction boom of the 70’s and 80’s when loads of Paddys were busy being Irish abroad. When we got there it was tack and cracked – a few leftovers were watching Snooker on the Plasma. The waitress had a serious attitude problem and contented herself with doodling death masks. When a customer finally tried to get heer attention she muttered ‘Aw, Jesus Christ’ under her breath – Don’t bother going. We had a much better time at the end of the street at a ‘Schnell Imbiss’ eating wurst, chuggin’ beers and people watching-

Berlin July '09 - 3

Sachsenhausen. Today was earmarked for a visit to Sachsenhausen, the first camp built by the Nazis to house dissidents and the like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsenhausen_concentration_camp It was a short train-ride out to the suburban town of Oranienberg and then a brisk walk, Noodle and beer stop included, to the camp. The train used to go as far as the gates but that service has been discontinued. Like I said before, I’ve been to Auschwitz and I’ve also visited Dachau and the impression of the absolute terror, of industrialized mass-murder carefully contrived to eliminate ‘undesirables’ is beyond belief – but it can’t be – it actually happened and the walls and ruins are there, marks on walls made by people long dead, tortured, executed and disposed of in a clinically efficient manner. The first political prisoners were kept here and then the usual suspects were rounded up. The lists are there, the symbols that prisoners had to wear. The execution wall, the gas chamber, the gallows, the ovens. At the end of WWII the Russians took it over and put it to their own use.

We walked back to town, well that is an understatement. First we went to the nearest bar and quaffed a few beers and spoke about this, that and everything. One other customer came in and asked us had we visited the ‘Center’, we said we had and he said he has worked there as a gardener for 15 years – the barmaid shrugged her shoulders and said ‘You gotta make a living’, well I think that’s what she said. We trawled every bar back to the train station and got the second last train out of Oranienberg, lucky us.

Berlin July '09 - 2

Waking up in a house, on a sofa, in Berlin. We walked along the Karl Marx Allee, a monument to post-war Soviet architecture and what was going to be the New Berlin, but they ran out of money, now where have I heard that before. Visiting the Communications tower is a must and true to German efficiency, we bought our tickets, they took my mobile no. and said they would send an SMS when it was our turn to go up. Brilliant as it gave us time to discover a great bar just around the corner called ‘Kase Koenig’ it was a standard German bar with serious food and lots of the locals eating there, always a good sign. Pork Knuckle (codillo) Sausage and large beers are what you need before being whisked into the skies. The view from the top of the tower is spectacular, well, a clear blue sky helps, so you could see forever. Back down to earth and a stroll along the ‘Unter den Linten’ the major street in town to reach the Brandeburg Gate. All around there are photos of ‘then and now’, and around the Gate were the major embassies, the RAF, the US 8^th and the Russians flattened most of that and now it has been re-built and the pictures are quite spectacular. The Reichstag is right beside it and that is another landmark building. There was a mega-queue to get in and we don’t do mega-queues. On the other side of The Brandenberg gate is the Memorial to the Holocaust. It’s an experience and quite the conceptual piece though what it all means is beyond me. I’ve visited Auschwitz and that’s a conceptual construction. Curiously enough, just a block away, is the site of ‘Der Fuhrerbunker’ which is now the car-park for a block of flats. Apparently the structure is still there, albeit flooded. Another curious thing about Berlin being that the water table is quite high. To round off the days excursion we had a beer in the Sony Center, in fact we had a meter of beer. This was right on the wall and it was the Western answer to Soviet Architecture, it’s a 70’s hodge-podge of sky-rise and looks totally out of place especially when compared to the older buildings and vacant lots on the ‘East’ side.

Berlin July 09 - 1

OK - so it's taken ages to get this up - no excuse, stuff happens.

Berlin was our target, not only because Willy’s sister was entrenched there, but also because neither of us had been there. What better way to start than with a slap-up feed of lamb chops, a few liters of beer and a game of bowling in Madrid. I was scared of missing the early morning flight so, I didn’t bother sleeping and an excited and slightly dazed Tubbymurphy appeared on the Lufthansa flight. For those of you accustomed to the cheapo concept of flying, BEWARE, there is no real difference in price when you take into consideration the treatment you get on such airlines (KLM included). Berlin was reached and first stop was a ‘Schnell-Imbiss’ near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (the bombed-out one) in Breitscheidplatz with the famous Berliner Currywurst, but more of that later. To the house for a siesta. The building is a listed architectural heritage site as it was built as part of the reconstruction of Berlin, by the Rooskies, after WWII, when between all of them they reduced this city to rubble. The first Berlin experience was the U-Bahn to get to an interesting restaurant called ‘White Trash Fast Food’ http://www.whitetrashfastfood.com/, it had originally been a Chinese restaurant and is now a cultural center with the original decoration, a band playing, a cinema club, a tattoo parlour, a disco and some waiters with great ATTITUDE. The beer was wonderfully large, the steaks were ‘Love me tender’ and the company (Maria and her chums) was stimulating. Home was achieved and I practiced my snoring.