Day 69 30 May 2015 Berlin Warsaw

Leaving behind the lovely Ritz Carlton Hotel, a few people commented that it was the loveliest hotel they had been in. We chatted to our breakfast waitress who speaks English, German and a little French and is Vietnamese and she has been living in Berlin since she was 2. Arriving at Berlin’s central railway station about 8.30AM, we were about the only ones there. However, within 30 minutes there was a swarm of people, often football supporters singing raucously and often carrying a crate of beer. Tonight is the German Football championship final and one of the teams was staying in our hotel.  On football, Sepp Blatter and FIFA is dominating the news here. I absolutely support Sepp Blatter as FIFA president, ever since I received this as the small brown bag of unmarked Euro notes.

We hopped on the train and we were in a 6 person compartment with our cruise buddies and it was a pleasant conversation and looking at the native wildlife of Poland that seem to consist of a large moth and several cats. I now realise why David Attenborough hasn’t produced a three part series on “Wildlife in Poland”.  Poland is flat and boring.  That’s not exactly true…it is scenic enough with small farming hamlets, the occasional church spire, open fields, clumps of woods and economic refugees heading to Germany or hoping to star in a British crime show.

All through Europe security has been tight so we are hoping it might be more lax in Poland. 

Warsaw looks interesting and the tour guide told us how much Putin hates Poland…sounds like a bumper sticker and how much the Poles like Tony Abbot because he confronted him at the G20 last year (how old is Emma Rose now, our little G20 bundle of joy?) and how the Poles were afraid to because they didn’t want to upset him. The Poles love Tony…if only they could vote for him.

The Sheraton Warsaw is quite nice, our room is as spacious as anything we have had but it is quite plain, hence no photos of the room, although we do have nice views of the city. Tonight we had a three course dinner in a local restaurant which was quite nice although the venue essentially looked like a wedding venue with all the white feathers and long white corridor. No white doves but ornamental geese.

Crossing the Oder River the Polish-German border, 

Leftover picture from Berlin "I know there is a Lego giraffe here somewhere".

The view from our hotel room looking towards the centre of Warsaw.

Day 68 29 May 2015 Berlin

Today was a river cruise on the Spee River (pronounced Spey and R…i…v…e…r) that allowed us to see a lot of the major buildings from a different perspective.  It is not a large river, looks more like a wide canal.  You can see the parts where it was destroyed as part of the battle of Berlin in April 1945. You can also see the bullet holes and the shrapnel splashes. The weather was sunny though it did cloud over later in the morning, though there was no rain in it.

We had considered visiting the Berlin Zoo, which apparently has the Guinness World record for the number of species (the most I am guessing, it wouldn’t be much of a zoo if it had the least number of species.) 

We visited the Jewish Memorial which was very powerful and most cleverly designed. There were stone stele representing people at all different heights and you walk among them.  The artist was inspired by walking through a wheat field with the stalks at all different heights. It is quite a clever design. The free museum was underground. You could take photos and we had on the outside but we decided that we probably wouldn’t take any inside.  In fact no one else took photos inside.  I guess because it’s a memorial, almost a cemetery really, that people refrained from photography.  There were poignant stories of shattered lives and families from all different countries.  Ones you don’t think of like Hungary and Greece. There was an audio of a woman who was 11 at the time and some of her children had migrated to Australia but who returned to support family was from Australia. As we are visiting Auschwitz, I had already decided that I would take photos on the outside but not on the inside for the same reasons. 

We walked down towards the island of museums (an island in the Spee), and on the way we photographed a statue of Frederick the Great, the Humboldt University, the German Museum and the plaza and building where the Nazis did the book burning in 1933 Fig 6).  There is display on the ground in the plaza, where there is a glass sheet on the ground and you look down and see rows of empty bookshelves, symbolic of the destroyed books. We ventured to the Berlin Concert Hall.

Not enough time to visit any of the museums, you would need the best part of a week. Not much chance of us coming back unless Elizabeth’s Lotto numbers come in. Berlin is quite compact and quite easy to get around.  It’s a pity we didn’t have more time to visit the museums.

Day 67 28 May 2015 Berlin

Off to Potsdam today which is located 20 minutes by subway from south-west of Berlin.  Full of green spaces and parks, palaces and lakes.  Popular with the rich and famous it is regarded as German Hollywood as most German films are made here, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie. A nice lakeside residence would cost about $12 million.  Claudia Schiffer is one of the residents and our tour guide today, Johannes, told us that she had lots of assets here and we (at least I was) keen to see these assets.  

One of the highlights was Frederick the Great’s Palace and gardens.  (Fig 1 and 2) We didn’t go into his palace and the gardens were nice, not as ornate as others in some ways were much nicer. Potsdam itself is really quite attractive.  Of all the places we had seen I had thought Versailles would have been my pick but I think Potsdam outshines it.  It is a charming place.

Schloss Cecilienhof is where the Potsdam conference was held. Our the museum tour guide mentioned that Tom Hanks producing a suspense film in Potsdam about the exchange of Gary Powers, the U2 spy plane pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union.  At first we thought Tom must have been following us seeing that we were in Florence three weeks ago when he was filming in Florence but it did emerge that it was last year.  It was interesting to see where the decisions of the Potsdam Conference took place and how they influenced the world. (Fig 3 and 4 photos from their info board as we weren't allowed to take photos.)

Returning to Berlin, during lunch we visited the Memorial Church of William II that was almost totally destroyed in World War 2 in 1943.  The remaining mosaic was as beautiful as anything we have seen.  I suspect one reason why we thought it was so beautiful is that we were so close to it.

Checkpoint Charlie, a bit cheesy but what else can they do with it…you have to see it.  For 2 Euro you can have your photo taken with a Soviet or a US serviceman.  The tour guide made them sound like Chippendales but they were far from it.

There is a cardboard East German car on display.  Apparently they had like a two stroke motor and made of a plastic cardboard amalgam. You can hire them and you can push them from one Berlin attraction to the next.

Currywurst sausage is some sort of national dish which we have both successfully avoided. There is a Lego museum which is essentially a platform for selling Lego but I did stand next to a life-size Starship Trooper made of Lego.

We took some photos of the Brandenburg Gate had extra bits on the side which I didn’t realise and was designed as a tax point.

A visit and afternoon tea at the Reichstag this afternoon was a highlight.  Lovely views over Berlin and interesting construction that you can walk up the dome. It provides interesting internal reflections.  (Fig 4-7) It really was a highlight and we would have never considered visiting it if we were travelling by ourselves.

Day 66 27 May 2015 Prague-Berlin

After three days in decadent luxury of elegant suites we are due to be in a standard room tonight. Departing Prague at 8 AM with light cloud, overcast skies and an attractive countryside we crossed over into Germany after a couple of hours on the bus.  We had a walking tour of Dresden, which although it looks old, was completely destroyed by the Western allied air forces in February 1945. Dresden was a city of history and museums with a timber medieval centre. 

A catholic cathedral had to be built for the Polish King (Augustus) who was marrying a Catholic Princess.  He had an overhead walk bridge built for him so he could go from the palace to the church twice a day.  He had 300 children and 299 were illegitimate. We had lunch at a restaurant called the Kurfurstenschanke which was established in 1704.  It seemed to be populated by the locals as we avoided the touristy ones including, “Ayers Rock” that seem to have Australian cuisine we have never heard off.  We had lovely potato and sausage soup and shared a baked potato and salad, it was quite cool outside so it was good to be inside.

The Church of Our Lady that we went inside of is only 10 years old but the sandstone here ages quite quickly. The gold cross on top of the church was donated by the United Kingdom and weighed a lot considering it was gold. I doubt she bought it in her hand luggage as Queen Elizabeth was there for its consecration. Designed in rococo style and it appeared more like a theatre than a church it was spectacular.

Apparently a lot of Russians now visit Dresden because Putin was heas of the KGB for 5 years here.

On the side of the museum there is message scratched in big letters in Russian saying that there were no mines, this dates back to 1945, Krzysztof Piechowicz (pronounced Kristov – and for  his surname you are on your own here) our tour guide who is Polish, told is he had to learn Russian, which I guess everyone had to.  There was a lot of security in the city because a G7 meeting is on.

I did hear that Queensland won the State of Origin Game 11-10 - woo hoo!

On the way we saw a huge glass dome that apparently is like an Africa experience. Apparently Germany has been moving to renewable energy with wind power. The countryside is flat and as we get nearer to Berlin the open fields give way to pine forests.

Arriving in Berlin we had a very brief talking tour of the remaining section of the Berlin Wall, our tour guide told us that when the wall came down there were about 4 million people in Berlin and about 8 million rabbits living in Berlin who lived between the two walls.  So when the wall came down the rabbits were everywhere as they had nowhere to go, we can only imagine what happened to them…such cute little things…such delicious cute little things.  Strangely enough when we were in Paris we saw a rabbit in the middle of the day in the grounds of the Hotel Invalides.

He also told the stories of the difficulties of going through borders. His friend was going by car into East Berlin and they asked him if he was carrying any guns.  He replied by asking why isn’t is safe do I need one.  They then proceeded for the next ten hours to take his car apart screw by screw, bolt by bolt.  They did not have a sense of humour apparently.

We arrived at our hotel in Berlin the Ritz-Carlton and OMG the room, it was a suite, not as nice as the Art Deco in Prague but not far off and no night trams,  It did come complete with a Beefeater in uniform to greet you and a nightly bed turn down service.  How will we cope when we come back to Australia?

Day 65 26 May 2015 Prague

We started our walking tour today at 8.30AM…in a bus.  This is the form of our favourite walking tour. It dropped us off at the Prague Palace on the second highest hill overlooking Prague. The series of palaces makes it the biggest palace complex in Europe. We saw them change the guard on the palace complex.  Apparently their uniforms had been designed by the same person who designed the costumes for the film Amadeus (I have no idea if that is a good thing or a bad thing). We toured through the St Vitus Cathedral that took hundreds of years before it was finally completed. The Prague Castle complex gave us lovely views over the city. We had coffee on a lovely veranda with limited views.  The tour took us through the Wallenstein garden complete with maze, white peacocks, grotto wall - dripstone, live giant owls in an avaiary(and I mean giant!),  Charles Bridge, the Market Square with Prague’s astronomical clock (designed 605 years ago).  Lunch was in a beautiful Municipal Hall which was decorated art deco style.  Went on a tour of Lobkowicz Palace this afternoon.  It had a small but impressive collection of 16^th-17^th Century portraits, ceramics, firearms, manuscripts of Beethoven and Mozart a painting by Canaletto and Bruegal possibly would be worth that if they were able be sold they would be worth $10-15 million dollars each.

Prague city is reasonably compact but is easy to get lost with some of the side streets as not all have names on the street corners.  The buildings often are Art Deco and do make it attractive.

We had dinner tonight at the Lobkowicz Palace or at least in the cellar.  The food was lovely, the accordion player a little too noisy and the bus ride home quite entertaining and educational trip from our fellow cruise buddies who had enjoyed Czech beer who then enjoyed more alcohol before heading home.

Day 64 25 May 2015 Prague

Rested after our rather sleepless train journey the night before, we had discovered that the room seems to keep moving.  No doubt a left over effect of having been on the train all night. We had a leisurely breakfast with what seemed to be almost as many wait staff as customers.  Our E Class Mercedes limousine came to pick us up, leaving our baggage at the hotel.  We met our tour guide, Krystov (not sure about the spelling) who gave us useful tips on where to go because I had thought to stay away from the northern section as this is where he would take us today we went down to the Vlavta River to take photos of the Municipal Building, the bridges, the Twisted Building, the National Opera, the Lego Museum and the Prague castle on the hill.  After lunch we went to the National Museum but is was closed.  We could have gone into the new building but we decided to go back to the hotel, retracing the steps via a Jewish synagogue we saw when we first arrived.

The hotel had upgraded us to a suite for two nights…very nice. That broken water pipe is the best thing that has happened to us on the trip. Prague is the city that never sleeps, well not when the trams go all night.

At 6PM we met our cruise buddies and the tour guide, Kystov, who is Polish, gave a presentation that was thorough and useful.  Most people seem to be from Queensland and New South Wales.  They seem slightly healthier than our last group but they were sitting down at the time.

After he took us for a quick tour to the Old Market Square and it was most informative. Tomorrow will be day 65.

Gallipoli Visit and ANZAC Day

Here are some images from our visit to the peninsula and our dawn service and photos of the the peninsula from our ship.

The images you can see the Beach Cemetery, Elizabeth on ANZAC Cove, Lone Pine cemetery, the cemetery at Quinn's Post, the Turkish memorial to the Turkish 57th Regiment, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish Memorial of Chanak Bair and the cemetery at The Nek.  At The Nek imagine another 5 metres either side with steep drops either side...now imagine waves of 150 men attacking the Turkish trenches - a tiny area.

ANZAC Day and images from the ship and see the small distance they went. John Williamson and a sot of Suvla Bay to the north of the ANZAC landing.  The Lone Pine monument is the white spot in the middle of the photo directly above the memorial at ANZAC Cove (actually North Beach).

Australian warship offshore with us.