This is all quite normal and as it has been for the past few years us waking up in the middle of the night will continue on for about a week. As you might imagine it makes going back to work a bit inconvenient because not only are we waking up about 3 hours earlier than we normally should but around the late afternoon we will start falling asleep as it will be around midnight according to our bodies.

What we’ve noticed is that the amount of recovery time that we need to get over the jet lag has gotten much worse over the past 10 years. I seem to recall that we could come home and within 2 days be back to normal. I really hope that this trend doesn’t get worse and worse over the years to come.

Today is Tuesday and I normally take the day after we come home off work to recover but in Barb’s case she did not do this so for her it will be a working day. The last time I attempted going back to work the very next day after coming home was when we went to Italy in 2006 and I swore never to make that mistake again.

Our return flight back home from Berlin was uneventful. The only point of interest is that when we got back to the Vancouver airport and went through immigration we were directed into this special lineup where we used a self-serve kiosk to scan our passports and declaration form. The woman said that they had just installed these about a month ago and were trying them out. About half of the people who were in front of us put their declaration form in the slot and it got completely mangled so there was a guy running around fixing the machines so it was much slower than they probably wanted it to be.

Normal Food

One of the biggest things that we both look forward to after eating in restaurants for almost three weeks is eating normal food again. By that I mean eating home cooked food but also not constantly having to wait at the end of the meal to get the bill and pay. All of that was quite interesting and fun for the first few weeks but this one issue is where I really get the most tired of when we are on vacation. Barb and I have always talked about one day going to a place for a longer time – say a month or more and stay in an apartment instead of a hotel. I think that doing this where you could really live as a local and shop for groceries in the markets and cook at home could be really a great way to experience the local culture in ways that we never could by just staying in hotels.

Thanks to everyone who sent emails to us while we were in Germany. I’ll sign off until our next trip. It’s 3:00 and I’m sure that there’s something on TV.

Baden

As of today we have been in Berlin for 4 days and looking back on it all, if we had only come to Berlin I could have still been very happy. Berlin, Paris, Madrid, London, I could stay in any of them and be content. It’s the excitement of the city that I like and each of the above European cities offer so many things to see and do that I could never get tired. Of course I have to say that Paris is still my favourite city of any country but having spent the 4 days so far here I’ve got to say that Berlin has to be a close second.

The one thing that I’m missing in Berlin is the architecture. There is just so much new construction that has taken place over the past few decades that the look of Berlin doesn’t have the same historic grandeur that most other large cities in Europe have.

When we were staying with my friend Frank at the start of this trip, we were reminiscing how we would have liked to have spent more time in Berlin when I came to Germany by myself in 2006. If you recall from my blog stories from that trip (See: Baden’s Excellent German Adventure – Final ), we had decided to spend a few days in Dresden and on the train ride from Hamburg to Dresden we stopped in Berlin for a few hours. In hind sight staying in Berlin instead of Dresden would have been a more preferable choice. Nonetheless, we are here in Berlin now and will have 7 days here to get our fill of this unique city.

One of the most unique things about Berlin is that so much reconstruction was done on it after the Berlin wall came down in 1989 and subsequently East and West Germany reunified into a single Germany in 1990. Not only did massive reconstruction begin in the former east Berlin but in all of the former east Germany. As a result of all of this construction, Berlin has a look and feel all of it’s own and in many ways is not like any other European city because of its newness.

In addition to the reconstruction that started after Germany reunified, most of Berlin was rebuilt after World War 2 so subsequently there is virtually none of the buildings that are 100′s of years old that we have regularly seen in other German towns that we have visited so far.

Well Located

We are staying in a hotel just off of one of the most famous shopping streets in Europe called Kfurstendamm. For a minute I was going to say that it is like the Champs-Élysées in Paris but while attractive, the shopping on the Champs-Élysées is really horrible. Paris’s Boul. Haussmann would be a better comparison for the city’s premium shopping street.

Speaking of shopping, the must-see high end department store in Berlin is obviously KaDeWe (pronounced: ka-dey-vey). This huge department store (apparently second in size only to Harrod’s in London) is the place to go if you intend on doing any shopping in this city. Fortunately for us KaDeWe is just a few blocks from our hotel and I can attest that next to our hotel room Barb and Ruth have spent more time in this building than anywhere else.

Sadly, the large department store chain Karstadt , which is the 128-year old parent company of KaDeWe, declared bankruptcy this week while we are in Berlin. While it’s future is uncertain, the global recession seems to be affecting Germany quite hard. Compared to every other trip to Germany that we have been here, I have not seen as many "sale" signs in stores with deep discounts being offered.

Getting Around

In comparison to our last stay here in 2001, we were then on the outskirts of the city where we had to take transit to get to any kind of stores. Our present hotel location is ideally suited to walk to just about everything. Of course, Berlin is so big that you could never walk to everything, but as Berlin has one of the best transit systems in the world as long as you are near an subway station known as an U-bahn (pronounced: oo-bahn) then you’re set. As Barb and I normally do we have purchased a a 1 week unlimited transit pass. After this we can ride the U-bahn or S-bahn (the commuter train extension of the U-bahn) whenever we want at no extra cost. This is a big consideration as we have often had a spur of the moment idea to go somewhere and if we had to pay each time we would likely end up not seeing many parts of the city.

Favouring Spring Time

Most of you who know us know that we have almost always travelled in the fall – mostly in September or October. We decided a long time ago that this time of year was perfect for us as most people who had children were not travelling as they were back in school and in most parts of the world the weather is usually still pretty good.

However after this trip we may have turned all of this upside down.

With us deciding to break with tradition and take our "big" vacation in the spring time we have had a chance to see some real advantages with travelling in May/June. By far the biggest plus is that the evenings are far more usable this time of year since it’s daylight much later. By late September it starts getting dark earlier and earlier (at least in the northern hemisphere). In Berlin this week we have been walking home after dinner and it’s still light outside. We may need to completely reassess if a spring vacation is the way to go from now on.

Separate Ways

It’s Friday now and it’s our 5th day in Berlin but the number of days before we return home to Vancouver are getting closer. We have the full weekend to ourselves but on early Monday morning we will be heading for the airport.

On of the things that being in Berlin has changed for us is that we are no longer all together for the whole day. Today Barb and I were together for part of the day and then we went our own direction. We only saw Ruth for breakfast and won’t see her again until dinner.

All of this is quite normal and not unexpected so don’t read too much into this. Ruth has been running out of energy to keep up with Barb and I as we will typically spend most of the day walking around. As a result she has been staying closer to the hotel each day and only going out shopping here and there. Luckily our hotel proximity lends itself to that.

For Barb and I, we no longer spend the whole day together as I am usually off scouring the city for places to photograph and Barb finds other things that are of more interest. I’m sure that most of those places involve stores that sell shoes. So it’s a win-win situation.

The Food

It is impossible for me to visit any place in Europe and not talk about the food. If there is any bad that has come out of our travels is that we have become so spoiled for all of the good food that we have had in Europe. In particular, pastries, breads and cakes are so much better than what we normally have at home that it’s difficult to describe how much of a difference there is.

The most noticeable difference in the variety of foods here is when we were in a small towns. Fresh public markets appear at least once or twice a week in the public areas (or platzes) where the sheer variety of different foods like produce and seafood exceeds our local supermarkets in Vancouver by a wide margin. And it’s not like all of the food sold here is grown in Germany – much of it is imported from countries like France, Spain and Italy but the taste of the imported food seems so much better.

Comparing restaurant food on the other hand is a different story. By and large, much of the German food that we have eaten in restaurants is heavy on the meat and potatoes and gravy is served in quantities about twice what I would normally like. Vegetables served with the main dish are often cooked a lot more than I normally like them but virtually all restaurants that we went to offer side salads that in most cases were more than just boring lettuce and tomatoes.

Barb was commenting to me last night that she has not seen any sidewalk vendors or in the pedestrian zones here in Berlin that sell the brötchen und würstes (buns and sausages). The last time that we had one of these was just before leaving München so maybe they’re not such a Berlin thing.

In Germany, Everything’s Good

Today is Sunday which means that it’s our last day in Berlin (and Germany) and we will be flying home to Vancouver tomorrow. I can honestly say that if we had only come to visit Berlin as we had originally talked about I would be quite happy as I really do like this city. As we have done for Paris, I can definitely see us coming back to Germany in the future to only visit Berlin. I could easily stay here for 8 or 10 days on another trip.

Over the past few days I have gone to many different parts of Berlin and keep finding something new just around the corner. With my rudimentary German speaking skills I have found that I am comfortable enough in most situations by myself as when I am with Barb or Ruth I almost always let them do most of the speaking.

I will be sad to leave Germany tomorrow. I feel that there is a lot of the German culture that I can identify with – perhaps more so than any other country that we have visited. At some point in the future I can easily see Barb and I staying in some part of Germany for a long time, months, perhaps when we are retired.

I think that our Excellent Return to Germany can be summed up with the following thought: I was by myself this morning walking through an area of Berlin called Charlottenburg. I went there primarily to see the Schloss Charlottenburg (the palace) but afterwards was walking through the surrounding neighborhood just taking in the sights. It was one of those nice sunny afternoons where most everyone was just relaxing in the parks or just sitting at an outdoor restaurant having a drink. I happen to sit down on a bench in a park and next to me on the bench was an old man. The after a few minutes the man turns to me and asked "Alles gut" (is everything good)? And it was.

Barb and Baden’s Excellent Adventures will return on our next trip that we have not planned at this point. No doubt that during the summer time this will become more clear.

Take care.

Baden

We’ve been really lucky that since we’ve stepped off the plane in Frankfurt about a week ago we have seen about 1 hour of rain – the rest non-stop sunshine, mostly in the mid 20′s. I was thinking that this great weather seems to make being here in the Bodensee area all the better as we were taking on a short ferry ride across the lake over to the small town of Meersburg this morning. The warm sunshine made the spectacular views of the town from the ferry that much more spectacular (see the picture below of Meersburg).

Meersburg is one of those old medieval towns that has a small, walled inner town with a castle and the new part of the town that subsequently grew outside of the original walls as the town prospered. Of course "new" still means about 500 years old so don’t get the impression that it was built last year. One of the most impressive parts of Meersburg is the view from the water as it has a colourful row of buildings along a single street along the water and up above can be seen the old castle and a newer winery that was built later on.

Zeppelin Town

The name of the hotel we are staying in here in Konstanz is called the Graf Zeppelin Hotel. We happened to just stumble across it when we arrived in town on Thursday but the name immediately struck me as the name of the company that made the well known zeppelin the Hindenburg. As it turns out, the founder of that company, Count von Zeppelin was born in Konstanz, hence the affiliation. While I’m not an expert on zeppelins, I’m pretty sure that the Zeppelin company made at least one other zeppelin that didn’t blow up like the Hindenburg. Unfortunately, zeppelins, the Hindenburg and blowing up all seem to be connected in most people’s minds.

Bavaria Bound

I must have spoken too soon about all of that good weather. On Saturday when we were planning on leaving Konstanz it started to rain and didn’t let up until the next day. We we thinking about staying another day in Konstanz or maybe even moving to Lindau which is at the other end of the Bodensee but with all of the rain we decided to keep driving towards München (Munich) which was only another couple of hours drive.

Not only had the weather turned wet but it dropped about 10 degrees as it was about 12-13 degrees from the previous sunny, mid-20′s the day before. We had to attempt to extend the booking on our hotel in München and this turned out to be fairly easy since we had the cell phone that we had purchased in Mainz on our first day. We had come to use the cell phone several times since we bought it and in many cases it made the hours driving in the car useful time to make or change bookings. One of the problems that we had using the phone was that some of the phone numbers are not always dialed as they are published. The best analogy is that if you dial a number in Canada, sometimes you have to add a "1" in front and sometimes not. Everyone just knows when to use the 1 and when not to. Similarly, there are things that everyone here seems to know like having to put a "0" in front of the number. Before we figured this out we would go to a shop and ask the clerk "how do you dial this phone number"? like we had just come from another planet or something.

The Bells

One of the things that Barb and I always associate with being in Europe are the church bells. There’s something about waking up in a hotel room (especially on a Sunday morning) and hearing the church bells – especially if we’re located near a huge cathedral as we often seem to be. Now I realize that we have church bells in Vancouver but the thing is that we don’t hear them from our house so it’s not something that we identify with home. One of our best memories is being in Germany in 2001 on New Year’s eve (called Sylvester in Germany) just after midnight and opening the doors to hear the church bells ringing in the local town. We were told that church bells would be ringing all over Germany at that moment.

As I write this section it is Sunday and our second day in München as we arrived yesterday in the pouring rain. Of course with it being Sunday pretty much everything is closed today so we walked around exploring the city at a leisurely pace. When we woke up this morning we were relived to see that the weather had changed for the better and we had our sunshine back again although it was a bit cooler that we had seen in the Bodensee area (it was now in the mid-high teens).

My final chapter of Barb and Baden’s Excellent Return to Germany will conclude with our move to our final and perhaps most anticipated destination of this trip: Berlin.

Baden

As it was Saturday night we noticed that there were lots of people out in the streets, mostly drinking, and as we were staying at a hotel in the old part of town just a block from the famous Kölner Dom (Cologne cathedral) we got the impression that we may be in for a less than quiet night. This prediction turned out to be to be pretty accurate as we had a bunch of drunken revelers outside of our window until about 2AM in the morning.

Odie Clone

One of the first things that I had on my list while we were in Köln was to buy some "odie clone". Odie clone is something that I remember from my childhood as my mother would talk about as some kind of medicine (you have to remember that I would have been about 6 or 7 years old at this time). It was only years later that I realized that what I was hearing as "odie clone" was in fact Eau de Cologne which is actually just a light perfume but can be used for headaches as well. The same as what I remember from decades ago, it comes in the distinctive green bottle with the the number 4711 on the front. Officially called Echt Kölnisch Wasser , it has been made in Köln since 1709.

One of the other items on my list to purchase in Köln was Kölsch beer. This type of beer, brewed locally in Köln, is has very light colour and does not have the typical bitter taste of other beers. Usually served in small glasses it seems to be a local favourite and probably explains the drunken revelry from the previous night. If you are ever in Köln you have to try Kölsch beer. It is quite possibly the best beer that I have ever had.

Stores Closed

On Sunday virtually all of the stores are closed and we expect the same tomorrow as it is a holiday. As shopping was definitely off the list we decided to take a train to the town of Aachen which is about an hour southwest of Köln by train right near the Belgium border. The stores being closed for two days had a collateral effect that it made virtually all of the places that we visited on Sunday and Monday much less crowded as it seemed that the locals were staying home for both of those days. While in some ways this was nice to have less crowds on the street, all things considered it would have been preferable to have the crowds and have the stores and all of the restaurants open.

On the Road

It’s Monday morning now and we have picked up our rental car and are heading to the first stop over. Of course driving the German autobahn is a highlight that I look forward to on all three of my trips to Germany. When we were planning the car rental we not only needed to get a car that could fit the three of us comfortably, with luggage, for the 8 days that we would be driving but perhaps more importantly be able to perform reasonably on the autobahn. Of course, my definition of perform reasonably may differ somewhat with yours.

While I always try to rent a BMW when we are in Germany it is never really possible to know what car you will get until you show up at the car rental office. Substitutions are the norm. In this case we were also given a substitute which turned out to be an Audi A6 which is a nice enough car and perfectly up to the task of getting us down the road at normal German driving speeds.

I’m written on this subject a few times but one of the most common misconceptions about driving on the autobahn is that there are no speed limits. There are many, many parts of the highways that have speed limits (as low as 80 km/hr) and even in the sections that do not have posted limits the traffic congestion limits your speed. However, all these things considered, when the speed limit sign says that the limits are gone and the road ahead is clear there’s definitely a driving satisfaction that cannot be met in any other part of the world – legally that is. For the driving enthusiast, driving in Germany with the appropriate type of car is always the highlight of a German vacation.

From a practical perspective, driving at speeds between 140 and 200 km/hr has a another effect: the distances that you cover while driving are vast. Destinations hundreds of kilometres away are reached in very little time.

Of course there is a price to paid for driving at these speeds and the payment is made at the gas pump. Fuel prices are quite a bit higher in Germany than in Canada under normal circumstances and driving a big sedan on the highway at high speed certainly has its price.

One of the best things that we ordered with our car was the GPS navigation system. Being able to plug in your destination and be able to get instructions from the car is an unbelievable benefit. I can’t count the number of times that we have gotten lost on previous driving trips and the obligatory ensuing arguments. A navigation system is now going to be a required standard item for us on any future car rental.

Schwarzwäld

One of the most famous areas of Germany has to be the Schwarzwäld (the Black Forest to most people outside of Germany). We were heading south from Köln and we had planning on spending a few days in different parts of the Schwarzwäld and it was going to be quite a different feel to what we had experienced in the other German areas that we had come from.

Baden-Baden was the first town in the Schwarzwäld area the we stopped for the night. Barb and I had spent several days in Baden-Baden on our trip here in 2001 but when we drove into town I could hardly remember anything about it and nothing looked very familiar.

Of course as the names of towns goes, I can’t complain about this one in fact it’s about as good as you might hope for. Perhaps twice as good. Realistically, the name Baden-Baden is not pronounced the same as my name as the "a" is pronounced in the Germany way like the "o" in pod. Also, any German town with a "bad" in the front of the name usually indicates that it is a spa town as I believe that bad means to swim or bathe in German.

Names aside, Baden-Baden is a town that appears to have a lot of wealthy people judging by the cars that are seen on the street and the number of high-end clothing stores.

We only spent one night in Baden-Baden and in the morning we moved on to our next destination of Freiburg which was only a short 90 minute drive (at normal Germany driving speeds, of course). Also, located in the Schwarzwäld, we are staying in Freiburg for two nights and from here will explore some of the other small towns.

Schwarzwäld Kirschtorte

One of the things that I had high on my "must-do" list when coming to Germany was to have some Schwarzwäld kirschtorte. Yes, we’re talking Black Forest cake.

One of the most unfortunate crimes that exists is that stores around the world sell an item that they call "Black Forest cake" that is so inedible that it has turned people off of this outstanding delicacy in record numbers. I too was not a Black Forest cake fan until my friend Frank did me the most generous service on our trip to Germany in 2001 and showed me what real Schwarzwäld kirschtorte was all about. My life has never been the same since.

Actually being in the Schwarzwäld, one must take it as a sacred mission to eat kirschtorte so that you can understand what the real thing tastes like. In the past 24 hours I am happy to report that we have had kirschtorte twice – each one better than the last. If our German trip were to abruptly end tomorrow, I would not be disappointed as nothing could get any better in the days to come.

Moving on

Today we spent the whole day driving through the Schwarzwäld visiting a few small, quaint towns. Titisee (pronounced: tee-tee-say) and Todtnau were the towns where we went to and both of them picture postcard locations. Titisee is located by the side of lake Titisee and is a bit on the touristy side but is one of those places that is a must-see if you are in the Schwarzwäld. Barb bought something that is called a Räuchermann that is now going to be part of our growing German Christmas collection at home. I won’t bother trying to explain what a räuchermann is because the explanation would not be able to do justice to what this item is. Suffice to say that räuchermann means "smoking man" in English and that it is brought out only at Christmas time so it will be in the box for quite a few months once we get home.

As I finish writing this section I am reflecting on the dinner that we had tonight at a restaurant across the street of our hotel in Freiburg. The place where we dined is called the Zum Roten Bären . The interesting part about this is the fact that this places say that they have been open since 1311 (the oldest inn in Germany). Many of the buildings on our street in Freiburg have dates at least 500 years old and the concept of history in this part of the world really boggles the mind. Something that I appreciate on all of our trips to Europe.

Tomorrow we will be leaving Freiburg and will be heading even further south to the area around the lake known as the Bodensee where we will be for a few days.

Until then.

Baden