Hotel City B - A Review

Time for another hotel review, don’t you think? We’re up to Berlin, where I stayed in Hotel City B.

The location for Hotel City B gets mixed reviews. On one hand, it was great because it was right across the street from a U-Bahn station and, thus, transportation anywhere else in the city, and Berlin is huge. On the other hand, there really wasn’t much going on in the section of Potsdamerstrasse and the area was a little sketchy. About a ten-minute walk north, however, brought you into the heart of Berlin, not to mention a Dunkin Donuts, so it wasn’t horrible.

Check-in and check-out were painless. My room was on the third floor, so an elevator was very necessary. Fortunately, it also existed at this hotel. The hotel’s motif is sort of hard to explain. Very strange colors in the hallways, on my floor the walls were purple, and the room numbers looked like they were handwritten, but I believe that was purposeful.

My room was huge. It had a double bed and the entire south wall was a window that looked directly into the U-Bahn station across the street. The room had an internet connection. It wasn’t wireless, but that was fine as I used the good connection to spend one night catching up on American television shows that I’ve missed while I’ve been in Europe. The only English-language stations on the television were CNN and MTV.

The breakfast wasn’t free, or cheap, so I didn’t indulge. In any event, with Dunkin Donuts all over the place in Berlin, that was going to be my breakfast in Berlin anyway. Oh, how I do love me some Dunkin Donuts coffee.

The rate was dirt cheap, around $70/night. Another thing I liked about the hotel is that I wasn’t required to leave my key at the front desk, so entry/exit was less work here than at some other places I’ve stayed at in Europe.

All-in-all, though I would have liked some better eating options close to my hotel for late-night runs, I was happy with the room, the staff and especially the price.

Amsterdam - The Surprises

If there’s a rock show at the Concertgebouw,

They’ve got long hair at the Madison Square,

You’ve got rock and roll at the Hollywood Bowl

We’ll be there

When last we stepped in on me in Amsterdam, I was talking about places that were on my list of “must see”s in Amsterdam. Anticipating a lot of relaxation in Amsterdam, I hit al of those places early in my trip. I also hit a few others, though.

If you remember from earlier posts, I have a thing about Olympic Stadiums. I visited the one in Berlin built for the 1936 Olympics and in Munich for the 1972 Olympics. Until I went to the Dutch History Museum, though, I didn’t even realize that Amsterdam had hosted the Summer Olympics (in 1928) and had an Olympic Stadium all it’s own, called the Olympisch Stadion. It took a 30-minute tram ride to get there, but I decided to go.

Olympisch Stadion was about as humdrum a stadium as I’ve ever encountered. Just a big oval of concrete that holds about 60,000 people – expanded from the 23,000 or so it held during the 1928 Olympics. I couldn’t get a good picture from outside because of sponsor crap hanging from everywhere in preparation for next week’s Amsterdam marathon. I went inside to see if they were open for the 5 euro tour. The guy behind the counter said that it was open, but it was all in Dutch and all indoors, so it probably wouldn’t be worth it to me. I told him that all I was interested in was taking a few pictures from inside the stadium. He said that since it was only me, I should feel free to just walk out on the field and take some quick pictures. So I did. That was pretty cool. In Munich and Berlin, I got to walk down the stands to the front row of the stadium, but in Amsterdam, I got to walk around the track and onto the grass of the stadium. I loved that, but like I said, the stadium was just so-so.

I hopped back on the tram to return to my hotel near Dam Square and about halfway back, something caught my eye. It was the Concertgebouw. Now, I don’t know anything about the Concertgebouw except that it was mentioned in “Rock Show” by Paul McCartney and Wings back in the 1970s. But I’ve been to the Hollywood Bowl and I’ve been to Madison Square Garden, so I felt the need to hop off the train and at least take some pictures of the Concertgebouw. One is included here for your viewing pleasure.

Another place I ended up visiting was the Homomonument. I had never heard of it before my trip, but I saw signs pointing to it while I was walking back to my hotel from the Anne Frank house, so I decided that with a name like that, I had to check it out. I’ll tell you what I know, which is practically nothing. It honors gays and lesbians, but I’m not sure which ones. That is to say, I don’t know if it’s honoring anyone in particular or commemorating any specific event. There was a plaque, but it was all in Dutch and I couldn’t figure it out. Anyway, I took some pictures and moved on.

Okay, if you’re waiting for the stuff from Amsterdam that interests everybody in Amsterdam, that’ll be in another post to come shortly.

Amsterdam - The Highlights

I’m sitting in a railway station

Got a ticket for my destination

On a tour of three night stands

My backpack and MacBook Pro in hand

And every stop is neatly planned

For a lawyer and a one-man band

I’m sitting in Amsterdam Centraal waiting for a train to Paris. I’m not taking it all of the way to Paris. I’m only going as far as Brussels. There, I’ll hop on another train to London. It will be my first trip to an English-speaking country in four weeks. Woohoo!!!

Hmmm . . . Amsterdam . . . where to start. I didn’t do nearly as much sightseeing in Amsterdam as I did in other cities where I stayed at least four nights. I spent much more time in Amsterdam . . . relaxing . . . and walking around town in a relaxed state of mind. Knowing that likely would be the case, I did go to all of the places in Amsterdam that I wanted to hit, and went to a few more that I didn’t even know existed before I got there.

I guess that I’ll dedicate this post to the places that were on my original agenda that I visited while in Amsterdam. The top place on my to do list was the Anne Frank Huis. Like everybody else, I read the book a few times as a child and have always been intrigued. Of all the places I’ve visited, the Anne Frank house had the longest line that I’ve been in since I went to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Once inside (it’s a little pricey), we got the tour of the digs. All of the information was in English as well as Dutch, so it was easy to follow. There wasn’t much to it since there’s no furniture, just the rooms of the secret annex, but the one thing that I took away was how small all of the rooms in the secret annex were. I think claustrophobia would have got to me before the Nazis did.

The next place on my list was the Heineken Brewery. Now, I don’t think it’s an actual brewery anymore, so it’s more of a brewery museum. It was quite interesting as it allowed me to learn more about beer, although to be honest, Heineken is far from my favorite beer. At the end, though, we got free beer at the Heineken bar, so I guess you can’t argue with that. Like all of the other sights in Amsterdam, though, it was kind of expensive. Fifteen euro (about twenty-two dollars).

I also wanted to make sure that I went to the Van Gogh museum. Unlike other museums I had been to in Europe, e.g., British Museum, the Louvre, the people here took the “no photographs” rule pretty seriously, so I don’t have anything from inside. If you’re a Van Gogh fan, the place is very interesting. In addition to paintings, the museum also focuses on correspondence Van Gogh had with his brother and others, e.g., Guagin. These letters are in Dutch, but several are translated into English and many also contain sketches of paintings Van Gogh had finished or just begun or never actually painted. Extremely interesting look at an extremely interested man.

The final “must see” on my list was the Dutch History Museum because, well I’ve looked at the local history museum in almost every city I visited, so it just felt right. Although I did learn a lot about the history of Amsterdam (and got ideas about additional places to visit), beyond that, there was little to get excited about. Much of the museum attempted to demonstrate Amsterdam history through art, fittingly enough. The most famous museum in Amsterdam likely is the Rijksmuseum, but having seen enough Dutch Master paintings everywhere else in Europe, and not being the biggest fan in the world, I decided to bypass that particular one.

That’s enough for this post. I’ll probably talk about the places I visited that weren’t on my “must see” list in the next post.

Dag.

German Efficiency, My Ass

I really wish that I had started writing about Berlin before I tried to get out of it. I absolutely adored Berlin, much more so than I expected and even more than Munich, but I’m afraid that my description might be clouded by the hellatious time I’ve had trying to get from Berlin to Amsterdam. Maybe if I write about it first (not sure if I’m going to post it first), I’ll get the venom out of my system before I start writing about the rest of my trip to Berlin.

First off, let me say this. “German efficiency” can kiss my ass because I haven’t been able to get in or out of this country on time, yet. So far, my second trip out – the one I’m on now – has been the worst of all. People had less trouble getting out of East Berlin during the cold war than I’m having today.

I’m neurotic when it comes to travel. I get to where I need to be on time. No, not on time. Early. Very early. I was at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof an hour before my train was supposed to take off, waiting patiently. I got a sandwich to pack away for lunch, got a muffin, got some coffee, and went to the track forty minutes early.

Now, let me tell you about the tracks. There are eight tracks, numbered 9-16, all in this little complex. The weather outside is bad, so there are numerous delays and announcements, mostly in German. Now, occasionally there would be an English announcement, but that didn’t matter. Announcements were coming over the speakers at five tracks at once, all different announcements, and even if I was fluent in German, I wouldn’t have been able to understand five people speaking it at once.

I kept checking the overhead board at my track that said my train was coming at 10;37. At around 10:40, they took my train off the board. Then there was an announcement, finally in English, that the train would not run today. Then, they apologized for any inconvenience. That made everything better. GODDAMMIT!!!!

So, I go to a ticket counter to see if I can get a different ticket, perhaps to a train that was going to run. At least this part was relatively easy. They put me on a train that had to make a connection in Duisburg that was leaving in five minutes from the track on which my original train was supposed to leave. I can handle that. Just walk back to where I was and wait three or four more minutes. Right?

About ten minutes later, some woman comes to yell at me in German. I tell her that I don’t understand what she’s saying. She obliges me by yelling at me in broken English. The train’s not running upstairs. I have to go downstairs. She tells me that I should have looked at the big board downstairs. Oops, sorry. I go downstairs to the big board and it says Track 13. There’s only one Track 13. It’s upstairs. And the train is running 50-minutes late (meaning I’ll miss my connection, but I’ll get to that).

I go to the people who exchanged my ticket and they tell me everything is fine, but the train is actually going to run out of Track 3 or 4, downstairs. I still have a few minutes, so I knock people down and jump over suitcases like O.J. Simpson in the 1970s. (I was tempted to go all O.J. Simpsons in the 1990s, but fortunately, it didn’t come to that. At least, it hasn’t yet.) I get down to Track 3/4 and wait about five minutes and notice, without any announcement in either German or English, that the board has changed to say that the train is now heading out of Track 7. Grab my 100 pounds of crap, run upstairs, run downstairs get on Track 7.

About an hour late, the second train arrives. I get on it. It goes from Berlin to Amsterdam, but there is a connection in Duisburg. Originally, I had a 41-minute wait time for the connection. Now, it appears I’m going to arrive 20 minutes or so late, depending on how much more time we lose. My hopes are that (a) the train running out of Duisburg is a half-hour or so late and/or (b) there are plenty of trains running from Duisburg to Amsterdam since I’m arriving in Duisburg around 4:00 pm.

Anyway, the best laid plans and all that. F@#king German trains. I thought these things were supposed to run on time. I hope I get to Amsterdam sometime tonight and I’ll probably update this post eventually to let you know if/when/how-in-the-hell I make it.

Toodles.

(Ed: Obviously, I made it to Amsterdam. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be so high, umm, I mean I wouldn’t be able to post this. Since the train stopped in a station other than Amsterdam’s main station and after 8 pm, trying to figure out the public transportation here was futile and I had to hop a train without a ticket and randomly guess where to hop off. I guessed wrong. Cost me about 30 more minutes. Oh well. It’s all better now . . .)

K+K Fenix Hotel: A Review

In Prague, I stayed in the K+K Fenix Hotel, just off of Wenceslas Square. In many ways, it was the best hotel I stayed in while I have been in Europe, thus far.

Getting to the hotel was pretty easy. The Praha Holesovice station is on the Metro, so I just hopped on and four stops later, I was in Wenceslas Square, at the base of the statue of the good king. From there, it was a seven- or eight- minute walk to the hotel. Check-in was quick and easy and I was given a room on the fourth floor because I asked for something relatively quiet.

The hotel did have a lift, which as I’ve pointed out in earlier posts, is a big plus given the masses of crap in my backpack. It also had free internet service, though not wifi. I had to plug my computer into a modem to get the juice, which isn’t as convenient as some places I stayed, but after having nothing in Vienna, I wasn’t about to complain.

My room, which was in the neighborhood of $100/night, was huge, relatively speaking. It had a full-sized bed (my first true full-sized bed in Europe) and a flat-screen 19” television, which also was an upgrade over all of the places that I have stayed, thus far. In addition, the bathroom had a bathtub, which I took advantage of since I have no idea when the next time I’ll see one of those.

The free breakfast was the most extensive of any that I have experienced, as well. There were cereals, breads, meats, cheeses, eggs, fruits, vegetables, fungi, juices, places to sit. Not necessarily all you could ever want, but all you need and plenty of it, too. Did I mention it was free? Free breakfast is always good.

If I have a complaint, its that I returned to my room around 2:30 on Sunday and housekeeping still hadn’t arrived. When housekeeping did arrive, they had a tendency to not bother knocking, which could always lead to some awkward moments. They did a good job, though, because it was one of the cleanest rooms that I have stayed in.

Since it’s starting to get cooler here, the lack of air conditioning generally isn’t a problem. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even know if I had air conditioning. I’ve grown so accustomed to just opening the window that it’s what I did here. Also, noise was generally not a problem, though I could hear a television coming from somewhere in the wee hours of the morning once.

Overall, I guess I’d rate it a very good budget hotel, at least in relation to everything else I’ve experience with respect to budget hotels in Europe.

Berlin: What I Liked (Most)

As the train cruises from Germany into the Netherlands, I thought I’d do a quick post on the two things in Berlin that intrigued me the most – The German History Museum and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

The Germany History Museum covers nearly two thousand years of various groups of people who have lived in these lands over the centuries. As far as German history that I am actually interested in, particularly with respect to Berlin, most of that took place in the 20^th century, or the second half of the 19^th century at the latest. Apparently I’m not alone and the museum’s curators realize that because I would estimate that out of the two-thousand years of history, about half of the museum covered the period from around 1820 to the present.

What I most wanted to see before I went into the museum was how things like World War II, Nazis and the Holocaust would be portrayed in the country in which those atrocities either took place or had their genesis. The answer is pretty frankly. There was a significant wing dedicated to Hitler’s rise to power, the war and the murder of millions. There were various documents demonstrating early discrimination of jews and homosexuals in Nazi Germany, leading to a sculpture of the death camp at Auschwitz (if I remember correctly). I was glad to see that the issues were not swept under the rug, not that they really could have been, but it also left me with a deep sense of confusion of how this could have been the same place that I was visiting less than 70-years ago. As time passes, it becomes easier to think back to the time as something far back in history, doomed to black-and-white film and Time/Life books, but it in the big scheme of things, it really wasn’t that long ago at all.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the museum.

The other thing that intrigued me in Berlin was the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the church is about 60% of the size it was prior to a 1943 Allied bombing raid of Berlin. Rather than save what they could, tear down the building and rebuild, however, the “hollow tooth,” as people from Berlin refer to it, stands as a memorial, with a completely new church built right next to it.

I never got a straight answer though as to what exactly is being memorialized. Is it to memorialize the German dead of World War II? There were millions of them after all. Or is it a memorial to the severe destruction that war causes and a reminder as to why it should be avoided at all costs? Or is it just a sign of defiance to a world that kicked its ass? There’s probably an answer somewhere, but I don’t know what it is.

Anyway, I was really enjoyed the church.

Berlin: What I Did

I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting to find in Berlin. Aside from the Brandenburg Gate, currywurst and remnants of the Berlin Wall , there wasn’t anything in particular that I was hoping to see, though I had hoped that the more I examined the city, the more I would find that interested me.

Berlin surprised me with the degree to which I found myself mesmerized by various things that I found. In particular, off the top of my head, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtnis Kirche and the Deutsches Historisches Museum. I’ll go into more detail on each of those in a future post. For this post, I’ll just highlight a little of what I did.

Because of the strategic positioning of my hotel, I decided to hit Berlin in two waves over the course of my two full days there. On the first day, I went towards the center of the city. My hotel was just a short walking distance to Potsdamer Platz, which is surrounded with skyscrapers (by European standards) by companies such as Sony and Mercedes. Turning left on Ebertstrasse takes you straight to the Brandenburg Gate.

If you’re familiar with Berlin at all, you’re familiar with the Brandenburg Gate, which was built in the late 18^th century. It’s long been the scene of celebrations of military conquests, and not just those of Germany. Napoleon marched through its gates. So did the Soviets. So did I, though I imagine it was much more dramatic when the others did it.

In the same neighborhood as the Brandenburg Gate is the Reichstag, which is the official seat of the German Parliament. It probably is best remembered for the 1933 Reichstag Fire, which helped bring the National Socialists into power, even though they likely were the ones who started the fire. One of the things that I found most intriguing about the building is that although it has had extensive renovations, parts of the façade are still riddled with bullet holes, courtesy of World War II.

Walking east from the Brandenburg Gate takes you down Unter den Linden, one of the most famous streets in Europe, not to mention the most famous in Berlin. Before I walked down the street, I had read that it was full of beautiful old buildings and beautiful scenery. The first kilometer or so, though, primarily all I saw were fast food joints and souvenir stores, and the only beautiful building I saw was the Russian Embassy. As I got further down the road, however, I saw what they people were talking about, as I approached the Dutch History Museum and the Berliner Dom. I spent a few hours in the Dutch History Museum, but like I said, that’s for another post. I didn’t enter the Berliner Dom, but I took pictures of the outside, which will have to do for now.

On the second day, I headed west. The first of the two places I wanted to visit Kurfurstendamm, which is a two-and-a-half mile street filled with shops, shops and more shops. A lot of shops. I walked the entire length, each way. In the middle, I stopped for my first currywurst.

(Detour: Currywurst probably deserves its own post, but I’ll talk about it now. I had heard for years that currywurst was a Berlin specialty and that only people from Berlin could appreciate it. What I’ve learned is that you can find it at least all over the German-speaking world – I saw it in Switzerland, Austria and other parts of Germany. Currywurst is a sausage, usually something in the neighborhood of a fried hot dog, drenched in this ketchupy-curry sauce and sprinkled with curry powder. I avoided eating it until I got to Berlin because I wanted the original currywurst. I wasn’t disappointed.)

Much more interesting to me than the shops of Kurfurstendamm, however, was what I found at one end of the street, my starting point. What is there is the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtnis-Kirch (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church). Nicknamed “the hollow tooth,” the church once stood 370 feet tall and was one of the largest structures in Berlin. Following a 1943 bombing raid, the church became a severely damaged 206 ft ruin, but the Germans left it standing as a memorial to . . . something. A new church was erected next to the ruins and services are held in the new structure.

The last part of Berlin that I wanted to visit was Olympic Stadium. I’ve seen matches on television played at the Olympic Stadium, home of Hertha BSC. I’ve also seen old film of the Hindenburg flying overhead and Jesse Owens winning his four gold medals there. The stadium has changed significantly since the 1936 Olympics, including being partially covered in the last decade or so. Nevertheless, one could get the sense of how it would have looked when it was the Nazi’s pride-and-joy as they showed off their culture to the world. It was a very interesting trip.

Those are the highlights of my trip to Berlin. I’ll go a little deeper into a few of the items that I mentioned above, though I’m probably through talking about currywurst. Let’s hope so.