Christmas 2008

For Christmas day and Boxing day 2008 Daniel, Gillian, Mike, Natalie as well as Madisyn and Sarah of course spent a couple of days at our house. Although too small to open their own presents we were there to help them. After all the excitement of their first Christmas they swapped notes whilst sharing a chair although Sarah looked decidedly tired by it all at one point.

Enjoy the slideshow.......

Happy families

If there is one, the advantage of Mike being away (sorry Nat) is that Natalie, Madisyn and Keira came to stay in Ottawa for a few days. It was great to be able to spend almost four days with them and for Gill to bring Sarah over a couple of days so we could all have a bonding party.

The pictures say it all but we look forward to doing it again before too long...

..and finally

Yes, I've not yet left the planet. We arrived back in Canada on August 21st and have since been busy bonding with Madisyn and Sarah as well as getting the house organised, renovated (after all, it'll soon be a year old!), getting the car registered in Canada and looking for work as well as probably a few more excuses.
I'll try to update more often and include a picture or two next time.

Underground / overground

At work it happened that one person's hobby is learning and extolling the delights and history of the 'Berlin Underworld'. There is quite a vast assortment of air raid shelters, stores and goodness knows what hidden beneath the cobbles. I got the opportunity to visit some of the bunkers and pass on the photos to you!

Electrified steel beams put across the interconnecting subway tunnels during the Berlin separation to stop people escaping to West Berlin;

Underground dorms and ladies loos (hooks on wall above show where curtains once hung);

Map of one of the bunkers;

For more bunker info see http://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/

Nearby ('S' bahn station Nordbahnhof) is a section of Berlin wall complete with the hinterland ('behind') wall and a dividing strip in between. The main wall was on the West Berlin side and the hinterland wall on the East Berlin (Communist) side. Anyone caught attempting to cross from East to West would be shot and killed.

One stretch of 'The Wall', at the end is a large reflecting stainless stell plate to give the impression that the wall just went right on....

At a break in the wall (since re-unification!) is a cross to commerate those who died in the conflicts. In the background is an old cemetry, some coffins were reburied in the cemetry as the dividing strip was also once a put of it. Also in the picture are sections of the wall, now removed.

The Church of Reconciliation stands on the site of a former church that ended up caught in the divided zone and was pulled down to give the wall guards a clear line of sight to shoot would be escapees.

Berlin also has some remains of Flak towers that basically housed anti-aircraft guns. these towers are largely demolished/covered with large mounds of rubble, now well wooded. Consequently there was not much to take pictures of although in the adjoining park is a quite nice rose garden......

For more flak tower info see..... http://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/

Sachsenhausen Camp

Sachsenhausen Camp is a concentration camp on Berlin's northern fringes and I eventually got to visit today. It has long been on my 'to-do' list so I was glad to take the train up and cycle over to it. It was very interesting, though sad to think what men can do to men, there must surely be something demonic about the perpetrators.

Here are the pictures...


Gate A - the entrance into the camp (any guesses about gate Z?). The camp side of the gate has a balcony with machine guns mounted and trained permanently on the prisoners.



Through the actual gate into the camp - with the inscription ARBEIT MACHT FREI, roughly translated as 'work will make you free'.



In case you do not work hard enough (and therefore 'don't feel free'), don't try to get free through the gravel 'shoot-at-will' zone, barbed wire, electric fence, dog patrol and concrete wall.


Roll call ground where prisoners were forced to stand or crouch, hands behind heads, for hours on end in all weathers. Move and you get beaten (and if you'll lucky, not killed). On the post war concrete wall are the outlines of more prisoner huts that used to stand there but are long since demolished.



Prisoner hut



Execution squad firing range also with 4 simple gallows in the beam across the top.




Cremation ovens - largely destroyed by the Communists. These ovens are in the part of the grounds called 'camp Z'. the implication being that you walk in through gate a but can only leave through camp Z via the execution methods and cremation ovens. A-Z, the full circle. :-(




Mortuary



Memorial

Rhine

In Germany, the first of May (Thursday in 2008) is the Labour day holiday so we took the Friday of work as well and visited the Rhine valley. We stayed at the Hotel Hillen in Bacharach and visited Sankt (St.) Goar, Boppard, Loreley and more places along both sides of the river.

I will try to add more text later but for now here is a sample of some pictures and videos.

This weekend we did something I had thought about doing for a while and something on the spur of the moment.

On Saturday, before buying our regular newspapers, we ventured to the zoo area and paid a visit to the aquarium. From the S Bahn station we took the "wrong" way but going the long way around to the aquarium entrance meant we walked around the boundary of the zoo. Unlike Bristol zoo, in Berlin even from outside you can see several types of animals. We recognised elephants and giraffes (who wouldn't!) as well as llamas, donkeys and flamingos. There was even a properly constructed viewing area outside the zoo to see the llamas and it looked as if these particular llamas could not be seen by the people paying to visit the zoo.

The aquarium was pretty good with lots of fish , reptiles and insects (including a mock-up kitchen complete with cockroaches!).

On Sunday we had planned to visit a church we had not been to before and we entered the address into Tom-Tom and got there and parked ten minutes before the service started. Then we realised that the (English) church had moved and a German congregation now met there. Unfortunately, the English church information I had was outdated and we now have the new address so maybe next week. Since we didn't know what else to do we drove over to Potsdam's Sansoucci Castle for a walk. We had been there before but this time explored a part of the garden we had not been in before.

Here's the picture record of the weekend....

Easter drive

Having stayed in most of the easter weekend as we had nowhere in particular to go, I am back to work tomorrow and the sun was shining and there was no snow on the ground this morning, it seemed like as good a day as any to go for a drive.

We set off off firstly for the bunker near Zossen just to discover where it was and it was easy enough to find but we'll actually go in there another day. Then we headed through the countryside, including some snowy woods, to Jueterborg where we had a quick look in the centre of this interesting looking town.

Then it was finally onto Wittenburg. This was where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church doors early in the 16th century, having found some discrepancy between what was taught in church and what the bible actually said!

Wittenburg is therefore a very important place for the protestant church and is the site of pilgrimmage for many from across the world.

In the pictures, the 'black and white'church is the church where the nailing of the theses took place.

The very small brick church (with the blue portaloo front and right!) is where Luther was put on trial.





Parish church of St. Mary's

behind the shops

If you take us with you when you visit we can show you a nice Italian restaurant that does very good pork medallions in Gorgonzola cheese sauce!