Under Stars and Over Seas: New And Old

Our train from Amsterdam did end up leaving (after a stunning performance of Bohemian Rhapsody on the station piano by a traveler), and we arrived successfully, but exhausted, in Berlin, Germany. I think of all the places I've been in the past four months (yikes!), Berlin is one of my favorites. We only had a few days there, but the weather was nice with only a little rain, and the things were saw were absolutely incredible.

Berlin is full of history, mostly because Germany has been around and involved in so much. There were victory monuments from the mid-1600s that continued to play parts in wars up until the 1900s, with things being stolen by the French and Russians. The museums were really cool, because they had material going back to the stone age.

During World War II, when the threat of being bombed was high, the museums packed up their prized possessions in crates and shipped them off to various safe locations. Unfortunately, with the occupation of the Soviets in Berlin, most of the items were seized and held by the Russians. They still have them today, a fact that the museum and most of Berlin are upset about (nearly every plaque in the museum that talked about it passive aggressively mentioned that Russia, in violation of international law, still held those items. The crates that weren't taken by the Soviets were thought to be lost to time for almost forty years, when they were discovered quite suddenly to the delight of the museums.

Any of the items that hadn't been moved to storage were destroyed when the museum was hit by bombs. A few pieces and remains were collected and hung in the new museum building as a tribute to what was lost.

Among the rubble and regained items were the museums three prized exhibitions; the Berlin Golden Hat, the bust of Nefertiti, and a bronze statue of a boy, discovered by a fishing vessel.

As cool as the museums were, though, I found the most interesting thing to be the remains of the Berlin Wall and the Berlin Wall Memorial. It was humbling to stand before the symbol of a country and city's division, something that lasted decades and killed nearly 150 people, a good portion of which were children and teens, people trying to escape the horror of East Berlin. There was a memorial dedicated to those who had died at the wall, and among them I found people my age, as well as an eleven year old boy. It astounds and frightens me to think that their lives were terrible enough that they were willing to risk everything for a slim chance at something better, taking on the most highly secured and armed barrier in the world.

It was also interesting to travel with someone who remembered the night night in November of 1989 when the wall came down. Walking past the ruins of it all, the graffiti-covered concrete barrier and iron poles that follow a path through a cemetery and streets, that cut a city in half for decades, it is impossible not to be awed and silenced by it. The people of Berlin, some who are still learning from the other side of the city after nearly 25 years of a wall-less city, drive past it without much thought. For them, this is a normality. Much like the West Berliners of the previous decade, the wall is just another part of the city. The only difference is now they can cross it.

Beyond the wall, we also saw monuments dedicated to the people murdered during the second World War, the genocide that the Nazis committed against millions of people memorialized in places of remembrance and sorrow. But we also saw representations of hope, like the Brandenburg Gate, something that has recently been completely renovated, as before 1990 it sat in ruin in East Berlin, the government leaving it in its decimated World War II state. The same was almost done to a beautiful dome church in Berlin, but with funding from the West side, the Berliner Dom, which had originally been built and designed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, was returned to its former glory. A church that manages to combine attributes from Lutheranism and Catholicism, it is a symbol of compromise and integrity. It also offers an incredible few of the city.

We left Berlin with fortunately much less trouble than we had getting there, and arrived in Paris within a number of hours.

Having been in Paris before, it was nice to see both things I hadn't seen and get a new perspective on things I had. This time I got to go up the Eiffel Tower and even eat lunch there, something that was terrifying to start with and amazing to see. You really can see all of Paris from the top (though the elevator ride of the 300 meters was not fun).

The Arc de Triomph was grand as I remembered, and this time I figured out how to get over to it and see the Tomb of the Unknown French Soldier. Notre Dame was as stunning as I remembered, and honestly it is probably my favorite church that I've been to in Europe.

Unfortunately, it rained every day after our first day in Paris, so a lot of the things we did were in doors. The Rodin museum, with the statue of The Thinker and the Gates of Hell was amazing. A lot of Rodin's work, centered around the Gates of Hell, was inspired by Inferno by Dante. He had depictions of Ugolino, Francesca and Paulo, and other characters from the Inferno, all in hell. There were also statues dedicated to the committee members who sacrificed themselves to end a siege of their city, six members all showing different emotions in their statue, ranging from acceptance and defiance to defeat and despair.

The Sacre Cour, a Catholic Cathedral on a hill in Paris, is beautiful, and just down the street from it is an art market, where painters and other artists display their work, paint, and draw people and places. It was beautiful to see the various kinds of art and styles there, and if I ever go back to Paris that is a place I would return to.

We also got to see the Musee de Invalides, a museum that also functions as a home for soldiers permanently injured in battle. Napoleon Bonaparte and his brothers are buried in the church there, and along with the largest collection of armor in Europe, the museum also holds an enormous and impressive collection on World War I and II, as well as the history of leadership spanning from King Louis XIII to Napoleon.

On our last day in Paris, while it continued to rain very steadily and continuously, we took the train the 17 kilometers outside of Paris to visit the beautiful and grand Palace of Versailles. Beginning as a humble hunting lodge for Louis XIII, it was fixed up to its incredible state by Louis XIV and made into the seat of government It continued to be built up as rulers took over, abandoned a few times but surviving the years as a grandiose and stunning place. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette left lasting impressions as well, as Marie redecorated most of the palace and the outlying buildings, her favorite part of the palace. Even Napoleon fixed up a part of it, but it wasn't until Louis Jean-Baptise came along that Versailles was made into a museum and preserved as it was.

The gardens of Versailles are spectacular, with various fountains and walkways, styled and trimmed hedges and trees forming intricate lines and crisp edges for the gardens. There are a ton of Greek and Roman myth inspired statues that I was delighted to see and tell the stories of, and overall it was an incredible experience (once we got past the two hour line to get in).

The next stop on the journey, and the last one before returning to London for my flight back to the states, is Bayeux, a French city in the region of Normandy, where we'll be looking at museums and then going out to see the beach where the D-Day invasion took place.

Until then, its another train ride and hopefully some dry weather. So good night Paris and good morning California.

Sam

The Brandenburg Gate

A man was blowing huge bubbles in a park near the Reichstag

The seat of the German government, the Reichstag

Statue of Bismark in Berlin

The Victory Monument in Berlin

The Victory Monument

View of Berlin from the Victory Monument

Berlin was so green!

The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church; this church was bombed during World War II and left in its decimated state as a warning and monument against the horrors of war