Blog #Germany
Short trip around Germany 2024
Bremen
The first association that comes to my mind when I think about Bremen is the Brothers Grimm fairy tale and the Soviet cartoon based on it, “Town Musicians of Bremen”. I didn’t know what to expect from this town, and it seems the town’s government builds their strategy on attracting tourists by exploiting the images of the Donkey, Dog, Cat, and Rooster—they are everywhere here, at least in the touristy downtown area.
Bremen undoubtedly is one of the most charming German towns I’ve visited. The most memorable places include the beautiful historic central train station, which was built in 1889, a scenic embankment, and the cozy, quaint old town.
Ruhrgebiet
Ruhrgebiet is an industrial region in the west of Germany. It consists of several towns (Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, and others) that are so closely connected that it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this region was the centre of heavy industry, with major coal mines and steelworks that played a key role in Germany’s economic development. Since the mid-20th century, when coal mining and steelmaking began to lose their importance, the Ruhrgebiet entered a period of decline. Today, many factories and mines have been closed and converted into cultural centres, parks, and museums.
In general, it’s a boring, dismal and grey place. It’s literally grey, the number of sunny days here is smaller than the rest of Germany. I wouldn’t stay here for a long time, but abandoned mines and steelwork factories are very unusual and worth visiting. Besides that, I was lucky, and at the time of my trip, there was a Champions League match between Borussia Dortmund and Celtic. I couldn’t miss this game. I bought tickets from a reseller at three times the price, but the game was worth it-I got to see three times as many goals as a regular match, the game finished 7-1 :))
Munich
It wasn’t my first trip to Munich; this time I visited a couple of familiar places, for example, the stunning English Garden, and also I went to Scamfest Oktoberfest and to the Olympiapark and its surroundings.
I didn’t expect anything special from Oktoberfest, but anyway, it became the biggest disappointment of the trip. It’s just a bubble blown by the local marketeers, and there is no reason to visit this event! Crowds of drunken tourists, double prices for everything, and ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY nothing original: food, beer, entertainment—all of these things are the same as at any other German fest, or even at any other event in any other European town. And all these things are in a noisy crowd of drunken, vomiting tourists stumbling around in Lederhosen and Dirndls. Honestly, I felt more secure in the crowd of Celtic FC fans shouting chants and shaking the tram they were in, than at this Oktoberfest.
The Olympiapark is quite a beautiful place, though, just like any other well-maintained park, but I found the former Olympic Village and the block of panel houses next to it to be more interesting. It’s a cheap place and there are no other similar districts in Munuch. It’s mostly students living here now. Some photos can easily be confused with those taken in, let’s say, Chertanovo :)
Over the past two weeks, I’ve had two amusing encounters with the German police.
On one day, I was riding my bike along my usual route. It turned out that part of the road was closed due to construction, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it. After riding about 100 meters, bang!, a female police officer stops me and starts speaking in German. I ask her to switch to English, and she calmly explains that due to the roadworks, you’re not allowed to ride there and shows me where I can take a detour.
On August 19th, there was a supermoon, and I wanted to photograph it in Treptower Park. The idea was to capture the moon behind the Soviet War Memorial. So I went there during the day to scout out the best spot. I should mention that my photography gear isn’t the most professional, but it might look that way from a distance: tripod, camera, 300mm lens. About five minutes later, two police officers approached me and started asking what I was doing there and if I was shooting for commercial purposes. I explained about the supermoon and that at most, I’d post the photo on my little blog. The guys said they had no issues with what I was doing but warned me that the monument and park are under Russian control, and if “they” (it wasn’t entirely clear who exactly) don’t like my photos, “they” might ask me to delete them. I hope it won’t come to that :/ Below is the supermoon photo I took that evening.
Prague, March 2023
Olya and I went to Prague for a couple of days, below are a few short notable things from that trip.
Transport
The first thing I want to mention is not about Czech Republic but about Germany. I probably won’t ever stop marvelling at how terrible the railway system works here. The information system in Germany’s railway stations tells you exactly in which section of the platform to wait in order to get the correct carriage. Very convenient! Except the cases when the train arrives in reverse order and you have to run from one end of the platform to the other in 2 minutes before the train departs. No carriage with the number on your ticket? Well, sometimes it happens, passengers will somehow sort it out. You have bought two tickets for neighbouring seats, but the train with a different carriage arrives and now you are sitting across the aisle four rows from each other. Who cares?
Cities
The second thing, which was really highlighted to me, is not about Prague, but about Berlin. Berlin is, without exaggeration, — the dirtiest city in Europe I’ve ever been to, whereas Prague, at least its centre, is one of the cleanest cities. In Berlin, you slowly get used to the trash, cigarette butts and other traces of human life scattered everywhere, but it is especially noticeable after you have travelled to other European cities.
Food
I spent quite a lot of time in Prague in 2014 and 2017, therefore this time we didn’t do much sightseeing (though, apparently, we went to Charles Bridge and Staroměstské náměstí) and mostly focused on the local cuisine. The most popular local meal is a pork knee but its disadvantage is that it has almost the same taste everywhere. However, pork ribs have a specific authentic recipe in each restaurant. The number 1 pork ribs, in my personal opinion, are cooked in the restaurant Lavička. They are marinated in a honey sauce and served with horseradish, barbecue sauce and crispy croutons. Delicious caramelised crust, soft tender meat that separates easily from the bone… mmm… ich mag das. You should eat this meal oooonly with your hands, it’s muuuch tastier in this way :)
The first time I tasted these ribs in this place was during my first visit to Prague 9 years ago and since then the taste hasn’t changed a bit. But it’s times like these when you don’t want there to be any changes.
Despite the fact that pork knees have relatively the same taste in all places, here I also have my own favourite place from 2014, it’s the restaurant U Balbínů. Here they serve this meal with pickled onions and cucumbers. Pork meat, to my taste, is too fatty and the pickles here create a perfect balance: on the one hand they suppress this sticky fatty taste left in your mouth by the meat, but on the other hand the meat eliminates the acidity created by the pickles, in case you ate too many of them. The knee itself here is literally enormous, it may easily weigh more than 1 kilogram, so, it’s safe to order for two.
To add to that, when talking about local food it would be a crime not to mention the Wenceslas sausage — a hot-dog in which they use a chopped meat sausage instead of regular one. Yummy. Earlier, in 2014, in Prague’s downtown there were plenty of kiosks where such hot-dogs were served. These days, for some reason, they’ve been removed and you now can only find Wenceslas sausages in a few small restaurants where this street food is to go.
Currency exchange
In 2014 in Prague’s downtown there was an obscenely large number of currency exchange kiosks with predatory Euro to Czech Krone exchange rates. Now they also exist, but their number has reduced significantly, I stumbled upon only 2 of these, where the exchange rate was about 16 Krones to 1 Euro whereas the official exchange rate is about 23. The fact that the number of such scummy exchangers has been reduced is a big advantage, but tourists still have to be careful.
Massage
In Prague’s downtown there are still a lot of Thai massage salons with prices starting from 9.99 Euros per session. I can’t imagine what kind of service they provide for this price, highly unlikely to be anything valuable. Apart from such fishy salons you can find those where a massage costs more or less an adequate amount of money. For example, in 5 minutes by foot from the Wenceslas Square (in other words, the heart of the city) an hour of a good Thai oil-massage costs 1000-1200 Krones (50-60 Euros) and in the salon Leela, 4-5 tram-stops from the downtown, 700-800 Krones. By the way, from the 2014 prices Leela’s have remained almost the same.
