Kurt Johnson

See our Germany photo album

[Posted by Susanne]

Germany was a welcome relief of western familiarity after our (at times) very foreign experience in China. After the China/Tibet debacle we only had about a week to book new tickets from Beijing to Frankfurt so despite some lukewarm reviews of Turkish Airways we jumped on their flight from Beijing to Dusseldorf.  We were pleasantly surprised with the new A340(?) and other amenities on the flight. Similar to other airlines that we’ve liked such as Japan Airlines and Korean Air, Turkish Airways had individual TV screens with tons of in-flight entertainment options. Both legs of our flight were on time and we even scored exit row seats despite our last minute booking!

We were greeted in Dusseldorf by Kurt’s sister Adele. She and her husband Uli live 30 km away in a suburb of Mülheim and they took us home to spoil us with home-cooked meals and family hospitality! Mülheim is in a coal mining region and there are several sites to visit which elaborate on the history of this industry. In nearby Essen, we went to Zeche Zollverein. This former colliery was once considered a technical and architectural masterpiece due to its efficiency and aesthetics. Today it is a designated World Heritage Site and houses several museums including the Red Dot Design Museum which was my favorite part of the complex. We also visited Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum (German Mining Museum). One of the main attractions here is a replica mine located 20 meters underground where we explored 2.5 km of drifts containing huge drills, cutters, conveyers and other mining equipment.

Since we were only a 2 hour drive away from the Netherlands we decided to spend a day in Amsterdam. Our first stop was the Van Gogh Museum. This collection is put together very nicely with his works organized chronologically and then separated into the different stages of his career which seem directed by his geographical location at the time. Other than those few hours dedicated to art we spent the majority of the day shopping. Amsterdam is a great shopping city! Like in New York or Tokyo I was content to do that all day long…and I pretty much did.

After a few days of exploring around Mulheim and a day trip to Cologne the four of us decided to go on a road trip. We headed south on the Autobahn and based ourselves at Uli’s family home in Untersulmetingen, a small village about 30 minutes outside of Ulm.  In addition to amazing hospitality from Uli’s parents this gave us a good jumping off point for daytrips to Rothenberg, Nuremberg, Lake Constance and Ludwigsburg.

Hitler apparently identified Rothenberg as “the” ideal German town and when we arrived it was easy to see why – the walled city truly is a model medieval village complete with drawbridge, towers and gates. We headed straight for the clock tower located at the city’s center and were just in time to watch the wooden people figurines pop out at the top of the hour. After a few minutes of watching their mechanized motions we moved onto some window shopping. Trinket shops abound but we found ourselves amused by toy store windows filled with wooden train sets, antique-looking rocking horses and puppets. It only takes a bit of imagination to see a toymaker in the back carving Pinocchio.

After seeing the town of Rothenberg we moved on to the much larger Nuremberg and found it to have a nice balance between contemporary and traditional attractions. While shopping, I was reunited with my favorite clothing stores.  I became a repeat-offender of slipping into kitchen stores carrying cooking accessories injected with fun colors and sleek design and I was also introduced to an array of German Christmas shops featuring the traditional wooden candle carousels that I pored over only to walk away without buying one in the end. To round out our quintessentially German experience we walked around the Nuremberg Castle and then lunched on very tasty sausages, sauerkraut and white asparagus served on simple tin plates at a casual eatery with wooden benches and tables surrounding a big open grill in the middle of the dining room.

In the area around Lake Constance we discovered the demise of our recently acquired calorie conscience diet. It’s called spaghetti ice. Because it rained almost the entire afternoon we were out our day was spent going from one café to the next ordering hot drinks and dessert. Spaghetti ice, as we discovered, is like an ice cream sundae on steroids with the unique twist of the ice cream resembling spaghetti noodles. Wet, cold and uncomfortably full from eating sweets all day we headed back for a lazy evening at home.

For the last destination of our tour of the south we went to Ludwigsburg Castle. This very large and opulent estate was originally a hunting lodge in the 18^th century. It fell into disrepair for a while before later monarchs revived it and used it as their primary residence. We took the official guided tour and thought it was well-worth our time. Unlike other estate tours that we’ve taken this one seemed to cover most of the grounds and left us feeling like we’d seen the majority of this “home.”  

Aside from the very touristy parts of our trip the highlight was spending time with Adele, Uli and the rest of the Woerz family. At their home in Untersulmetingen Adele and I feasted on the blackberries, raspberries and currant berries we picked in the backyard and Kurt can now pour beer like a real German bartender thanks to Uli’s dad’s patient instructions!

After 6 weeks in Southeast Asia and China, spending a week off the tourist track with family in Germany was just the thing we needed.  By the week’s end we had gained back any weight that we had lost while in Asia and we were fully recharged for our next adventure in Tanzania.

Crowds at Tiananmen Square for a flag-lowering ceremony. More Beijing photos

We arrived in Beijing to find clouds, haze, and a breeze cool enough for long sleeves – all very welcome after spending a month melting in Southeast Asia.  Beijing is kind of surreal – intellectually it’s hard to reconcile the ultramodern freeways, malls, and skyscrapers with a country that, on average, is quite poor.  The disparity in wealth and amenities seems kind of like putting New York City in the middle of Bolivia, with all the consequent social tensions between the urbanites and traditionalists.

Although we are getting to like Beijing more and more it has taken some time to warm up to.  We started with the notorious pollution, which gave us two days of depressing gray skies, 300 meter visibility, and obvious respiratory problems.  After being accustomed to walking around freely in the rest of Asia, Beijing's sprawl, construction sites, and ideograph-only signage made exploring a little less fun.  Finally we had the pleasure of trying to change our travel arrangements without speaking the language or encountering anyone especially helpful.

We originally planned to spend a week in Tibet but in April a few Americans held a protest against the Chinese (PRC) occupation of the region. The PRC responded by disallowing all tourist travel to Tibet, later relaxed to allowing travel only when chaperoned every day by an official guide.  Our first reaction was to blame the 4 American protesters who screwed it up for everyone else.  On further reflection it’s pretty obvious that the fault here lies with the PRC’s hamhanded response to any suggestion that the optimal form of government for the people of Tibet might be something other than occupation by PRC troops, systematic transfer of Han emigrants to crowd out traditional ethnic groups, etc.  At any rate we elected to nix that leg of our trip rather than jumping through all of these hoops and paying an egregious day rate to a chaperone.  Removing Tibet from our travel plans cost us a couple dozen hours plus $500 and, combined with things like currency controls and crappy censored internet access (Wikipedia and most blogs are blocked) left us with a general resentment of the PRC which has taken some time to overcome.

The other beef I will mention before moving on to why we are starting to like it here is the language issue.  We have been spoiled with our other destinations by  having either plenty of English speakers around (Europe, Cambodia, India), speaking the language (Vietnam), or being able to fudge with sign language and cognates (Latin America).  China is completely different; the local words are very difficult to learn and pronounce and very few people speak any English.  If someone is speaking English to you, you are mostly likely either in a place catering primarily to foreigners or are in the process of getting scammed.  The first couple of days were tough – I imagine we had an experience about like a Chinese-only speaker would have if they showed up in Dallas with no English or Spanish skills.  For example, taking a taxi requires finding our destination in Chinese characters on the internet and taking a picture of the name so we can show it to the driver on our camera, or alternately a hotel concierge who understands where we are trying to go and will transcribe the directions into Chinese for the cabdriver.  Dealing with airlines, train tickets, and other logistics is a nightmare without a translator since websites are not used much and reaching English speaking staff over the phone is like playing the lottery.  I am only trying to set expectations for other non-Mandarin speaking travelers, not trying to imply that everyone here is “bad” for not learning English.  However it is tough to imagine all of next year’s Olympic visitors getting around without similar headaches.

Once we settled in to Beijing we headed out for the country’s star attraction: counterfeit luxury goods.  The Silk Street market is 7 stories of small booths selling everything from fake North Face jackets to fake Rolex watches to fake silk bedding and fake chicken sandwiches.  I might be making that last one up but I might not.  The vendors are absolutely hysterical – they are aggressive like nobody I’ve ever seen and any one of them could teach a negotiation class at Wharton.  Walking down the aisles I got more female attention than I’ve ever imagined, with about a third of the girls actually grabbing Susanne or me by the arm and physically trying to pull us into the stall.  Once you’re in you may be forced into a chair with a girl basically sitting on your lap to keep you from leaving before you find something you like.  If you do find something you can expect the vendor to offer a ludicrous price loosely in line with what a genuine article from an authorized seller would cost (“I make special deal for you because I want you to tell your friends to come here in 2008!!  No joke – lowest price for Polo shirt is $45”).  We ended up walking away with Polo T-shirts for $3 each, 2 knockoff Hermes watches for $11 together, and assorted Gucci and LV handbags for something like $20 each….but not without a lot of salespeople checking our forehead temperatures because we were “sick” for making such low counteroffers.  The market can be either enormously stressful or kind of a fun game depending on how you calibrate your expectations going in.

Having filled duffel bag with knockoffs for people at home we were free to check out the rest of the city.  All the stories about the frenetic pace of construction here are true.  The sidewalks around our hotel seem to get torn up in the evening, worked on overnight, and be freshly set with marble flagstones by dinner the next day.  Every fourth block is a high rise building in progress, and many of the buildings have 3 or 4 tower cranes installed where the US would use 1 or 2.  Rumors are that as many as a million people in Beijing were relocated for Olympic related construction although the government officially claims that only 6,500 households were moved.  Even the 6,500 number is mind-blowing – can you imagine trying to displace this many families for the London Olympics?

Beijing’s literal and figurative centerpiece is the Forbidden City-Tiananmen Square complex.  The Forbidden City is the 600 year old cloistered quarters for Chinese emperors; they lived and worked amongst 9,999 buildings surrounded by a wall and moat to keep the common folk at bay.  While the size of the complex is massive there isn’t a whole lot of explanation in English, the best buildings are closed for pre-Olympic renovation, and at least half the complex is off limits to visitors.  The whole experience is a visual fugue – endless repetition on the theme of red buildings, yellow roof tiles, right angles, and big open rectangular spaces.  Across the street is Tiananmen Square, the largest public square in the world and most notorious meeting area in China.  Again the size and history are impressive but the square itself is….just a big square, surrounded by a couple of grandiose federal buildings you can’t get into.

The Great Wall at Huanghuacheng.  More Beijing photos

The highlight of the “old stuff” part of Beijing was walking along the Great Wall in the Yellow Flower area, a/k/a Huanghuacheng.  You’ve probably seen the photos or heard about the wall on the history channel but there’s nothing like struggling up the steep mountain sections of the wall to really appreciate the majesty of it.  This was probably the most fun we had at any of the sights in China; this section of the wall was gorgeous, combined both restored and unrestored sections, and remained completely free of hawkers and other tourists while we were there.

Towards the end of our time in the country we spent a couple of days in Xi’an, a city of 5 million people and another well worn spot on the tourist trail.  Xi’an’s primary claim to fame is the Terracotta Army, a collection of 8,000+ life size model soldiers buried to protect an emperor’s tomb in 200 BC.  However we really enjoyed Xi’an itself – it is much more pedestrian friendly than Beijing with a more manageable level of shopping, construction, hawkers, etc.

Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an.  More Xi'an photos

I have mixed feelings about China as a tourist destination; the place is amazing with hundreds of things worth seeing but the logistical headaches of traveling here are substantial.  If you have the chance to visit in the company of someone who speaks the language I would jump on it; alternately I’d consider going with a tour group that provides a translator (the horror!) or at the very least trying to maximize the planning and booking you can do stateside rather than waiting until you get here and struggling with communication.