Springtime in Sauerland

Finally - with blue skies, sunshine, and a temperature above 20C - we had a taste of spring. We just spent a lovely relaxed weekend with John & Mariska and their two dogs at a holiday house in the rolling green hills of Frankenau (Sauerland, mid Germany). The house was great (see first photo below), with all mod cons, a perfectly positioned terrace to enjoy a sunny outdoor breakfast, and a view out over the valley and the village of Frankenau below.

Frankenau itself is nothing to write home about - pretty boring and uninteresting little village. On Saturday night there was no one out on the streets, and it seems all the locals (all 15 of them!) were dining in the same restaurant we were. Schnitzel paradise ;-)

Lucky then that the surrounding area has plenty to see and do - traditional villages filled with beautifully detailed "fachwerk" buildings, national parks, and a giant toboggan run!

The fachwerk technique has been used extensively in Germany and the buildings are readily recognised by their external timber frames (if you know the Tudor style, you know fachwerk!) We visited two little mediaeval villages (Fritzlar and Frankenberg), enjoying lunch on the terrace in front of one of the historic buildings of Fritzlar (the Seibel House) and ice cream in Frankenberg.

One of the highlights of the weekend was our visit to the giant outdoor summer toboggan run :-) Fun for young and (not so) old ! At more than 850m long, you are pulled up to the top of the hill by cable and then left to decide how much (or little) brake you apply as you hurtle down the hill. We all had loads of fun, and were definately not the only adults out there enjoying ourselves!

The rest of our time was spent not doing much - sipping wine in the sun, reading, and playing boardgames. Hard life huh!?

Alli xxx

A day out in Berlin (Part I)

We spent last Monday back in our 3rd favourite European city (after Nijmegen and London of course!) :-) With airfares SO cheap and perfect flight times for spending the whole day away, we couldn't resist going back to Berlin.

This time we spent a couple of hours being guided around the old Stasi prison - what a creepy, disturbing but yet somehow fascinating place! Our tour guide spent 2 1/2 years locked up there, but with his commentary all in German I couldn't really make out anything of what he was saying! Lucky some of the information boards were in English, and with Jeroen translating every now and then I got the picture. Originally set up as a Soviet internment camp at the end of WWII it was taken over in the 1950s by the Stasi and was used as its main remand prison up until 1990!

At times with up to 4,200 inmates crammed into the complex, living conditions were needless to say, horrendous. Food rations were totally insufficient, blankets were scarce (and in an unheated concrete building the winters bloody cold!), and prisoners were often tortured in the most bizarre ways. We saw various cells converted into "water cells" - with prisoners forced to stand for hours knee deep in almost boiling water; we saw lower than normal doorframes in which tall prisoners were forced to stand hunched over for hours on end; and we saw tiny bunker like cells with no windows. It is estimated that more than 3,000 detainees actually died in the prison.

And while wandering around we ran into a couple of Danish tourists, one of whom was wearing a sweater with the website : www.nijmegen.dk Turns out he was a member of a Danish team who participate every year in the Njmegen 4daagse !

As yet another reminder of Berlin's Soviet past, we visited the "Sowjetisches Ehrenmal" (Soviet War Memorial) at Treptower Park. It is a vast Soviet war memorial/war cemetary and was built to commemorate 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died during the Battle of Berlin in April-May 1945. Before the decisive battle was over, Adolf Hitler and many of his followers had committed suicide.

In true Soviet style the entrance to the "park" is an imposing portal consisting of two giant stylised Soviet flags at half mast built of red granite. The central area is lined by 16 stone sarcophagi, one for each of the 16 Soviet Republics; but the focus of the memorial is the towering statue of a Soviet soldier with sword holding a child and standing imposingly over a broken swastika! The white marble sarcophagi are also all carved with reliefs depicting military scenes and quotes from Joseph Stalin, in Russian on one side and German on the other. The 5,00 soldiers of the former Red Army are buried under the sarcophagi.

Continuing the somewhat militaristic theme of the day, we also paid a quick visit to the Berlin Siegessaule. It too commemorates a famous war victory, this time the Prussian victory in the Danish-Prussian War. The monument is closed for renovation for the whole of 2010 so we couldn't clamber up the 285 steep steps to the lookout platform above.

We will be back in Berlin on 31 May so look out for more photos then :-)

Alli xxx