Norddeutschland update!

Once again I've been slacking off in the postings- finding time to blog, especially while being on the road, is much harder than I thought it would be. But I've experienced a lot only in the last week, which I think will do well for this entry.

My boss at the Uniklinik had a trip to Tuscany with his wife planned long before my arrival in Aachen, so he was very cool and let me take a whole week + a weekend off. I decided to save some money and see more of Germany, so I took off in search of some of the famous cities and places in the north. I started in Hamburg, Germany's quintessential port city (actually it might be the largest port in Europe) and a town uniquely wrapped up in it's lifeblood, the North and Baltic Sea shipping trade. It's actually got quite a spacious and beautiful downtown surrounding the Binnenalster and Aussenalster lakes, but just a short S-Bahn ride away are the huge, ornate brick Speicherstadt shipping warehouses and HafenCity, which will be one of the largest planned urban renewal projects when finished. I think it may rival the Big Dig in Boston in size and complexity.

I met up with John, another DAAD RISE program participant, to travel around the city and try to experience Hamburg. We did the typical tourist stuff- the Sunday morning fish market (rock covers, beer and fish and chips at 5 AM!), a walk through the Reeperbahn red light district to see where the Beatles had their first gigs (Grosse Freiheit 36), and even rented a row boat and tried not to get rammed by the much speedier sailboats on the Aussenalster. We even took a day trip to Luebeck, a tiny preserved medieval town north of Hamburg that was once the city of the 13th century Hanseatic League (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League). But I found Hamburg itself not particularly touristy, which suited me just fine- because the people there are some of the most open and fun-loving in Deutschland. It's not just because they have the Reeperbahn here- I managed to meet some local university students (unfortunately on my last day there), and we had a great time just walking around the town. Plus, that ugly harbor, full of cranes and container ships the size of football fields, gets really pretty at night. Hamburg is somewhere I could definitely live for a few years.

Then I was off to Ruegen Insel, with a short stop in the nearby 'gateway' city (and also former Hanseatic member) of Stralsund. Ruegen is the island right at Deutschland's northeastern tip, surrounded by the deep blue Ostsee (Baltic Sea) and can thus lay claim to some of this country's most beautiful landcape- imposing chalk cliffs, alternating white sand and stony shorelines, windswept fields of grain and wildflowers and a web of bike paths through it all. I used the latter to visit the famous Koenigsstuhl and Victoria-Sicht Kreidefelsen (chalk cliffs) and Cap Arkona, the northernmost point on Ruegen, marked by two distictive lighthouses. Along the way there much to see as well- native seaside pine forests, swallows living in the chalk cliffs, poppies everywhere, and an artist's colony specializing in works made out of the amber and other natural materials native to the island. There was even Vitt, a tiny fisherman's village that hasn't changed in centuries.

I could have spent a whole week or more on Ruegen, but alas I had to move on- to Berlin, the heart and soul of Deutschland. I've been here once before, but I couldn't pass up the chance to see visit it once again. This city is everything Germany was, is and will be, and bears the scars from all it's survived- from Bismarck's Prussian Reich, the world wars and the Cold War, the remainders from the Wall, to today's new Reichstag and the Kanzler's building- I could go on and on. I feel as if Berlin stands at the crossroads of everywhere the western world is going as well- with it's huge alternative lifestyle neighborhoods (and the accompanying graffiti everywhere), fantastic museums, lively music and arts scene and centers of learning (Charite Medical School, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Humboldt Uni, etc).

I started my day today, for example, with a morning walk along the East Side Gallery, the longest and best-preserved section of the wall that lay originally on the eastern side of the divided Berlin. After the 'Wende' (literally 'the turn', what Germans call the re-unification), artists came to this place and painted some very famous graffiti, of which sadly little has stood the test of time (and the work of competing later artists). Still, it was powerful just to touch the Wall itself and think about what it meant for the world, and what it could still mean. There's a eerily similar eyesore being erected in Jerusalem right now- but that's for another day.

And yet, in other places of Berlin you wouldn't distinguish it as different from any other cosmopolitan European capital- especially in places in like the completely new Potsdamer Platz, with such architectual icons as the Sony Center's glass-and-steel canopy. But this place was also part of the no-man's land between the East and West sides of the Wall for 30 years or so, and you only have to look where you're walking to see a double-row line of bricks weaving randomly through streets, apartment complexes, even in front of theaters- the line of the old Wall.

I've also had the chance to spend time with some great friends here- the Gnirck family, whose father I stayed with here two years ago, the time when the city first burned itself permanently into my memory. Together, we've tasted typical Germany cuisine from around the country, visited the Juedisches Museum (definitely a must-see here, although budget more time for it than we did), and watched Christoph, one of the two Gnirck sons, run in the the Jugendmeisterschaft for Leichtathletik (track and field) at the enigmatic Olympiastadion, cite of the infamous 1936 Olympics and Jesse Owen's triumph over Hitler's 'Aryan' athletes. Christoph ran well for his first time at the event, even besting his own 800m time by 3 seconds in this Deutschland-wide junior track championship. We even saw a great performance of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess at the Deutsches Oper Berlin, played by an all-black South African cast- a typical Berliner mix of culture and history.

I've still got all of tomorrow to experience Berlin, but somehow I know I'll never get enough of this city. It's not only that there's so much to see and do here, but that I really feel 'zu Hause' here, at home, as the Germans say. True, it's huge, somewhat bizarre, and sometimes neglect of it's minority communities spawns ugly events (particularly in the Turkish community), but overall it's really livable, and it's size helps you escape your fellow tourists once in a while. And because Berlin really is the heart of Deutschland, the German people are always concerned with taking the city in the right direction- something I don't always think is a concern in Philly, for example.

The other Gnirck son, Markus, has just returned from a year of social service in an AIDS orphanage in South Africa. In getting to know him better this weekend, I can see how a year in such a strange and often tragic situation has fundamentaly changed him. I've not experienced anything near that traumatizing over here, but it some way I feel myself changed in some way as well. He hardly speaks of Africa, despite being really a joker and extroverted, and his native land somehow feels foreign now. I think it's going to be a long flight home for me as well.