Raving Amicks

Tyler and I just got back from our three-week trip to Germany and Ukraine with our friend Vlad. During our trip we visited Lübeck, Berlin, Munich, Kiev, a small village in Western Ukraine, and Copenhagen. It’s really hard to write a single blog post about a three-week trip where we took 1,968 photos, so Tyler and I are going to split the duties (he’ll write a post about Ukraine sometime this weekend).

We flew Icelandair, and yup, our departing flight was canceled because of that that one problematic volcano named Eyjafjallajökull. I think despite losing a day’s money on our first hotel (German hotels usually don’t refund cancelations), that leaving a day later worked out for the best. It was like having one free day after I already packed to make sure that I have all the socks and panties I’ll need.

Lübeck

We started off our trip with a number of days in Lübeck, which is a really cool medieval port city way up in Northern Germany. There’s a lot of Danish influence in Lübeck, so I could not understand a goddamn thing any of the locals were saying. It was like they technically spoke German, but when it came out of their mouth it made no sense and I had to think really hard about what they just said.

Highlights: The Theater Figuren Museum, which was just a small portion of a private collection of thousands of old puppets a single man has collected—he personally showed us around most of the museum and let me play one of his many barrel organs (giant hurdy-gurdy cart). Also, we loved the server at a bar named Im alten Zolln and would highly recommend anyone visiting Lübeck stop by for a drink.

Hamburg
We took a quick train from Lübeck and spent just a day in Hamburg. It’s also a port city and has lots of boats and canals (like Lübeck), but is bigger. It was hit harder during WWII than Lübeck, so there’s more of a mixture between old architecture and modern buildings. One of the more hilarious encounters also happened here—some locals in a small bar started talking to me in German and thought Tyler was Indian. They didn’t believe me when I told them he was American like me, so to make things simple, I told them he had French blood and then they said, “Ahh, so that’s it! The French are always so dark!”

Highlights: We climbed to the very top of St. Petri (all 544 steps), the oldest church in Hamburg. We also got to see the city from the main canal by riding the public ferry (#62).

Berlin
We stayed in Berlin for two days and one night, which I knew was not nearly enough time to visit this city. We did get to see the bigger touristy things like remnants of the wall, the Brandenburg Tor, a number of museums, the Tiergarten (a really awesome park), and the Reichstag.

Highlights: Memorial for Murdered Jews of Europe (at one point we hopped on the blocks and a ton of other people started doing the same and having fun), Museum Berggruen (had a ton of Picasso works), and finding and taking pictures of as many bears throughout the city as we could.

Munich
Sorry, Dieter. Munich is a beautiful city, but there are too many drunk Germans and tourists running around and throwing their garbage all over the streets. Drunken idiots aside, we went to some of my favorite museums of the trip, had one of our best dinners (Cafe am Beethovenplatz), and spent a good amount of time soaking in the overall city.

Highlights: Pinakothek der Moderne Museum, bottom floor of Alte Pinakothek Museum, dinner at Cafe am Beethovenplatz, and the Munich Residenz.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 8:16 am and is filed under Pictures, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.