auf wiedersehen, Berlin

March 26, 2026March 26, 2026Leave a comment

I’ll finish up with the remainder of my Berlin sketches and thoughts. I definitely had a lot of thoughts when visiting the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial) in the northern section of the city, close to the Nordbahnhof. before heading up there I walked over to the Hackescher Höfe, which I had visited a couple of days before with Omar. I wanted to visit the art and bookshop there, at the Haus Schwarzenberg, which is covered in graffiti and has a stairwell full of art and posters and stickers (and signs saying not to take photos; I broke that rule). The shop I visited was called ‘Neurotitan’ and was an incredible place, I bought some zines and stickers there, and asked the assistant if they had Detlef Surrey’s book ‘The Wall Revisited’ (I’m pleased to say I held a conversation in German and was totally fine; normally I need a couple of beers before the German comes flooding back). I had heard that this store stocked it, but she said that the last copy had just been sold that day, probably by someone else who had seen his talk in Poznan. I showed her my sketches of that talk, she said that I could probably get in touch with the publisher to get a copy (I did, once I got back to the US, but it took some time and a bit of extra money – thanks a lot, bloody tariffs – to get one sent over to America). I had that book on my mind now especially because I was going up to the Berlin Wall Memorial, which Detlef had talked about at length. I took the S-Bahn out to Nordbahnhof (I realize that sentence implies that I simply got on the S-Bahn, and just went to Nordbahnhof, but leaves out that I got on the wrong train in the wrong direction at least twice, like when you try to fix a scratch but end up smashing up the table, but I did end up at Nordbahnhof in probably more time than it would have taken to walk). The Berlin Wall Memorial is a preserved section of the Wall and the Death Strip, along Bernauer Strasse. It was already early evening when I arrived at Nordbahnhof (sketched below), which during the Cold War was closed down, a ‘Ghost Station’ on the divided S-Bahn system, where West Berlin trains would not stop but passengers would catch a glimpse of a time capsule manned with armed guards. I found the Berlin Wall Memorial chilling. This was not like the East Side Gallery, here was the Wall as it looked, along with rows of metal poles installed like bars you can walk through. One section remains closed off to give an idea of what the Death Strip really looked like. Berlin is a city that dares you not to forget its past. On a metal display in the middle of the grass are the names and faces of every person who was killed trying to escape from the East into West Berlin, 136 in all. The faces as they look out at you, some so young – even children – was frightening. There were blocks occasionally showing where people were shot trying to escape. The Wall was up from 13 August 1961 until 9 November 1989. I didn’t get to see all the areas of the Memorial, nor the documentation center, but I sketched the Wall as the light was fading, then took a tram out to Prenzlauerberg and back to the hotel.

After a late dinner of spaetzle from the hotel restaurant I walked back over to Hackescher Markt. All over Berlin, but especially around here where there had once been a large Jewish population, you find the ‘Stolpersteine‘, or ‘stumbling stones’, which are actually little square brass plaques in the pavement that are slightly raised so that you might trip on them, by design. Each has the names of people who lived there previously, usually Jewish but many Roma, homosexuals, disabled, who were removed or forced to flee by the Nazis, along with the year, how old they were, and their fate (you see ‘Ermordert in Auschwitz’ a lot). This is an initiative by the artist Gunter Demnig started in the 90s, and has now spread to many other cities commemorating victims of the Holocaust. Each of the Stolpersteine is handmade. Berlin makes sure it does not forget. I went back over to Hackesche Höfe and had a beer at the Cinema Cafe, which I sketched in the poor light. It is interesting that a lot of places in Berlin are cash only, where I got so used to using my card everywhere in Poland, same back in California. It wasn’t a busy evening, it was Tuesday, but it was an interesting cafe to sketch, and I used my fountain pen. The outside area of the cafe is in that alley with all the graffiti and would have been an interesting sketch, if I could find somewhere to sit with a good view, which I couldn’t. After this, tired, I went to bed.

On my last morning in Berlin, at the end of my Poland-Germany trip, I was ready to go back to London but had a last sketch or two in me. I had considered adding in a short trip to Denmark onto the end of this adventure, since it was 30 years since my strawberry-picking visit there, but decided a couple more days in London would be better for me. I had also considered taking the overnight train from Berlin to Brussels, a fairly new service, and passing a couple of days in my old Belgian haunts, but I’m glad I didn’t in the end. It was nice to spend some time by myself in Berlin but it’s not 1998 any more. I walked down to the Museum Island (sketching a man fishing in the Spree along the way) and sat next to the Dom, drawing the view of the Museums in pencil.

It is fun (and quick) to draw in pencil but I don’t really like straight lines much. I do love that sky though, and miss those wispy cloud skies. Before long I was back up in the wispy clouds myself, and sketched the view on my very small plane (see below). It was easy to get the S-Bahn out to the Brandenburg airport, but took a very long time getting through the security line, which seemed to have one line per baggage inspector and the inspector seemed to have to open up every single bag and inspect every single thing. I eventually had to ask them to let me through as I would miss my flight despite being there super early. Word of warning for you in Berlin airport, it can be slow. I flew back into a new airport for me though, London City Airport out past Docklands, a very small and convenient place to end up. I jumped right onto the DLR to Bank, and onto the Northern Line back home to Burnt Oak. Auf Wiedersehen Berlin, it was nice to reconnect after all these years. I would like to get back to Germany again soon, but I’d like to go back to the South and West again, maybe explore the Rhine Valley at last.

East Side

March 25, 2026March 23, 2026Leave a comment

I took the U-Bahn out to Warschauer Straße, a wide busy road well out into the East, full of hostels and clubs and new buildings. I was headed to the East Side Gallery, a famous stretch of the remaining Berlin Wall that separates Mühlenstraße from the banks of the river Spree. Popular with tourists, I’ve been here before, but almost didn’t recognize the other side of the street, now all built up with tall steel and glass hotels and apartments and businesses, plus a big modern concert arena, not like the concrete DDR era blocks and empty spaces I saw on my last visit. The East Side Gallery starts close to the Oberbaumbrücke, a decorative bridge over the Spree, and is the longest bit of Berlin Wall left standing. It was covered in artwork by over a hundred artists in 1990 after the Wall fell, and has been left as a testament to the fall of the DDR. Some of the artwork has stayed in place over the years, much of it has been updated or renovated, or even had new artwork put in place. Some sections have even come down, as Berlin has started redeveloping, but this is considered to be the largest open-air gallery in the world and contains some now famous paintings such as the one of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing, My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love by Russian painter Dmitri Vrubel. I stood and sketched the section above, showing Alles Offen (‘Anything Open’) by Rosemary Schinzler. I drew in pencil and watercolour (on that horrible bobbly Moleskine paper) and I likely had in mind the looser style of Detlef Surrey having been so inspired by his work at his talk. Plus it was just faster; I get bogged down with my penwork sometimes, and it’s good to be free; where better to be free than at the broken Berlin Wall. There were a lot of tourists about but it wasn’t crowded. I tried to find the spot where a photo of me was taken in 1998, and it was besides Wir Sind Ein Folk (‘We Are One People’ aka ‘Worlds People’) by Schamil Gimajew. I got someone to take a photo of me, so I could put them side by side. It’s clear that the original painting looks fairly different to the updated version, but still in that very distinctive style that I was so drawn to. The side by side photos are below. I remember we used a highly stylized black and white version of that photo in a poster for our small university production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (performed in German; I was Azdak the judge, the best possible character to play ever; that was a chaotic student production for our German Play course, in which I co-directed the first half, and designed the set to be projected on stage by one of those overhead projectors you get in schools, with extra characters drawn in pen and moved about alongside the real actors by me, it was very strange but we were on a budget and had to be creative…). Wir Sind Ein Folk is a really long piece and you could spend hours looking at all the details; there is more information about the piece and the artist on the East Side Gallery Exhibition website. Anyway here are the two photos, almost three decades apart (note the odd socks in the older one); I still stand in the same way.

After exploring the East Side Gallery I walked along the Spree, the Sun was out and I like to find the shade, so I stood next to a big boat (which was also a hostel; seemed like a fun place to stay, or maybe not, maybe 1998 Pete would have enjoyed it). I wanted to draw the long Oberbaumbrücke. I had intended to colour it in but couldn’t be bothered in the end. It is a double-decker bridge, and connects two neighbourhoods (Friedrichshain and Kreuzburg) that were divided by the Wall. This bridge was built in 1896, replacing an older wooden crossing, and has those two distinctive brick towers inspired by those in the city of Prenzlau. Updates were made following reunification. While I sketched, an American man started to chat with me, he was another sketcher who had been at the Symposium and was part of Urban Sketchers LA, Kevin Riley, really good sketcher, so now I’m following him on Instagram. It’s this whole thing about urban sketching, we get to recognize our people out in public, make connections.

Here’s another picture of me in Berlin in 1998 standing on the Oberbaumbrücke, with the Fernsehturm in the background. I had thought about taking one of those riverboats down the Spree, that would have been interesting. Can’t do it all though. After I finished the sketch of the bridge, I walked back over to busy Warschauer Straße, had a fairly gross tasting vegetarian currywurst at the station, and headed back to the hotel for a rest before seeing some more remains of the Berlin Wall before it got dark.

Prenzlauerberg

March 23, 2026March 22, 20262 Comments

After a short rest at the hotel, I got back to exploring Berlin. I got on the U-Bahn at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and went a couple of stops up to Eberswalder Straße, a station above ground in the busy Prenzlauerberg district. I had struggled to remember exactly where I stayed on that trip to Berlin in 1998, just remembering that it was somewhere in East Berlin, where there was a busy intersection and an U-Bahn station above ground with some magnificent ironwork. I looked in my old journal from that trip – instead of bringing guidebooks that would weigh down my bag I simply got a notebook, filled it with information from each book, copies of maps and metro systems, and left space at the back to write a journal of the trip, five weeks around Europe on the trains. No smartphones in those days. I had kept a separate journal for more detailed and personal writing (lot of time to write on trains and in hostels) but in my main one I wrote down when I arrived and left, what I did, who I met and where I stayed. When I went to Berlin, it was not from an overnight train but a shorter journey from the pretty city of Lübeck where I had slept for a couple of nights at a hostel, and had met a couple of Australians called Pete and Kat who were also going to berlin the next day. We went together, and after arriving at Zoobahnhof we were right away being approached by people offering places to stay at hostels or otherwise. This it turns out was very normal especially in the Eastern European cities, and Berlin I suppose was the furthest East I’d been yet (in my life). An older woman called Frau Wurst (Mrs. Sausage) offered to rent us her small apartment for a few days, and being in our fearless early 20s we all said yeah why not. This was many years before the concept of AirBNB. She took us on a bus, getting angry with the ‘Wessis’ (who were very rudely just minding their own business and not bothering her at all) for sitting in the front seats upstairs, she was scolding and scowling at them, to their (and our) confusion. I learned that ‘Wessis’ were West Berliners and ‘Ossis’ were East Berliners, and Frau Wurst it seemed was no fan of a Wessi. Me and my two new friends who were both Aussies (not to confuse things) just looked at each other like, what have we got ourselves into here? Frau Wurst told us all about Berlin from the top of that bus, all in German that I translated for the two Australians as best I could, and especially about life following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I learned about ‘Ostalgie’, the nostalgia for the life in the old DDR. It was an education. We ended up in the area which I now realize was Prenzlauerberg, and I wrote down the address in my little journal so that decades later I would remember where it was we stayed – Schliemannstraße. Frau Wurst told us how she had lived in the flat before the Wall fell, and then after German Reunification she suddenly had to start paying rent and had all these other unexpected living expenses, so she converted the flat to rent out to tourists and was making extra money that way during the summer. It was the 90s though, so instead of posting online she had to literally go to the station and talk to people getting off the train. She had a fascinating story and I’m really glad we met her and stayed up there, as it was an interesting and convenient place from where to explore Berlin, but it still felt like two cities with two vibes. Not so much any more. I walked around the neighbourhood, finding the street where I had stayed with two Australians all those years before. It was different, very busy, diverse, lots of cafes and shops, and I sat outside a fast food joint on the corner and sketched the view of the station while Berliners whizzed past on e-bikes.

*Me and a Trabant in Prenzlauerberg in 1998*

Everywhere I had read told me that Prenzlauerberg had gone very upmarket and was one of the trendier parts of Berlin, but I didn’t feel that so much. Buildings were covered in graffiti, which seemed more the norm in Berlin that other cities anyway and it added character, but it was scruffier than expected, but again I didn’t mind that. I walked to a little park that cuts across Schliemannstraße, where people were playing games, reading, talking, walking their dogs and in my case, sketching a big green metal water pump, which had a dragon’s head for a tap. I found a nice bookshop opposite the park and had a look around in there (no sign of Detlef Surrey’s book), and wandered about a little bit more before heading over to Mauerpark. I found one of those Photoautomats, the old-school instant photo booths found all over Berlin that all the hipsters want to find. I had to have a go (see below). In the first couple I didn’t realize it was even working properly, in the third I held up my sketchbook, and in the last one I held up my blue plastic ukulele that I’d brought along to play while sat in the park.

Mauerpark is a grassy space just a short walk from Eberswalder Straße. As the name suggests, it is a park next to what was a stretch of the Berlin Wall, and was part of the infamous ‘Death Strip’. These days it’s a lively park where they hold a flea market and regular open-air karaoke, but there are always people spraying new graffiti designs on the stretch of concrete on tope of the steep embankment. I sketched the wall and listened to a group of four teenage artists debate over what to paint and how, the familiar sound of cans being shaken and music being played over tinny speakers. One of the kids said that he could not be out too long as his mother had called him home for dinner. I found it fascinating watching the street artists at work, and I sketched that part of the wall before sitting on the steps strumming my ukulele as the sun started to go down. A pretty good evening in Berlin.

I took the tram back to Eberwalder Straße and walked about a little more, checking out the Kulturbrauerei (finding another little Photoautomat, above), before deciding to grab some groceries at the supermarket and head back to the hotel. It was dark by now, and I was hungry. I ended up going for a late dinner at the much more Bavarian Hofbräuhaus, near Alexanderplatz, where I had a hige liter-sized ‘Maß’ of Bavarian beer and some schnitzel, while listening to some Bavarian oom-pah music (not very Berlin but very fun), and trying not to overhear the conversation an Irish man was having with his date behind me, I say conversation, more like monologue. I tried to sketch it all in pencil, Monday night in Mitte. And then, home to bed.

through the heart of Berlin

March 22, 2026Leave a comment

When I’m so behind in posting my sketches it is overwhelming to think of how much catch up there is, but then I remember that I’m looking back on my adventures from last summer, and it’s sometimes good to reflect on them when they are less fresh so you have had the time to digest them. Berlin is a lot to digest all at once, especially if you are mostly digesting by going around drawing it all. Berlin is a city with a lot of stories, and you can’t draw it all, and you can’t absorb it all. All those stories go through your head as you stand and look at them and try to make sense of things. You see how things are in the present day and you see how easily things went from one situation to another situation so quickly in the past and you think, well of course we should look at the past. Right now we are living in other peoples’ past. I remember feeling this very strongly the first time I was in Berlin, back as a scrawny 22 year old student dashing about Europe on night trains, feeling like this was a city coming to the end of the twentieth century where there were a lot of open wounds, but that it was about to become a different city again. Almost three decades later I was back with a more accomplished sketching habit to take a look around, and on this day I left my hotel near Alexanderplatz and walked down towards the MuseumInsel, which I’d explored the evening before with Omar. I sat in the grassy square outside the huge green-copper-domed Cathedral (Berliner Dom), which was peaceful except for the gangs of young women with indeterminate accents approaching people from all angles with clipboards. You see those gangs in many cities, they really want your signature for something or other, and your wallet too when you let them get too close. You have to keep these obvious pickpockets away from you, and I had to tell them to go away several times, eventually telling them to f-off, but I could see them going up to people all around the square. I was feeling pretty relaxed though, and was really happy with my drawing of the Dom with the Fernsehturm in the background. The cathedral itself has a long history going back to the 1400s, and has had several different iterations, but the present building designed by Julius and Otto Raschdorff was inaugurated in 1905. I didn’t go inside. It was a nicely overcast day, perfect for sketching where I’m not bound by looking for shade, and I think this was my favourite building sketch of the trip, drawn in the portrait sized Hahnemuhle, two page spread.

I was going to walk all the way down towards the Brandenburg Gate, but it was a long walk down Unter den Linden and there is an U-Bahn that goes all the way down it now. I love travelling on metro systems in other cities, it’s a whole new level of concentration. Berlin’s system is easy enough, the U-Bahn underground intermingled with the S-Bahn above, but that didn’t stop me getting lost a few times, or getting on a train in the complete wrong direction more than once, taking longer to mess about in stations than it would have taken me to actually walk the short distance. It was easy enough to get from the shiny Unter den Linden station down to the U-Bahn station formerly known as Unter den Linden but now called Brandenburger Tor.

The Brandenburg Gate is for many the most well-known architectural symbol of Berlin, especially of my generation and before who lived in the Cold War era. This was that big ghostly gate, stranded in the no-man’s-land between the Berlin Wall, which we Westerners could only see the back side of. It was on the news a lot when I was a kid. I remember the strange thrill of being able to walk through it when I went in ’98, less than nine years after the Wall fell, while souvenir sellers hawked old Soviet and DDR era army hats and badges. It used to be at the very real and dangerous dividing line between two worlds. I was planning to see more of the old Berlin Wall locations on this trip, inspired by Detlef Surrey’s presentation on his book (which I now have) and the stories he told about his younger life living next to the Wall. The Brandenburger Tor was built in 1791 during the height of the Kingdom of Prussia. Since the Wall fell it has been a symbol of German and European peace and unity. I stood in Pariser Platz, tourists all around taking photos, a man on a platform talking about something or other political, tour guides (‘Tor’ guides?) pointing out the window at the nearby Hotel Adlon where Michael Jackson once dangled his baby (remember that?), and I sketched the gate and the people milling about. I always feel a little awkward sketching columns, I have always felt that life is too short to draw columns, but I just don’t like drawing straight lines. When I was done admiring it all, I walked through the gate and into what used to be called West Berlin.

I had to sketch it again from the other side. I have a photo of me from that trip back in 1998 looking young and skinny, standing with this view in the background. there’s the picture below, along with another of the young me sitting where the Wall once stood (with the sort of look on my face that you see in YouTube thumbnails with clickbait headlines like “Berlin: Was It Bad?”). The view has not changed that much really, though my poor eyesight and short memory led to me write ‘Hotel Adler’ above the Hotel Adlon. There’s the Fernsehturm, finding a way to get into every sketch. Traffic rushed by this busy junction, and the massive Tiergarten park loomed behind me full of trees and joggers. I had thought about getting up in the morning and having a run through the Tiergarten, but decided against it. It’s really big.

So I walked down Ebertstraße towards Potsdamer Platz, following the line of the old Wall, but first I was going to visit somewhere which was both moving and chilling, the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, also known as the Holocaust Memorial. Berlin does not turn its face away from the dark past, and the location of this huge memorial space is significant, nearby the Reichstag, on an area which used to be part of the infamous Death Strip inside the Berlin Wall, and close to where Hitler’s bunker was located. The memorial looks like a filed of smooth grey concrete blocks all lined up in symmetrical rows, appearing to move up and down as the ground level gets deeper and the slabs get taller. It resembles a graveyard, a colourless crop field, a grey grid system city that feels like a labyrinth; the designer Peter Eisenman left it open to interpretation. As you enter the monument the concrete blocks are short, resembling tombs, and children jump from one to the other, though they are not supposed to. The further you walk down each corridor, the taller the blocks get until they tower above you and everything feels…cold. There are people around, but you feel isolated. You might see them pass by ahead or behind, quickly in and out of view (reminding me of that scene in Yellow Submarine), leaving you along again. The rows may be meant to put you in mind of the lines of Jews being led into the camps or onto the transports, and you feel trapped inside this grey world seeing the sky above that can’t be reached. I felt a bit scared in there, not that anything would happen to me, but that the feeling of isolation descended so fast. It is not a labyrinth, every path is a way out, but it was easy to feel suddenly lost. It was sunny when I emerged and I needed a rest. I sketched the Memorial, with the green Tiergarten away to the left, the glass dome of the Reichstag and the solid block of the U.S. Embassy in the background.

It was a longer walk than expected to get to Potsdamer Platz; perhaps I was just tired. The day was already getting away from me, and I hadn’t eaten lunch. The last time I was in Potsdamer Platz it was just a building site, the biggest in Europe, but now it was all big modern buildings and infrastructure. The train station was complicated; you had to go back outside the find the U-Bahn, I decided to go back to the hotel for a rest before I did any more exploring. That was a lot of history for a small area.

Back To Berlin

March 16, 20262 Comments

Ok, a month of not posting (I went to England) but let’s get back to last summer before this summer comes around. After Poland, I spent a few days in Berlin, a city long on my go-to-and-sketch list (a list that includes all of the cities, but some are nearer the top than others, like Berlin). I was last there in 1998, which may as well have been in a different century. Which it turns out it was. I was staying in Mitte, in a hotel not far from Alexanderplatz, a good central location to explore from, but in the heart of the old East Berlin. This was a changed city from the last time I was there, but so am I. I arrived by crowded train from Poznan, which was headed for the Hauptbahnhof (a station that wasn’t even there in 1998) but ended up diverting to a different station at the last minute, confusingly. It was all good in the end. I got to my hotel, and then met up with fellow Urban Sketcher Omar Jaramillo, who has lived in Berlin for many years now. He showed me around on an extensive walking tour of the city centre, giving me all the histories and showing me all the details that I might have missed on my own. That was really great, and a nice introduction to the city before my sketching adventure (plus Omar’s awesome and I’ve been a big fan of his art since the first days of USk). I didn’t sketch him though! The first sketch I did of Berlin was the one above, of the massive Fernsehturm. The iconic TV Tower which can be seen from all over Berlin, a real Ost-Berlin landmark. I didn’t go up this time. I thought about it. I did go up in 1998, and there was a revolving restaurant up there. I love big telecommunications towers. I drew the BT Tower while I was in London as well. In the foreground there is St.Marienkirche. I stood out on Karl-Liebknechtstrasse as it was getting dark and looked up. Birds were circling the steeple. I had to remind them this was not a 1970s art film. When I was done I went to a small restaurant near the hotel and ate some spaetzle (which was not very good) and had a beer (which was also not good). Ah well, can’t win them all.

I got up and it was Monday. I had two entire full days on my own just to wander the whole of Berlin sketching what I can. I had a rough idea of where I wanted to go, but all the best Berlin stories start with a meeting under the big World Time Clock, Die Weltzeituhr, at Alexanderplatz. I wasn’t meeting anyone but myself on this day, and I was late, so while I waited I sketched. Those yellow streetcars hummed along dodging stray pedestrians, and the base of the Fernsehturm can be seen behind the big arch of Alexanderplatz station. I love this sketch. It was not that early in the morning, and the sky was threatening some light rain, but people were out and about and the city moved around me. I didn’t see any people meeting underneath the clock, unless they were spies, in which case good job lads, I never noticed you. I probably wouldn’t have been a good Cold War spy, I’m too obvious standing there with my sketchbook, or maybe that’s the most genius spy design. Anyway before we start my journey through Berlin, here are some other Berlin things I drew that I though I should share here.

If you have been to Berlin you will recognize these, the Ampelmännchen, which were the old East German street crossing lights that have become a big symbol of Berlin. You can’t move for tourist tack featuring the green Ampelmann in his hat and the red Ampelmann with his arms outstretched. And I couldn’t get enough of it, I bought the lot, even got Ampelmann socks, candies, stickers, one of those plastic reflective things you put on your bike, I loved them. When I did that 1998 trip I took notice of these, and the street-crossing signs, in many of the countries I visited, and drew them in my journal. Seeing these everywhere reminded me of that obsession. I don’t care, I love street furniture. Speaking of which, below is a fire hydrant from Alexanderplatz. Like London these are mostly underground and have to be brought up.

And finally, a sketch of the Fernsehturm that I did the next morning while looking out of my hotel bedroom. I stayed at the Lux on Rosa-Luxemburgstrasse, nice hotel but very slow elevators, especially when I need the loo. It was a lot sunnier that day and I ate breakfast in my room and played my blue ukulele a bit while watching the city. I sketched, and made the decision to add a little paint, golden yellow and turquoise blue, but unfortunately it was on that horrible new Moleskine paper and didn’t have the effect I was after. Still, I had a nice time drawing it. See you in the next post…

wir sind die meister, mein freund

April 1, 2011April 1, 20111 Comment

Weihenstephaner (literally ‘Holy Steve’) is one of my preferred Bavarian beers. About six years ago my wife and I visited Bavaria and drove around (well, my wife drove, while I spoke German and made old ladies giggle), and I loved all the local Bavarian beers. Every town we visited sold it own local beer, brewed locally, with very few big commercial beers available, for which I was very grateful. I remember I had one particularly nice beer in Schliersee, with one of the nicest roast duck meals I’ve ever had. One brewery we visited was on the outskirts of Munich, calling itself the oldest brewery in the world: Weihenstephaner. It’s at an abbey, and they have been brewing beer since the 8th century, though their brewery founding date is officially in the 11th century. On that day I tried a ‘Kristallweiss’ beer, and that’s what I had last night when I sketched this.

My reasons for wanting to visit the brewery back then were linguistic: I had recently written an essay for my Master’s (one of my courses was in Germanic Philology) based largely around the competing influence of both Anglo-Saxon and Gothic on Old High German, focusing on the words for holy, ‘heilig’ and ‘weih’, the latter being from the Gothic. If you’re interested, the Anglo-Saxon influence won the day for the most part (not surprising as the German patron saint, St.Boniface, was English), but I wanted to go somewhere which still used the Gothic word. I was a big Wulfila reader back then.

Anyway, a new shop opened in Davis recently, the ‘Davis Beer Shoppe’ (quite why it needs the ‘pe’ at the end of ‘shop’ is unclear) and I was pleased to see that they had my favourite Weihenstephaner beer. I still have some Hefe glasses from Bavaria (this one in fact was given to us by a talkative lady called Hildi, the now sadly passed friend of my wife’s German grandmother, in her home town of Ingolstadt. That day, I learnt a lot about the Bavarian language!).

While drinking this beer, I noticed something. The Hefe glass reminded me very much like the World Cup, which probably explains why Germans are so accustomed to lifting it. Interestingly enough, after a few of these, one tends to come over all Klinsmann and start falling over easily…

überlingen am bodensee

October 20, 2008October 20, 20085 Comments

Überlingen am Bodensee. I came here in 1996 to stay for a year, but liked it so much I stayed for nearly a month. That was a funny episode in my life. Whatever possessed me to up sticks and suddenly move to Germany? Where I knew nobody, with practically no money nor idea of what I was doing, going off to save the world I think it was. I’d always wanted to live in Germany. I had gone to work with mentally disabled children at the local Heimsonderschule, several miles out of town (on my one day off a week I’d hike or hitch into town, look around the record shop and the bookstore – I love German bookstores – then trudge back again). For one reason or other I decided it was the wrong move, though, and trudged back to England.

I no longer recall that much about Überlingen; I did revisit briefly in 1998 while on my five-week tour of Europe, and took the photo from which I drew this picture, but didn’t stay long. It also made headlines after two passenger planes collided ouside the town, a few years ago. I have been to Bodensee (or Lake Constance, on the Swiss/Austrian/German border) several times, first of all when I was 15, on a school work experience trip to Vorarlberg. “Schnupperlehre”, I think the experience was called.

I do remember hitching into town, though. The walk was pleasant enough, going past pear orchards and rolling sunflower meadows, but long; a lift would be nice. I often hitchhiked while strawberry picking in Denmark – pretty much everybody I knew there did, not just into town or back to the farm, but often across Europe. I was told one trick of hitchhiking, to stand nearby to where a car has broken down. They may just be waiting for the AA to show up, but you’re more likely to get offered a lift by some kind passing audi. When it’s raining, you’re happy for such advice, even if you feel a little guilty about it. But local people would always offer to give you a ride: the first evening I arrived in Überlingen, I was checking out the map at the station as the sky grew ever darker, when a family asked if I needed a lift to wherever I needed to go. Oh, no that’s ok, danke, ich gehe zu Fuss. “Nein, nein, es ist zu weit!” they insisted, laughing hearty German laughs (after discovering how far it was and how dark the countryside was at night, I bashfully agreed). They even invited me to dinner at their house the following week (I regret not going). It seems so long ago. The idea of hitchhiking anywhere now seems so mental to me, perhaps it’s living in America where, and I thank you media, hitchhiking equals certain death possibly involving machetes and being buried in the desert.