I am a big fan of street markets and a sucker for nostalgia. When we planned to come up to Hamburg for a weekend from Berlin, Isemarkt popped into my mind immediately. The market part of that urge is understandable. Isemarkt is a long open-air European style market in Hamburg which stretches out between two […]
The TV Tower at Alexanderplatz is one Berlin landmark that you can see from pretty much anywhere in the center of town. Perhaps only the famous green crossing men are more ubiquitous. The tower’s distinctive ball on a stick shape is a symbol for the city as much as the Brandenburger gate is. The Fernsehturm […]
Compared to the US, Germany is fairly small. Despite which the culture and food is very regional. Even just a two hour train from Freiburg to Frankfurt brings you into another region with its own language and specialties. When we came up to check out the Frankfurt Christmas Market, we also got a chance to […]
Baden-Baden is a roman era spa town in the area of Baden in south west Germany. Thousands of years ago the Romans founded it as a set of baths. Baden means baths in German. It has certainly developed a long way since those roots. Much of it was overhauled and rebuilt in the grand styles […]
Art Nouveau is my favorite era of art and architecture. I studied it a summer in Vienna during my college years (not to shabby for an engineering student huh?). Since then I love to look at the detail of Art Nouveau (Jugendstil in Germanic lands). When we were planning our walking tour of Heidelberg a […]
We live in Freiburg, Germany. The Bächle are a unique feature of this Black Forest town. They are small gutters alongside the roads in most of the old town which run with clear water. It is clean enough that kids play in them in the summer. The entire old town has them and they vary […]
Sometimes it doesn’t feel worth it to travel. Heck, sometimes it doesn’t feel worth it to get out of bed, let alone get on a train and go fight through a horde of snap-happy tourists. In the end, everything has good aspects and bad aspects, although it is almost never an even distribution. Sometimes the […]
Heidelberg is a popular tourist town in Germany. It gets several pages in Ali’s Europe guidebook whereas Freiburg only gets one. The castle on the hill in the old town is definitely one of the draws, but we found another castle on a Sunday afternoon that I like better, Tiefburg. Tiefburg (Deep Fortress in German) […]