This is the cleanup post, a post for photos that don’t have anywhere else to go. Or posts I forgot when they would have fit nicely. Sometimes these are the most interesting impressions of the trip.
Weather
If you believe what you read, heat records fell here one after another during the summer. Forests burned, rivers dried up, crops roasted in the field, roads melted, thousands of people died. But high up in the northeast of Germany, temps generally swung between 50F and 75F. Rain determined what you’d do that day.
EES
The new airport digital Entry-Exit System (EES) wasn’t the headache the headlines warned it would be at many European airports. At Munich, it ran pretty smoothly (this was Germany, after all). But during the morning international-arrivals rush, it still took 45 minutes to get in front of an officer at passport control. The face scan and fingerprinting are designed to help reduce the number of people who stay longer than they’re allowed.
Cars
Right. It’s blank. I was going to mention the soaring market share that Chinese electric vehicles have grabbed in car-export-driven Germany, home of Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, etc. It has led to big layoff talk in what’s one of Germany’s backbone industries. VW has announced plans to cut 100,000 workers. But the photo shows how many Chinese cars I found during three weeks of looking as I went by parking lots and along side streets in Potsdam.
Politics
I don’t know what kind of a photo would illustrate this, but I think it deserves a mention. In conversations every day for three weeks, not one German gave me any grief about the U.S. president. In fact, most were openly sympathetic. A common refrain was something like: “You’ve got two and a half more years with that . . . in the White House. Wish you luck. Wish us all luck.”
Belvedere Klausberg
Two-story Belvedere Klausberg in Sanssouci Park was commissioned by Frederick the Great as a “lookout” (“Belvedere” means “beautiful view”). Remember from grade school? Columns around the first floor are Ionic; columns around the second are Corinthian.
Dampfmaschinenhaus
This two-story Gothic building sits on the edge of the Havel River and is the pump house for grounds in Babelsberg Park. Its duty is to keep the sandy hills green, the ponds filled and fountains spraying. The crenellated tower is the chimney. The park was the summer home of the first German emperor.
Alexandrowka
This Russian-style settlement of a dozen wooden houses and a church was built as a memorial to Russian Tsar Alexander I and a commemoration of the Russian-Prussian alliance against Napoleon. The houses are not really log cabins; they’re made of half-round logs so they look like log cabins.
Einstein Tower
The Einstein Tower was built in the early 1920s to measure a light shift predicted by the general theory of relativity. Readings apparently were directionally supportive but ultimately inconclusive. The predicted effect was proved in the 1950s. The tower’s still in use, by the Leibniz Institute as a solar observatory.
Flatow Tower
The 150-foot tower is named for an estate of the king who became the first German emperor. It housed the royal family’s collection of chandeliers, cabinets and glassware. It was designed to fit with the Medieval-Romantic setting around the big Babelsberg palace.
Devil’s Bridge
This 125-foot-high, five-arch stone pedestrian bridge in Sanssouci Park was built to link a pair of royal estates in a single designed landscape. It’s one of several “devil’s bridges” and locals have a better story: The devil helped finance the bridge in exchange for the first soul to cross it. Locals responded by sending a farmyard animal across first.
BER
In 2018, I wrote: “After almost 15 years in planning, more than a decade of construction, half a dozen delays and an estimated $5.75 billion in overruns (on an original budget of $2.3 billion), Berlin Brandenburg now is Berlin’s big airport.”
The airport (BER) was supposed to open in 2011 but didn’t until 2020. So when I was in Berlin in 2018, I was going in and out of Tegel airport and never got to experience BER.
Eight years later, they seem to have the kinks out. BER is big and boisterous. They call the area “Airport City”.
I remember reading that BER had baggage problems in 2020. Belt breakdowns resulted in long waits. But nothing compared to Denver’s baggage problems in the 1990s. BER’s baggage claim worked for me this trip.
And that’s the last post from me about Trip2026. Thanks for reading along. Maybe see you next fall.
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