Just a couple of hours driving north of Berlin and you’re into the vacation area of the Baltic beaches. Once out of the northern suburbs of Berlin the landscape quickly changes to a surprisingly pleasant, green countryside with lots of lakes and forests.
And in a nice change from most places in Europe in July, these beaches are delightfully uncrowded:

Unlike the concrete and steel jungle of Berlin, the towns and villages in this area are far more traditional, with thatch roof houses still fairly common.

Since typical East Germans couldn’t travel west, and most couldn’t afford to travel very far south to other communist countries even if they were allowed to, family vacations typically meant coming here to the Baltic.
It’s quite a nice place, actually, and for some reason it seems no one else wants to come here. Traffic is quite light, and cars with foreign plates are all but non-existent, even though Poland is very close and there’s ferry service to Scandinavia.
I’d have to guess East Germany acquired a poor reputation for welcoming foreign tourists and hasn’t managed to correct it yet. I’m not sure it’s deserved any longer as I found the east German Baltic coast a pretty agreeable place to visit, and a welcome relief from the crushing crowds almost everywhere else in Europe this time of year.
Of course, it may be the unexploded munitions:

While hiking or cycling on the trails in the area you occasionally encounter a fenced-off area announcing deadly danger, evidently old DDR military bases that haven’t been completely cleared yet. Remnants of the communist era do show up even in the most out of the way places.

Well give Luda a special pardon if I’m ever in the slammer
Better yet put him in office, make me your vice president
Hillary hated on you, so that b^$&%* is irrelevant
…
So get off your ass, black people, it’s time to get out and vote!
Paint the White House black and I’m sure that’s got ’em terrified
McCain don’t belong in ANY chair unless he’s paralyzed
Yeah I said it cause Bush is mentally handicapped
Ball up all of his speeches and I throw em like candy wrap
Cause what you talking I hear nothing even relevant
and you the worst of all 43 presidents
Get out and vote or the end will be near
The world is ready for change because Obama is here!
Cause Obama is here
The world is ready for change because Obama is here!
Mind you, it might secure the voters here …

I last visited Berlin in 1991, when the wall was open but the city was very much two cities. In the west a colourful, modern, hectic western city with all the trappings of a big European city, including foreign tourists and immigrants.
And in the east – a dull, grey, run-down city with few tourists, no immigrants and a population driving awful East German Trabant cars on poorly maintained roads.
Where I stayed was just a few minute walk from Alexanderplatz, near the centre of old East Berlin.

The building above was once the Centrum Warenhaus, what passed for a department store in communist times. Like much of this part of Berlin, it’s been refurbished inside and out and doesn’t show much evidence that it was ever a communist eyesore. Indeed, you can drive back and forth in many parts of Berlin now and not really notice where the wall was. The roads, trains and stations have been brought up to western standards, as have many, many buildings. The typical concrete slab communist buildings can still be found, but many have been demolished and many more have been refurbished into something more livable.
However, a couple of blocks away I found this:

A classic concrete slab building that hasn’t been touched since the collapse of communism. I wondered why this particular building still stood untouched while so many around it have been modernized and repurposed.
It turns out the building holds the Stasi archives, which are still being preserved.
Another interesting note – two major streets that intersect Alexanderplatz are named after Karl Marx, and Karl Liebknecht, a founder of the German Communist Party. I found this a little shocking at first, especially at such a prominent location, but these communist era names still exist all over the former East Germany. It’s common to see a Marx-Engels Platz, Lenin street, and even a German-Soviet Friendship street, which surprising still exist even though the Soviet Union no longer does. I expected such things would have been renamed by now, but it appears the locals are happy to keep them.

People of the world – look at Berlin!

And so I did.
Actually I was on vacation in Germany before the Messiah arrived in Berlin for his speech. If you think the media here are infatuated with Obama you can not imagine the nauseating, fawning coverage he received over there.
I was in Berlin up until a few days before the Celebrity Himself arrived and had to suffer through the breathless anticipation of his arrival. How the media can fill so many pages and so many hours of coverage when they have nothing of substance to actually report is indeed remarkable.
Fortunately, I had already planned to move on to a beach on the Baltic coast by the time Obama arrived and so I was able to enjoy my vacation anyway.
But even out in the boonies enjoying a morning coffee and skimming the local regional paper I had to put up with daily dose of headlines like Obama Superstar and Berlin in Obama-fever. And this in a local paper that more typically carries local interest stories like describing how the recent weather has been affecting the population of wasps and rats. (It’s been too good for them, apparently.)
I just got back from Germany and since Kate’s away anyway I’ll post of few thoughts and pics from the trip. I spent about three weeks in Germany and drove about 3000kms – and most of it happened to be in the formerly Communist east. I don’t intend to bore you with an exhaustive travelogue – I’ll just post some thoughts and observations that touch on some of the themes frequently covered here.
First observation – a steady diet of schnitzels, wurst and strudels washed down with copious quantities of beer is not at all an effective weight control program.

In it’s Q2 financial report, the world’s number one water-wings maker, said today that IPCC orders for water-wings are down:

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh’s landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.
Maminul Haque Sarker, head of the department at the government-owned centre that looks at boundary changes, told AFP sediment which travelled down the big Himalayan rivers — the Ganges and the Brahmaputra — had caused the landmass to increase.

In the meantime, green-industry analysts have found a new source for ice cubes, which they claim may help ease the burden of Bangladeshis as they adapt to climate change:

A fortnight ago a Norwegian research ship, Lance, and a Swedish ship, MV Stockholm, got stuck in the ice in the area and needed to be freed by the Norwegian Coast Guard.
While one ice floe does not amount to a mini-ice age, the dramatic evidence runs counter to the mantra of the climate warming cult which has claimed the Arctic is becoming progressively free of ice.

Other sources confirm that the supply of ice cubes for Bangladeshis may in fact, not be as limited as earlier thought … click.