Spring Break 2006: My Trip to Germany

Spring Break 2006 was totally different from Spring Break 2005. Last year, the whole spring break was spent working on a paper submission for the SOSP 2005 conference. It was just work and nothing else. This time, it was everything but work. I spent almost the whole of my spring break in Germany. It was not all vacation. At least, it wasn't supposed to be. I attended a seminar on Peer to Peer Systems in Dagstuhl, located 3 hours from Frankfurt from March 26 to March 29. After that I was officially on vacation, exploring Berlin.

It's 1:00 am, April 1. I am now sitting in my hotel room in Berlin, trying not to fall asleep. I am taking a bullet train from Berlin to Frankfurt at 5:30 am. If I sleep now, I may not wake up on time. My flight to the US leaves Frankfurt at 1:45 pm. If I miss the train, I am in big trouble because my Schengen VISA expires today. So, I better not fall asleep. So here I am writing up a small travel diary. This is my first attempt at creating a compact photo summary of my trip. Usually, I just dump all the 100s of photos as it is (http://danjo.cs.berkeley.edu/photos/2006/germany).

I left SFO on Friday, March 24th morning to Frankfurt via Atlanta. I reached Frankfurt on Saturday morning. I took the ICE (bullet train) to Stuttgart from where Stefan, a friend of mine who was a visiting student at Berkeley last semester, picked me up and we drove to the University of Tuebingen. Tuebingen is a nice old town. This picture would have looked much prettier if it hadn't been raining.

Tuebingen being a university town without much industry was not bombed during World War II. So the old buildings of the city are still intact. This Stefan and me outside the Tuebingen city hall.

Tuebingen is quite an ancient city. This is the photo of a midieval castle. Behind me is the tower and a mini moat. It was raining. So we didn't stay for a long time.

The Tuebingen castle was built on top of the hill. This is a view of the Tuebingen city from the top of the hill. A lot of the buildings you see here belong to the university. It looks very crowded. My friend Klaus, a faculty member at the university and former visitor researcher at Berkeley, told me that the rents here are very high. It reminded me of Berkeley - hilly and expensive :-).

This is the Dagstuhl castle or Schloss Dagstuhl. Schloss means castle in German and Germany is full of Schlosses. There is a lot of history behind the castle (www.dagstuhl.de). Now it serves as a computer science conference center. Seminars take place here round the year. The P2P seminar I attended was one such Dagstuhl Seminar.

This is the new conference center adjacent to the castle. An air bridge connects the old castle to the conference center. The conference center houses many CS libraries, conference halls and guest rooms. The old castle has guest rooms, dining rooms, conference rooms, music rooms, a wine cellar and many other rooms I didn't get time to explore.

Trier is the oldest city in Germany. It was founded more than 2000 years ago. It is located around 65 km from Dagstuhl. The seminar participants went on a group tour of the city on Tuesday evening. Olaf (a student at the University of Tuebingen) and I are standing in front of an ancient Roman wall. Our tour guide claimed that there is no wall as old as this even in Italy!

However old the city is, whereever you are in the world, you can always find a McDonalds! Look carefully at the second floor windows of this building in the Trier market for the ubiquitous golden arches.

The tour guide showing photograph of the cloak of Jesus which was auctioned by the Roman guards before crucifixtion. The cloak was brought to the city by Catherine the Great (if I remember right). It was last on public display in 1995.

This is the Bishop's cathedral of Trier. It was built and rebuilt many a time, each time on the ruins of what was previously there.

Andrei Gurtov from Helsinki Institute of Technology and Prof. D Anthony Joseph from UC Berkeley standing in front of the Bishop's cathedral. People always mix up Prof. Anthony and me. It has happened at prior retreats. It happened here again, but we were on the lookout. Look at the coincidence. Prof. D Anthony Joseph and Dilip Antony Joseph both end up in the same university and both work in the field of computer networking. I hope people attribute some of Prof. Anthony's research papers to me :-).

We all had dinner in a fancy restaurant in Trier. Food was good but very expensive. I have realized that food in the sit down restaurants is very expensive in Germany. The takeout places are cheap. I also made it a point not to go to places like Burger King and McDonalds. My main source of nutrition during the trip were traditional German bakeries - inexpensive and tasty food. Sitting beside me on the table is Klaus. I am eating chicken fillet (There was some fancy german name I can't remember).

Dagstuhl is kind of situated in the middle of nowhere. Dagstuhl is surrounded by meadows, hills and streams. It wasn't yet spring. So the beauty of nature was not at its peak. But it was still beautiful. This is a picture of a small stream that flows beside the new building of Schloss Dagstuhl.

The old castle shown in the earlier pictures was not the oldest one. There was an older Dagstuhl castle which is now in ruins. The ruins are situated on the hill behind the current castle. After the seminar was over, I still had a few hours to kill before my taxi to St. Wendel railway station arrived. So I checked out the ruins. This picture was of the current day castle and conference hall was taken from the top of the hill.

These are the ruins of the old castle. This is an older castle, but it might not be the oldest. Europe seems to have the tradition of rebuilding buildings in their original form at the same site, over the ruins of the existing buildings. There were some archaelogists working here.

Group photo with the team at the University of Tuebingen. There is a lot of joint work between Tuebingen and Berkeley, especially in the OCALA project I am working on. From left to right: Stefan, Simon, Klaus, Dilip, Olaf. We are standing in front of the old castle.

After the group photograph, it was time for me to leave. I took a taxi to St. Wendel, the nearest railway station. From St. Wendel, I caught a Regional Express train to Frankfurt. I was on my way to Berlin. The train passed through some amazing terrain on the way to Frankfurt. This picture is just one glimpse of the breath-taking scenery that zoomed by the train window.

From Frankfurt, I took an ICE to Berlin. Berlin was diagonally across Germany. The ride took around 5 hours and I reached Berlin Zoological Garden station at 0023 on Thursday. It was a bit scary at first - alone in a big city for the first time. Fortunately everything went well. I got a subway train to my hotel Algon Aldea which was 3 blocks away. In the morning, I started exploring Berlin, starting again from the Zoological Garden station, where I had arrived the previous night. This monument stares right at you as you step out of the station. It is a church which was bombed during WW2. It has been left unrepaired right in the center of the city as a constant reminder of the horrors of war.

I bought a Berlin map from the train station. I had no clue where to go, what to do. Instead of arbitrarily wondering around, I decided to go to Potsdam to see the castles there. Someone at the seminar had told me that there was a Cinderella like palace in Potsdam. So I hopped on an S-Bahn (the local trains that run above ground) and rode 45 minutes to Potsdam. I didn't find any Cinderella like castles in Potsdam. Instead there were many more palaces like Schloss Sans Souci shown in this picture.

This wind mill was right next to Schloss Sans Souci. I had never before seen a real wind mill. Unfortunately, I couldn't go inside it.

This is a closer view of Schloss Sans Souci, this time from the back of the palace.

Another of the palaces in Potsdam. This is the Neuis Palais. It is within the Potsdam University complex. I didn't go in as I was not interested in museums. Besides, the whole trip was getting quite boring. I was just seeing palaces after palaces. And, I was alone. There was no one even to talk to; no one to take photographs of; no one to be photographed by ..

This is another of the impressive buildings in Potsdam. This is probably the Potsdam University Library.

I didn't hang around a lot in Potsdam. There was nothing to see except more palaces and museums. It had also begun to rain. So I took the S-Bahn back to Berlin. My next stop was Brandenburg gate. The Brandenburg gate is one of the most recognized symbols of Berlin. It has seen a lot of bullets, bombs and history. Surprisingly, it is still standing and is a favourite tourist attraction. It was still raining when I got to Brandenburg gate.

Just beside the Brandenburg gate is the Reichstag, the seat of the German Parliament. This building was also heavily bombed during WW2. In fact, there were hardly any buildings left in Berlin at the end of WW2.

The facade of the Reichstag. It is a very big building. Had to go very far out into the lawn to fit the full building into the camera frame.

I am standing on the terrace of the Reichstag. Behind me is the new glass dome. No prizes for guessing what happened to the old dome. Tourists can walk up to the top of the dome through a spiralling walkway. We get a great view of Berlin city from the top of the dome.

This is the glass structure inside the Reichstag dome. If you look down, you can see the parliament in session. This transparency was to symbolize the transparency of the government - Germans can literally keep a watch on their government.

Haagen Dazs is my favourite icecream in the US. I was overjoyed to find Haagen Dazs cafes all over Berlin. I had spent a lot of Euros here. This cafe was one of the starting locations of the guided walking tour of Berlin I took on Friday. The guided tour was pretty inexpensive - just 10 euros. I think it is the best way to get a feel of the city. You get to see all the important places in one go. You don't spend a lot of time at each place. But the idea is to come back later for it, which I did after the tour.

This is the Berlin TV tower. It was built by the Soviets in East Berlin to showcase to the west that the east was not behind in technology. I am not sure if the station is currently in use. It the observatory platform on top used to look like a golf ball. Thanks to the upcoming soccer world cup, it now looks like a football.

This was one of the first stops in the guided walking tour. Behind me is Berlin Cathedral. The building was destroyed in WW2. What we see behind is a reconstruction. Most of the buildings in Berlin are reconstructions, except monuments like the Brandenburg gate. The original buildings will be ridden with bullet and sharpnel holes. The river in the background is the river Spree. Across the bridge is Museum Island, a naturally occurring island in the middle of the river. True to its name, the island is just filled with museums alone.

One of the main museums of Berlin. This one is world famous because it houses the bust of Nefertiti.

The Berlin Cathedral. This is a protestant church. Berlin is mainly a Protestant city. There are just 4-5 Catholic churches here.

The Catholic Cathedral at BabelPlatz. This place is directly opposite the Humboldt Univeristy where Albert Einstein taught. BabelPlatz was also the scene of the Nazi book burning.

Humboldt University, directly opposite BabelPlatz. Many of the scholars at the university fled Germany the night the Nazi book burning took place.

The Unter Den Linden Railway station, situated in former East Berlin. This is a fully functional S-bahn railway station today. During the times of the Berlin wall, this station was walled off to prevent East Germans from escaping to West Germany through the West German trains that passed through this station. East German border patrol guards patrolled the station round the clock.

This is the Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin, remembering the 6 million Jewish holocaust victims. Below the ground is a holocaust museum. Strangely, there is no sign about what monument is, above the ground. Nobody knows what the monument symbolizes. The architectect's reply to this question was "Stop asking me that!".

One can walk right through the holocaust memorial. The stones are of uneven heights. The ground is undulating, full of ups and downs. You can get lost in here. But you are sure to make your way out to the street easily. After all, it is just a grid.

The main reason I went to Berlin - to see the Berlin Wall. There is nothing much left of the wall. It is hardly impressive - nothing like the Great Wall of China. But I learned about it in History so long ago that I had to see it. The Berlin Wall is probably the only wall in history that was designed to keep people in rather than to keep invaders out.

This is the biggest single stretch of the wall that exists today. Most of the wall has been chiselled away by souvenior hunters. There is a fence around this small stretch of the wall. You can see here that the wall is made of concrete reinforced with iron bars. The Soviets wanted to make the Wall tank-proof. The wall by itself is not very difficult to jump over. The difficult thing is to reach the wall. There was a very wide 'death-strip' before the wall on the East Berlin side. Anyone spotted in the death-strip would be machined gunned down at sight. So very few people ever made it across the wall alive.

This was one of the many checkpoints along the border between the American and Soviet zones of Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie is famous because this was the only civilian crossing point ever possible. There have been many daring escapes here as well. One Austrian guy slammed the gas on a sports car and ran right past the Soviet guards with his fiancee. The Soviets did not learn the first time. A week later, another guy did exactly the same thing - same car, same reason - reaching the woman he loved.

This is the Opera house on GendarmenMarkt. Berlin oftenhas two of everything - 2 opera houses, 2 orchestras - due to its divided past. This was also the last stop of our guided walking tour. Afterwards, we were left to explore Berlin on our own. I generally walked around. Bought some chocolates and souveniers for friends back in Berkeley.

Potsdamer Platz is one of the most modern part of Berlin. Till the Berlin Wall fell, it was all wasteland, part of the death-strip. Now it has got all the modern buildings, head quarters of all the MNCs, etc.