Sun 18 Jan 2004
As I’m sure everyone knows by now, we are leaving Germany at the end of this month. So we decided to spend the last few days discussing the “Best Of” we’ve encountered while living here.
Today, we are going to start with the topic of “Favorite Big City.” For our purposes, we are including anything that wasn’t clearly a village, because that’s going to be a separate topic. There are many cities that we’ve visited to choose from:
Paris, Strasbourg, Colmar, and Dijon in France.
Bruggs in Belgium.
Luxembourg in Luxembourg.
Amsterdam, The Hague, and Gouda in Holland.
Stuttgart, Ludwigsberg, Frankfurt, Munich, Füssen and Nuremburg in Germany.
Salzburg in Austria.
Zürich, Schaffhausen, Basel and Bern in Switzerland.
Florence, Rome, Venice and Naples in Italy.
We’ve spent at least a day in all of these cities, some we spent more than one day and others we have visited more than once.
Of course, just to be difficult, I’m going to pick a city that’s not on the list: Berlin.
I didn’t include Berlin because I visited it by myself after Sandi and the kids went home last July. But I had to make it my first choice because of the immediate sense of history I encountered there.
Many of the cities we visited have a lot of history, but Berlin has been the focus of a a lot of world events in the last 100 years: The rise and fall of the Third Reich, The rise and fall of the Iron Curtain and all of the trauma associated with each, such as the political turmoil, the bombings, the Cold War games between east and west, the Wall and the Reunification.
Berlin still bears the scars of these events, and they are easy to find if you want to see them. But at the same time, Berlin is probably the most lively, modern metropolis I have seen in Europe. It helps, of course, that World War II created a major “urban renewal” and that the communists held a lot of the prime real estate in escrow until the late 1980s.
Because of this, Berlin was my favorite city that I visited, and the one I would most like to return to. I barely scratched the surface.
As a runner up, I would like to give honorable mention to Rome for many of the same reasons as Berlin, although the era of its prominence is much further in the past. It is amazing to see Roman ruins surrounded by apartment buildings filled with people oblivious to the sight because of familiarity. And the Vatican, while not technically part of Rome, is a sight everyone should see regardless of religion.
