Excursion to Berlin

Excursion to Berlin

In Middle of December I visited Berlin for some days. It was shortly before Christmas and shops and streets were decorated festively. Berlin is a very big, noisy, hectic and crude city (3,5 million inhabitants) but in some back courtyards a bit of the Christmas atmosphere could be found in little extraordinary shops. Of course, Berlin has a lot of nice old houses, doors, old quarters, old shops, graveyards and museums etc. which are really beautiful and interesting.  You can see an old bookshop with wonderful wooden fittings in one of my photos.

Maybe you heard about the ambush that happened around middle of December in Berlin. I have been exactly at this place two days before it happened. I was really flabbergasted when I realized that I could have been killed, too.

I also visited the famous Jewish cemetery which is the biggest in all Europe. It was really very worthwhile to see a very different funeral culture. I found a very extraordinary grave with lots of gilded roses out of iron.

Berlin has a lot of little restaurants, coffee shops , pastry shops etc. and they are usually quite cheap, cheaper than in Hamburg, where I live.  I enjoyed some Indian, Greek, Italian and German food. After so many days of walking around in this big city I was happy to leave for my hometown Hamburg.

 

Flowers in macro – dew drops

Dew drops like lustrous tears of a putto

Like delicate diamond necklaces of a fairy

Like my tears on a last rose for the summer that is withering

I’m perishing every autumn like the flowers in my garden

The white veil is making everything so heavy

 

Snow-flowers

Winter Heavens

George Meredith (1888)

Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
It is a night to make the heavens our home
More than the nest where to apace we strive.
Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
The living throb in me, the dead revive.
Your mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,
Life glistens on the river of the death.
It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
Of radiance, the radiance enrings:
And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.

A walk through Hamburg harbor

The old warehouse district of the Hamburg harbor was built from 1883, and the first part was finished in1888. (On one of my photos you can see the number 1888 in dark bricks in an old warehouse)
The goods were brought from the ships with barges to the warehouses and there hoisted by rope winches which are still working up to today. In the warehouses jute sacks containing coffee, teas, cocoa, spices, caoutchouc etc. and carpets were piled. And still today you can find all these goods there.
Since 1991 the old warehouse district of the Hamburg harbor is an UNESCO world cultural heritage site. (Fortunately, they didn’t tear it down as planned some years ago)
On one photo you can see our main church, St. Michael, which has a baroque style and was started to be built in 1647. The other church which is called St. Catharine was mentioned first in 1256 and was constructed in a gothic style.
The modern building you see on another photo is our new philharmonic hall which will be opened in exactly one year. It was erected above the corpus of a former cocoa warehouse. The very modern and innovative glass construction rises up to 110 m. This concert hall of world class will cost us 790 million Euros!!
Up to 2003 our harbor was a duty free port with customs controls.
I have a very close relation to this part of Hamburg. My father was a ship chandler and had an office in one of these old buildings. He supplied all goods needed to the ships of A. Onassis and I have been in the harbor and on the ships quite often.
I have written a little poem about the feelings I had when I went there on 25th of December 2015

The last rays of the winter-sun are turning the windows into brilliant gold
The river is glittering in yellow, a cornucopia of diamonds scattered on the surface
A little purple cloud looking like a forlorn angel is silently drifting away
The cold wind makes a clattering sound in the rigging of an old sailing-ship
Little colorful pennants are fluttering merrily in the air
Veteran ropes are creaking with the rhythm of the little waves
Seagulls cawing harshly are floating above the ship like on strings in the last sunset-colored clouds
Slowly the sun disappears; everything looks like a paper silhouette in front of a salmon dream
The river is getting darker, nearly black, sparkling eerily with moon-silver and stardust
From far away the typhon of a ghost ship ready to leave
A sunset is a goodbye from a day – I leave this place of beauty with contentment in my heart

A walk through Hamburg in wintertime

This time I want to take you for a walk through my hometown Hamburg in wintertime. The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg has nearly 2 million inhabitants and was founded around 808. The ending (Ham)-burg means that there was a castle in its beginning.
Our harbor has an extent of 7200 hectare and has celebrated its 826th birthday this year. Hamburg has 2500 bridges, more than London, Amsterdam and Venice together. It is the greenest city in Europe and has two huge lakes in the center which you can sail with nice old steamboats.
Hamburg is No. 3 in the world for consulates as well as musicals. This is just for your information.
I live at the outskirts of Hamburg, in a wooded area which is a bit rural already and quite calm. I usually go by underground to the center which takes about half an hour. Sometimes I take my little Sony Cybershot with me to make some photos for my blog and then I discover Hamburg myself. I’m astonished and happy to find so many lovely details on old houses which you can find below. You can see a theatre, the monuments of Schiller (a famous German poet, philosopher and historian) and Lessing (another famous German poet), and a wonderful Christmas market close to the town hall, the former main post office, the old revenue board, as well as the “Mona Lisa” in a shop window, a door that leads to nowhere, a merry-go-round, a store sign for a jeweller etc. etc.

Wintertime

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Robert Frost