On the Road: Berlin and Utrecht

Foreign.

Welcome to the Fromer Travel show.

Coming to you this week from Utrecht.

I'm actually in Europe recording this, and since I wanted to have it all fresh in my mind, I asked Jason to come online to have a conversation with me.

You know Jason, he is Jason Cochran, the editor in chief of fromers.com World Traveler, bon vivant, excellent writer.

Hey, Jason, thank you so much for coming on and talking to me.

Oh, no.

The bon vivant description.

Now the pressure is really on for the clever lines.

Yes.

I want bon motes.

I want them just to flow.

Let me get my champagne before we begin.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

So I am traveling through Europe right now.

And just for listeners to this podcast, you'll be hearing this about a week after I come home.

But I'm traveling to Europe right now to be a groupie.

My daughter Veronica, my older daughter, I have two.

She is the lead singer of a band called Melt.

And you know her work if you listen to this podcast because you hear her singing at the end of the podcast.

That was her first hit, a song called Sour Candy that now has nearly 15 million streams on Spotify.

So she and her bandmates, the band is called Melt, they are traveling through Europe, and I couldn't resist.

I'm here to see a couple of their shows.

Play hooky.

Being a tourist, probably hopefully find some things to write about.

And I went to a place I've never been before and have always wanted to go, which was Berlin.

Jason, can you believe I've never been to Berlin?

Yeah.

Actually, when you told me that was your first time in Berlin, I was shocked.

Shocked because you're so well traveled, because Berlin figures largely in your family history.

So I find it fascinating that you're there for the first time.

What.

What did you think of it?

In general?

But I do want to hear specifics.

Yeah.

Before we leave, that my family history.

Absolutely.

For those of you who know about how the Farmer Guides was founded, my dad was drafted into the army to fight in the Korean War because he was a language whiz.

He spoke Russian and German, and so he got sent to Berlin, and that was the beginning of his travel writing life.

And so the other day, I was looking for an ATM machine in Berlin, and I got directions, actually.

Not an ATM machine.

A place to change money.

And I was wandering through the teeter garden, and then suddenly in front of me, there it was, the Brandenburg Gate.

And there's a famous, famous in my family photo of my father standing in military costume in front of the Brandenburg Gate with a serious look on his face.

And it was very moving to be there, to be in his footsteps in.

In those ways.

And it's the Berlin that.

That he went to, so different from the Berlin that exists now.

In fact, it was even before the wall went up the first time he was there.

So the idea that the Brendan Brigade is still there through all of these changes to remind you of him, I think is pretty special.

Well, yes, the Brandenburg Wall has had a lot of changes.

I mean, I think it was Napoleon who stole the statue that was atop it.

And then when.

When the Germans beat the French in.

Not in World War I or two in a previous war, they were able to get that back.

So it's become a real symbol of the city.

The city itself is so vibrant and yet in certain ways, so ugly.

It's a gritty, gritty city.

And when you're wandering around and you notice that the wall is pockmarked, that's because you are looking at bullet holes, you are looking at mortar holes in the walls of the building.

Because this was a city where there was block by block fighting at the end of World War II, and because they needed to de Nazify that country, a lot of those remaining buildings and a lot was just rubble, which is why it's kind of ugly now, because it's so many new buildings.

But those buildings that survived, they purposefully kept them with those scars of the war, which makes it a really very moving place to wander around when you realize you're seeing history in stone and plaster.

I mean, kind of amazing.

Yeah.

And the city's been very good about wiping away things that needed wiping away, but also about reclaiming some of the other old buildings they didn't want to lose Brandenburg tor being one of them.

But you went.

You went to a couple buildings that had been reclaimed, and one of them was the Reichstag, right?

Yes.

Yes.

I was worried I wouldn't get to see the Reichstag because I was really bad about planning for this trip.

And I didn't make my reservations for far enough ahead to get a reservation there.

But I realized if you just walk up, you may have to come back.

I walked up and I got reservations for the next day because the security is so high.

You really have to have your passport with you.

They won't take other types of id.

And you go through these kind of airlocked chambers twice before you get to go up there.

I mean, you have to remember the Reichstag was the building that in certain ways, helped solidify the power of the Nazis, they created a fire in that building to create then a state of emergency.

And so you go up to the top and you see this incredible dome that was built by Norman Foster, a famous architect atop the Reichstag.

It's meant to mirror another famous dome in the city of a church.

But what I kind of loved about it was it really speaks to the ethos of modern day Berlin in that you can look down into the parliament because they want their democracy to be incredibly transparent nowadays.

They think that that's really important.

And also this is an incredibly green country.

So I took the headphone tour and they're telling you about how water comes into the dome at the top, trickles down through funnel and helps cool and heat the building.

And they also have this series of mirrors that go.

The dome is this incredible massive steel and glass dome with this mirrored column in the middle.

And the mirrors aren't there just for beauty's sake.

They also help make the dome and the building almost, I think, carbon neutral.

So, wow.

Good on you, Berlin.

Have you seen it, Jason?

Oh, I've been in it, yeah.

It's fantastic.

And you know, the symbol, symbology of the people are allowed to be above the politicians.

That's why there are walkways up in that glass dome that you're talking about, so that the people are always above the servants.

It's interesting, it's noble, you know, it's noble symbolism.

Who knows how these things hold on over time.

But it's a fascinating building because it had been ruined by the fire and it was also quite near all the center of a lot of explosions at the end of the war.

So they really had to rebuild that from scratch to make it what it is today.

Interestingly, I also passed, I took a walking tour, which wasn't as good as it could have been, but we went past the Luftwasse headquarters, which was this two block wide and long building that was the head of the German air.

What is that called?

Not the navy, the German equivalent of the air force, wouldn't it?

German equivalent of the air force.

And it had always been used as a target by our, the Allies bombing.

During bombing raids they would look for it because it was bigger than all the other buildings, but they would start hitting bombs to go when they saw it.

So they'd always be past it.

And so it survived, whereas all the other buildings around it did not.

Also on that walking tour we went of course to Checkpoint Charlie.

We went to the wall, or remnants of the wall that used to stand between east and West Berlin.

And I asked our guide, you know, there were mines in the ground, there were people with guns shooting at folks who tried to come over the wall.

And because of that, not that many people were killed trying to approach the wall and getting shot.

In the 20 plus years it was up, this was.

I don't know why this struck me, but the most people who were killed trying to get over the wall went into apartments, buildings that had the wall right up to the building.

And they threw mattresses out and tried to jump to safety and they kept bouncing off the mattresses and dying.

And then they would brick up another level of the apartment building to stop people from doing this.

But our guide showed us gruesome photos of people throwing their children out onto these mattresses.

And you just have this visceral understanding of what it was like to be suddenly locked up, suddenly have your freedom taken away from you.

That was a really fascinating part of it.

And because I've always been fascinated by East Germany, I went to the DDR Museum, which shows you a typical apartment during East German time.

And one of the displays they had were comic books that the children would have read.

Disney was totally verboten.

You could not see a Donald Duck, you couldn't see Snow White.

But they had these comic books with heroes that kind of looked Disney esque.

Except at the end of the comic book, after their heroic battles, communism would arrive and things would be much better.

And that would be the happy ending in the comic book, which I thought was just hilarious.

And there was a whole.

The people in the east were told that the people in the west were the fascists.

Yes, absolutely.

You know, they believe terrible things about the people in the West.

You learn from this museum and they showed you all the different products they had.

They usually only had one type of coffee, one type of tea, one type of this, one type of that.

And there was a fascinating section about how during the Cold War, East Germans vacationed and one of the things they loved to do was go to nudist areas.

That was really big among East Germans, I guess, because it gave them a sense of freedom.

And so a big part of the museum is just all these nude photos of people on vacation.

Things I didn't expect to see at the DDR museum.

Have you been to that?

Yeah, it's a great museum.

It's really interesting.

Yeah, the different products that they had.

The idea that, you know, Berlin had a metro system and then the wall went up across the middle of the city and so the metro was still running.

And so if you're living in the west and your retro started in the west and it went through the center of the city back to the west, they just bricked up all the metro stations in the East.

So you'd live in the east and hear the metro going underneath your feet, but not be able to get on it to get out.

Wow.

Yeah.

And interestingly, the west was kind of a.

West Berlin was an island within.

It was in the middle of East Germany.

And so for them to go anywhere, they had to fly out today because so many of the factories closed when the Wall came down and east and West Germany were reunited, so many of the factories in East Berlin closed that people lost their jobs, lost their way to make a living, and left those neighborhoods, whereas things in the didn't change that much.

And in West Berlin now, in many areas of it, that's where the slums are.

Because they didn't in East Berlin, because so many people left, they totally remade that part of the city, whereas nobody left West Berlin.

And so these fixes couldn't be made to the same extent after the war.

And you have to remember, a lot of Berlin was in rubble.

And so to me, I thought that was really fascinating, that it's the west part of the city that's now the poorer part anyway.

So, yeah, lots of.

Lots of fascinating historic insights.

And then the museums.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, I think, oh, my goodness.

It may be one of the best cities in the world for museums.

I went to an art museum called the Gamalda Gallery.

I hope I'm pronouncing that right.

And one of the first things you see are Botticellis.

And then there are works by Rembrandt, and then there are works by.

Oh, gosh, just incredible, incredible artists.

One of my favorites was Cranach the Elder.

Lucas Cranach.

He did a copy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting that was lost.

The original Hieronymus Basque painting no longer exists.

Somehow in the shoals of time, it disappeared.

And yet we have his painting that is a copy of it.

And he was such a great artist.

We have this Bosch, and it's extraordinary, and yet it's not a Bosch you've ever seen because it's only the copy of it.

And I'm a big Bosch fan, so I felt like I had seen all of the Bosch paintings when I was a teenager.

For some reason, I would stare at them and feel like I could.

I knew what those people were feeling like in hell.

Cause, you know, I was a teenager and Bosch Spoke to me.

So that museum was extraordinary.

But what was really mind blowing and you told me to go there, was the Neue Museum, which means the new museum.

But it's actually filled with things that are many centuries old.

It's most famous for, for having the bust of Nefertiti.

And in fifth grade I was really obsessed with Nefertiti.

We were studying Egypt and that was my Halloween costume.

So I spent a lot of time studying that bust.

So I had always wanted long, slender.

Neck, not quite symmetrical.

It's so elegant and so beautiful, even though it's what, three or four thousand.

Years old and it looks like it was created yesterday.

It does.

It's great.

She's slender, she's elegant, but she's also clearly an older woman.

There are some lines or around her eyes.

And she's not in her 20s, she's probably in her 30s, which back in those days was old.

And yes, she just is so vibrant and alive.

But what really struck me about that museum is I think they're making a very good case that our understanding of how knowledge moved from community to community or civilization to civilization wasn't quite correct.

I mean, I was taught as a kid there were the Egyptians and they, you know, they were incredible.

Before them, the Sumerians and then the Greeks, then the Romans, then there was this terrible dark period and then the Renaissance rediscovered it all.

They show something called the golden hat, which is one of the many artifacts they show.

And the golden hat is this.

My gosh, it must be 3ft tall.

This thinly gilded hat.

Stamped into it was the math for figuring out how the lunar cycle and the solar cycle intersect and help farmers to know when to plant and also tell early astronomers when an eclipse will happen.

And this is information, this is knowledge that it was thought that the Greeks created.

And yet this hat with these intricate mathematical formulas all over it was around 500 years before the guy who supposedly created these theorems in Greece lived.

And it comes from the European Alps.

And the Neue Museum on the top floor has all of these extraordinary artifacts from Germanic tribes and from central Europe, showing that it was actually quite a civilized and cosmopolitan and very forward looking culture, or many cultures, because they had a lot of warring tribes.

But to think that there was only one center of knowledge and everything got passed cleanly one to the next, it's.

A total lie to why they stamped their knowledge on metal on hats so that it would endure and be able to pass it on, because any other way it may not make it to the next generation who Needed to read it.

Right?

Right.

So, yeah, so Berlin was pretty mind blowing.

I also was there to see my daughter.

She played in a little nightclub called the Cassiopeia Club, which was in this absolutely adorable area of Berlin where everybody was no older than 27.

And there were these incredible kind of clubs made out of old warehouses.

There was one club I peeked in and it was all skateboarders indoors with bars.

So everybody was drinking and skateboarding.

The next club was people doing climbing.

And there was a Christmas market going on outdoors.

And boy, oh boy, did that leave us Christmas markets in the dust.

First of all, they had open flame everywhere.

There were these big torches lighting everything up and giving things an incredible medieval look.

There were entertainers, there were these fire dancers, a lot of fire at this place.

There were little booths where you could try games.

Like my daughter and the guitarist in her band.

They did an archery contest against one another and these tiny little amusement park rides big enough only for children five and under.

And I think the crowd was big and was huge around those rides just because it was so delightful to watch the delight of these toddlers doing this teeny tiny Ferris wheel and these teeny tiny swings that were, you know, flying through the air.

And then of course, the glue.

Wine didn't hurt.

I love Dubai.

So much fun.

That's hot wine.

And so, yeah, that was a.

That was a real surprise.

I didn't know we'd be able to do that.

It's the only disappointment.

I had one good meal.

I went to a place called Cafe Frida, which was absolutely extraordinary, really delicious.

But I don't love the food in Berlin.

You know, I had low, low end food, high end food.

I don't know, is that just me or did I not go to the right places?

I just found it kind of heavy and unsalted.

I think some of the traditional foods are more heavy.

The stuff you'll get at a beer hall or beer garden, for example, tends towards that heavier stuff.

But like any city, you can find all kinds of food if you spend enough time there and know where to go.

The most common junk food they have there, you eat on the street.

It's the currywurst, which is like, it's like the frankfurter slathered with like this sweet curry sauce.

And it's sometimes it's absolutely delicious.

And sometimes you're like, I'll never have another one as long as I live.

It's one of those.

It rides that line for most palates.

Right.

I've had one of those in New York.

And I didn't like it, so I avoided it this time.

Cocktails, though.

I have a good friend named Alan Katz who's a major cocktail expert.

He used to be on Martha Stewart Radio talking cocktails and he owns a distillery in Brooklyn.

And he sent me to a place called the Alchemist Club, where the cocktails with an eye next to them, like an eye with eyelashes, are the ones where it's kind of like a magic trick.

And my cocktail came in what I can only call a bong.

I mean, it looked like I should have been smoking weed through the glass they gave me.

And it kind of filtered up to me with all of this smoke and.

And it was absolutely delicious, like nothing I've had before.

So if you go there, do go to the Alchemist, which is a lot of fun.

So that was the beginning of the trip.

And Melt did great.

They played at Cassiopeia.

People loved their set.

And then the next step was going to Utrecht in the Netherlands.

And Jason, you've never been to Utrecht?

I've never been to Utrecht, no.

So it's in certain ways very much like Amsterdam in that there are canals running through the middle of the city.

But some people think it's more beautiful than Amsterdam because these canals were created in a really different way.

They were dug out.

The city is very near.

Oh, my goodness.

I'm blanking on.

It's that major German river that had been the outside border of the Roman Empire.

Do you know which river I'm discussing?

It will come to me.

So they created these canals basically to use as transportation within the city.

And so next to the canals they had these massive piles of dirt that came from digging out canals.

And so from the dirt, they created these cellars that were part of the houses that lined the canals.

And.

And so unlike in Amsterdam, where you look down into the canal here, you look really down into the canal.

And alongside the canals are these cellars which are now restaurants and bars and clubs.

And so you have this multi level life in Antwerp, which is really kind of stunningly beautiful.

I mean, the gorgeous.

Utrecht.

Sorry, Utrecht.

So the river is the.

I think the Vest, which is a branch of the Rhine, which might have been the German river.

You were thinking of the branch of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I took the train into the city.

You walk towards the medieval core.

And when I was here, suddenly there were all of these adorable children in costume because in the Netherlands, Sinterklaas, his birthday is November 15th or 16th.

And so Sinterklaus, which is our version of Santa Claus, but different than Father Christmas because in the Netherlands, they give their gifts in late November, early December, and then Christmas itself is more of just a family gathering and more about celebrating Jesus Christ.

Whereas they have this Sinterklaus celebration.

And so there were all of these hopped up kids because there are these Sinterklaus figures who toss cookies into crowds of children.

And that sounds.

That sounds funny.

You mean throw cookies, right?

They'll throw up on the children.

Yes, they're throwing.

That would be quite a celebration.

But I don't know.

And the children are all dressed up like Sinter Claus's helpers.

And there were rides and there was music.

And I just walked into town and suddenly I was in the middle of a carnival.

It was really amazing.

You know, people in the tourism world tend to think of the Christmas markets and the Christmas celebrations of Europe as being rather touristy affairs, but both of the ones you've described are very local and very family oriented.

Oh, yeah.

They're really put things that the people who live there use heavily.

Oh, definitely.

We were the only non tourists or we were the only non locals, I should say, at the Christmas fair we went to in Berlin.

I didn't hear anybody else speaking anything but German while we were there.

So.

Yes, absolutely.

And so it was so much fun to be here during that fest.

I also got to run around town, see some of the top sights.

I went to the Spielkloch Museum, which is a museum of mechanical musical instruments.

Machines that were used at dance halls so that orchestras could take a break and they would be fed, you know, those papers with the dots.

What's the word?

The papers with the dots kind of cut out.

So that would tell the machine which was an organ.

Oh, like the punch cards, the perforated.

Push cards, that would tell the machine what instruments to play.

And some of these machines had actual trumpets inside them and snare drums and organs with 50 pipes.

They allow you to see the inside workings of the machine, and they're extraordinary.

It's like a steampunk fantasy, seeing these things in motion.

So that was really fun.

I went to the Catherine Convention, which is a museum of Christian art from many, many centuries, which was appropriate for Utrecht because Utrecht had originally been the city with the most churches in all of the Netherlands.

A lot of them are now museums because you have to remember The Netherlands became Protestant and the churches were built for the Catholics.

So a lot of them fell into disrepair.

When you're in the Dom Square, which is the cathedral, there's a gorgeous tower where there are bells at the top, and then there's this big square, and then there's this kind of squat cathedral.

And so for 150 years, there was just rubble in the very heart of the city before they decided to clear away this destroyed cathedral, put a wall on the part of it that was standing, and create a plaza in between it and the tower that used to be part of the cathedral.

I learned all about this when I went on the under the Dome tour, which is this tour of an archaeological excavation underneath the cathedral.

And they make the point during the tour that this may be the place where you see the longest stretch of history in all of The Netherlands.

Basically 20 centuries of history.

Because this archaeological site starts with the Roman fortress that was once in Antwerp.

Antwerp was founded by the Romans, who needed a strategic place near to the Rhine River.

It had just been a marshy area that various Germanic and Dutch tribes had gone through, but never really had permanent settlements on.

And so you see Roman sites down there, you see parts of the first cathedral.

And the way they do it could have been so hokey, but it was so fun.

They give you what they call a pistol.

I don't know if that was just a weird way to translate it.

I'd call it a flashlight.

But you aim the pistol, you're in this underground area that's filled with rubble.

And in the rubble, they've taken these little transistors, and if you find one, you aim your flashlight at it, and suddenly in your headphone, you're wearing headphones, you hear a story about what you're seeing.

And so you have to kind of search through the rubble with your pistol flashlight to hear these different stories about what you're seeing.

And so it was a hell of a lot of fun.

It was.

That's an interesting idea.

I like that.

Yeah.

No, I thought it was very, very well done.

And you hear about all the different layers of history and at.

They have a movie that recreates the.

It's all around you, and it recreates the storm destroying the cathedral, you know, shattering stained glass windows and parts of the ceiling falling down.

And it was very, very Dramatic.

So that was fun.

And then last night I went to see Melt at one of the most gorgeous performing arts spaces I've ever seen.

It's called the Tivoli Vredenburg and it has nine different concert halls that are filled every night.

They were in the Half Moon Club, which was on the top floor.

Beautiful views over the city through these kind of round windows.

Massive club and it was one of the smallest ones they had.

Luckily they sold it out.

It just was extraordinary to me that Utrecht can support on a Sunday night a club with, you know, nine musical venues in it.

And all of them had artists going and they all had big audiences.

Well, it's a university town, isn't it?

That's true, yes.

I should have said that.

The big thing in Utrecht is 10% of the population is students.

So that makes it a lot of fun to wander around.

I mean, it's, it's very, very lively.

So a beautiful medieval city.

Incredibly lively.

I want to come listening to this.

Thinking Utrecht sounds interesting.

I'd like to go, but I'm going to be in amsterdam.

It's only 18 minutes train ride away from Amsterdam.

Right.

And the trains go about every 10 minutes all day long.

So Utrecht can be part of your Amsterdam trip.

When you're there, it's very easy to do.

And I should say, I mean, Amsterdam is pushing people to go to Utrecht, so it's not untouristy when you are wandering around the gorgeous medieval section, the boutiques you see are Swarovski and Brandy Melville and all of these multinational chains, which is a bit disappointing.

And a lot of the restaurants are serving hamburgers.

So tourism has come to Utrecht.

It won't feel as much like a discovery, but still there are extraordinary museums here.

There's a castle right on the outskirts of the city that's one of the biggest and most beautiful in Europe that I didn't get to go to.

So I do want to come back.

Won't be hard.

Yeah.

So that's it, I guess.

Do you have any questions for me, Jason, about Utrecht?

I'm more curious about Berlin.

You said was kind of younger and scruffier.

Does the youth of Utrecht give it?

Except for the center of town, where the Swarovski and Brandy Melville's are.

Is there any scruffiness at all to Utrecht or are their students much more well behaved than the students of Berlin?

You know, because I was staying in the historic quarter, I didn't get to see the more modern part of Utrecht.

I only saw bits and pieces of it.

So I don't feel like I can answer that.

Well, it didn't feel that scruffy, but I was in the beautifully preserved.

Yeah, a lot of places in Europe now if the old town is the heart of town is the historic part where the tourists always go.

So you're going to have that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm not sure.

I mean, I did see in the distance some really wacky looking contemporary buildings, but I. I don't think it's that scruffy here.

But I.

But I can't say definitively.

So anyway, so go to Utrecht, go to Berlin.

Even though it was.

It's freezing cold here, it still felt like a great trip so far.

And next time I'll talk about Paris and Madrid, which are two other places I'll be going on this trip.

So thank you so much, Jason, for chatting with me.

Looks like you're having a great time.

And I can't wait to hear about the second half of the trip.

Yeah.

All right, that's it for this week's show.

I thank you so much for listening.

And to those who are traveling, may I wish you a hearty bon voyage.

Sour candy on the table Lazy afternoons in your sweatpants watching cable well it feels so far away all the channels seem the same Trying to remember all the songs we like to play.

Cause those lazy afternoons don't come so frequently these days oh it's been so long and I cannot help but wonder Are you ever coming home?

I like you with your sour candy in the boothouse on the lake oh but I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate the way it takes.

I can't get you off of my mind Looking out the window where we spent so much time of our time Cuz I miss the way about.

But.

I guess you can't control those damn cards with dam babe I know the both of us are everyone we're free but would it be so hard to find your freedom here with me?

It's been been so long and I cannot help but wonder Are you ever coming home?

I like you with this hour candy in the boat house.