Darling Dankeschön

Brad' Post

You are no-one until there is a statue of you on a horse. This appears to be a universal theme because no matter where in the world Christine and I have gone, there is always a guy on a horse pointing at something over the horizon (probably towards the nearest pub). Oslo was no exception. They loved their statues and in the extraordinary Vindegarden Park there were over 200 statues of people in everyday poses, all made by the one artist over 20 years (the guy on the horse was outside the royal palace, naturally). Our time in the park was made ever more interesting by a class of 8 year old Norwegian schoolchildren who had been given the task of trying out their English on the unsuspecting foreigners. Their English was, for the most part, flawless, as was their unwavering focus. They asked each of us the same set of 6 questions one after the other. There were 30 of them. There was absolutely no escape. Christine kept changing her answers because she got bored but I stayed true and suffered some sort of identity crisis as a result. Was my name really Brad? was lasagne really my favourite dinner? When you say it so much you begin to doubt yourself. Anyway, we enjoyed our brief time in what is a very picturesque city, before heading to Copenhagen.

The first thing that struck us about Copenhagen was how austere the architecture was. There was none of the creaky little cobblestoned alleyways of Tallinn, or the tree-lined walking malls of Oslo. It was all buildings with plain facades and very little ornamentation one after the other down very wide streets with no trees. The effect was impressively functional but also a little bleak at the same time. We decided to liven up our walk by visiting the famed 'Little Mermaid' statue from the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. Christine had seen it before and warned me it wasn't exactly the statue of liberty, just a tiny little figure on the waters edge. How wrong she was. For after a fairly long walk along that freezing shore we found... a large video screen planted where the little mermaid had been, showing the statue live on camera in its new location at the world expo in Shanghai. Pissed off! It reminded me of the times we used to steal garden gnomes from houses in Canberra and leave polaroids demanding ransom. Must be kismet. I did get the opportunity to see an exhibition of Bob Dylan's paintings (Christine abstained) and then Christine and I tried to wrap our head around a local artist called Norgen Larsen who considered slaughtering a horse on film, 'art'. There are many, many long cold months in Denmark...

Another train ride and we were in Berlin, and I am still trying to get my head around everything we have seen. Christine warned me that the walls would speak, and she wasn't kidding. We took local guided tours on foot and that is the best way to do it. From the Brandenburg gate, past the new Reichstag and along the old path of the Berlin Wall, the place was soaked in history, and most of that soak was blood. The wall was actually two walls, with a corridor in between sown with land-mines. They have kept remnants here and there (of the wall, not the land-mines) as a reminder of what must have been very grim times. Christine actually remembered when the wall was up, having passed through checkpoint charlie into East Berlin last time she was here. Back then, she said, East Berlin had been simply 'grey' - like the colour had been literally sucked from everything. So much has changed.

Our guide for the tour was a young Englishman called Paulo, with an obvious command, and love, of German history. The part that spoke to me most, and captured brilliantly how modern Germany is attempting to deal with its problematic past, is when we paused for a moment in a skungy little car park not far from the Holocaust memorial. The holocaust memorial itself was a quite strange effort to remember Germany's darkest times in WWII with a massive park of differently shaped concrete blocks. Whether it succeeded to appropriately memorialise 6 million murdered people I can't say (Christine thought yes, I thought no - which is a typical reaction, apparently) but the contrast with the car park we were in, said everything about Germany's approach to their war history. For as Paulo explained, 50 metres below us was where Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker during the last days of the war. No plaques, not signs, no nothing. Simply buried beneath the most mundane thing they could think of, a car park, and forgotten. The old entrance to the bunker is a now a children's sandpit. The remainder of the tour echoed this sentiment: Acknowledge the past but then move on. In a similar vein, their memorial to all victims of war had a single German soldier buried alongside a holocaust victim. As Paulo said, controversial, but their mother's would have grieved for them the same.

On a much, much happier note, we spent our second day in Berlin visiting museums. There are 160 of them in Berlin (heaven!) but the three we saw had such wonders as the Ishtar gate from the ancient city of Babylon, a 3,000 year old bust of Queen Nefertiti from Egypt and the remains of a massive Hellenistic period alter from the temple of Pergamon in what is now Turkey. The Germans were heavily into archeological digs around the middle east in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (which Christine and I already knew from the Indiana Jones movies, hah!) and it is amazing what they have left considering the soviets looted everything after WW2. There is very little left of the 'treasure of Priam' that Schliemann found at Troy, but what is there is fascinating and made "The Iliad" a little more real. All in all a fun, but exhausting day. A rest day tomorrow on the train to Prague!