With Love from London, Berlin and Poznan

Hello Everybody, Joey and I just got back from a work-travel-holiday thing in London, Berlin and Poznan (Poland) and so we thought we would share some of our pictures. You can see a ton of them below, but here are the highlights and a rundown by Anna.

First of all, I was in London taking part in a manual writing sprint about editing video using Free Software. I stayed on the Stubnitz, a former shipping vessel made in 1960’s East Germany. The Ship was pretty amazing on its own, but the contrast with the area where it was docked, Canary Wharf, was stunning! Here are my two favourite pictures of the outside of the ship.

The Ship and The City
The Ship and The City
Algorave

The trip was lots of hard work, and we wrote what promises to be a really great manual (my chapters are on Kdenlive) and we had a lot of fun too. My favorite fun part was the Algorave on Friday night, which was on down in the ships cargo hold / night club. All in all, The Stubnitz is amazing, but its only in the UK for a few more weeks now. There will be an Algorave on the last night, so well worth a trip down there if you can make it!

Anyway, I got back from London at about 1.30 am on the Sunday morning and by 2pm the same day Joe and I were off to the airport to go to Berlin. Anna had some meetings to attend in the FSFE offices, so we decided to make a holiday out of it.

The dog who gets paid for being adored!

Berlin is an amazing city, there so much light and space (and lots of Vegan food) and we had a really good time. We went on a bus tour and also did some sightseeing “by feet” (as my German friends would say). We met a dog who got paid for being fussed (left) and saw some stunning buildings. We also found out that while most of the buildings look quite old, actually, many of them were rebuilt after the war right through to the 1980’s and 90’s.

Bullet Holes in a statue

Even today, buildings are being rebuilt to their original designs. We also saw, once prompted, that there are still many signs of WW2 in Berlin today, particularly bullet holes in buildings and statues. The Statue (right) is next to The Brandenburg Gate, and he lost something kinda essential that way… lost his privates… poor chap!

We also visited the Holocaust Memorial near The Brandenburg Gate. It was a very strange place, an odd mix of stillness and noise, big silent stones, light and shadow mixed with locals picnicking in the sun and American tourists in socks and sandals. The contrast between the abstract calm and the mundane busy is amplified by the sudden changes from one to the other: because of all the corners, you can be suddenly alone and then suddenly surrounded by people again. It wasn’t at all the deeply contemplative place I have imagined. Below is my favorite photo of the Memorial, it’s totally deserted except for the foot of someone just about to walk into shot.  I like it so much because it made me realise that the battle between irritation and contemplation which the memorial creates is very much part of the artwork, and has lots of lessons to teach us.

Anna's favorite photo of The Holocaust Memorial

Anyway, Joey and I love Berlin and can’t wait to visit again. However, we decided to squeeze a few days in Poland into our trip before we headed home!

We chose to visit Poznan because it was the closest big city to Berlin. While it is mostly industrial, we found it was really beautiful and interesting. Like Berlin, large parts of the city that look to be old are actually rebuilt. This area of the old town was totally leveled in the war, but it has been re-made beautifully, with modern designs but old materials.

Restored buildings in Poznan

We really liked the attitude of the Polish, for example, the tourist shops sold quite a lot of handmade things, paintings, pottery and sculptures, for example, rather than just standard souvenir stuff. And also, many of the people in the countryside build their own houses – and they build them just the way they like them. So, in any given hamlet there can be houses with totally different styles from different countries and eras all in a row – it was really fascinating to see. We found some really amazing things in Poznan too – for example, we went to look at the cathedral, and it turned out to be the birthplace of Christianity in Poland. We saw a kind of font there, a large stone basin, dated around the year 900 AD! It was really beautiful and probably one of the oldest spiritual artifacts I have ever seen.

Font - from 900 ad

We also saw a clock on the town hall which has two wooden goats that come out at midday and have a fight, that was pretty cool, and we had yummy pizza and beer in a pub that had saddles instead of bar-stools!

We really did have a wonderful trip, but it was totally exhausting! We are just going to go camping for the next few holidays, keep things nice and simple 😉 Anyway – for now, farewell from London, Berlin and Poznan!

Joey and Anna on the way home

Enjoy the rest of the photos!

Love from

Anna & Joey

Ethical Pets

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