OT: Berlin Music Festival and other stuff.

[Twinspark]

Didn't do the trip on the bike... but did it in the car. Thought some may be interested.

Before I wibble on with a load of stuff about the holiday - I took a silly amount of photos...

http://flic.kr/s/aHsjJ8HY7b

So, we set out from home for Harwich on Tuesday afternoon last week. We'd planned to go via the M42, to avoid M25 traffic, but then got stuck for nigh on an hour because of a shed load on the M42.

Made it easily in time for loading - and hit the bar straight away, followed by a lovely 3 course meal - something we also did on the way back. It adds a bit to the cost of the crossing, but it's a fantastic way to start and end a holiday.

The following morning was a blast across Holland and Germany to Berlin - at times it was slow going, with Rotterdam morning rush hour traffic and lots of road works - but we still managed to get some high speed stretches in.

We'd booked the Ibis near Alexanderplatz - and I was really pleased when given a room on the top floor with a view of the TV tower - it looks particularly spectacular at night.

The first 2 days were spent doing the usual tourist things - we went to the East Side Gallery, Olympic Stadium and Stasi Museum - plus walked around the Eastern part of the city for hours. We'd also booked dinner at the top of the Fernsehrturm, but once we were up there, we were allocated an inner table, next to a family with toddlers - despite the place being largely empty - and they wouldn't move us to a window seat. At over €100 for the meal and a beer each, I voted with my feet and went to the bierkeller around the corner. (Brauhause Mitte). The rest of the visit up the tower was fantastic - we had a couple of beers each whilst wandering around.

But the main reason for our trip was the music festival - headlined on the first night by Blur and the Pet Shop Boys. PSB were absolutely awesome... Blur had moments of brilliance, but played too many of their slower / 'deeper' tracks to really captivate the crowd. Bjork headlined the 2nd night - and was absolutely awful. Fortunately, one of the other stages had the Klaxons as an alternative.

It's a really spectacular festival - 4 stages of music, Warsteiner stands and blokes wandering with kegs all over, loads of food choices and all set on the apron of the now disused Templehof Airport - which is a cathedral to Art Deco / Nazi architecture. A really special experience - especially as the festival staff were dressed as flight crew and they were using the check-in desks to exchange tickets for wristbands. If the 2014 line-up is as good as this year, then we'll do it again.

Sadly, on Sunday morning, we had to leave Berlin... which is when I scraped my car on the pillar next to my parking space.

We moved onto Leipzig for a night - another fascinating place, with a significant historical importance - it was home to a number of famous classical musicians, plus was hugely influential in the uprisings which brought about the fall of the SED regime. It all started with protests after musicians were arrested for organising a festival in the streets of the city. Like many places in Germany, the RAF had a significant influence on the current city architecture - there's a fantastic mix of communist era 'statement' buildings with historic Saxony architecture. It's not on par with the grandeur of East Berlin (especially Karl-Marx Allee), but impressive all the same. For food we sought out a local brew-house in an old railway station for several beers and some fantastic traditional German cuisine.

From Leipzig we briefly moved onto Brunswick (Braunschweig) - which was a bit of a disappointment, but again we found a fantastic bierkeller - in the style of an old railway carriage and station. On the way there, I sought out one of the last remaining sectors of the inner German border at Hötensleben, there's not a huge amount of stuff there, but it's a very good record of the past and well worth seeing if you're in the area.

Finally, we popped into the VW museum at Wölfsburg on the way back to the ferry - it was OK, but I wouldn't go out of my way to visit it - there is far too much focus on the air-cooled machines, with the watercooled cars being rushed through - and many examples of the later cars are nothing special and hadn't even been cleaned! - I swear they just rotate employee cars in there.

The journey back was awful - torrential rain, high winds, and everyone in Holland seemingly on the motorways all at the same time... combined with the awful standard of Dutch driving, this meant we spent far too long sitting in slow moving Dutch traffic, so arrived at the ferry an hour later than planned.[url][/url]