Berlin is a wonderfully diverse and dynamic city, and especially intriguing to visit as a tourist with an interest in history. In particular, Berlin is the place to go if you like learning about 20th century history, and, more specifically, World War II and the Cold War. I’ve written about a number of Berlin’s WWII…
It’s not the kind of sightseeing I usually do, but touring the Reichstag dome was so highly recommended by a friend that I decided to do it anyway. It was also a bit of a relief after all the grim history I’d been learning about at the DDR Museum, the Stasi Museum, the Berlin Wall…
At both the DDR Museum and the Palace of Tears, I learned about the kind of everyday surveillance that East Germans endured in Cold War Germany. To find out more, I went to the Stasi Museum as well. Disclosure: As at all the museums I visited in Berlin, I received free admission. Nevertheless, all opinions…
After my experience at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, I was apprehensive about visiting the Jewish Museum in Berlin. This, I thought, is something they will have to get right. After all, Berlin was Hitler’s capital city, the place where leaders managed the bureaucratic tasks necessary to carry out the genocide he planned. You…
The meeting place for the street art tour by Alternative Berlin Tour was easy for me to find. I looked for the guide at the base of the Berlin Television Tower in front of the Starbucks. I loved the irony of starting an alternative walking tour in front of a Starbucks. Ben from New Zealand, our tour guide…
Walking into the Palace of Tears is stepping back in time. The floor tiles, the wall clock, the “modern” design of the building: all hearken back to a 1960s aesthetic in interior design. Standing on East German territory since 1962, the Palace of Tears was an addition to the older Friedrichstraße train station. This station…
The consequences of the division of Berlin by the Berlin Wall (1961-1989) are visible all over the city. The Wall was a wide, empty gash through the city, and that gash has, ever since the Wall “fell” in 1989, been repurposed in a variety of ways. In some places, buildings encroach on the space: Potsdamerplatz is a…
The night I arrived in Berlin was full of color and light: the annual Festival of Lights was underway. A light show projected onto the Brandenburg Gate kept the crowds entertained in the cold autumn air. Walking the short distance from the Brandenburg Gate to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe meant, both…
Sometimes it’s hard to choose a travel destination. Say you have only two weeks’ vacation, and you want to get the most out of it. Here’s some advice.
Here are four things to do and see to learn about life in Communist Prague – and Czechoslovakia as a whole – during the Cold War era.
A weekend in Portland, Oregon: here’s a 3-day itinerary that covers what to see, where to stay, where to eat, things to do … everything!
A memorial composed of a series of statues portraying the anguish of the Holocaust, becoming a sensory and emotional experience for visitors.
Truly practical advice for women traveling alone. Tips for sleeping, eating, socializing and lots more travel advice for solo female travel!
Freiburg, Germany, is a lovely little city with narrow cobbled streets, charming architecture, and a gorgeous cathedral. Read here about all the things to see and do in Freiburg in 1 day.
You’ll only have a short time in Frankfurt? This article will help you decide what to see in Frankfurt in 1-2 days: must-sees and lots more options and ideas so you can make the best of a short city trip!
In the 19th century, European hot springs became gathering places for the rich and titled, and the historic thermal towns that grew around them still exist today. Read about them here!
If World War II interests you, the Liberation Route Europe is something you could easily build a European vacation around. It traces how the Allies advanced through Europe to retake it from the Germans. Click on any of the 10 countries listed on the Liberation Route’s website and you’ll find dozens of sites marked. The…
Note: This is a guest post by LeAnna Brown. There are so many things to do in Nuremberg, whether it be visiting the famous Christkind Weihnachtsmarkt, or just walking the Altstadt, which is why it is one of our favorite day trips from Munich. There are also some great day trips you can take from Nuremburg….
Things to do in Heimaey island, off the southern coast of Iceland: a small place with dramatic scenery and a dramatic history to match.
Ruminations on a tour of Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where Nazis turned genocide into an industrial enterprise, efficiently turning over a million souls to ashes.
You could easily miss the KGB Museum in Riga if you didn’t know where to look. Commonly referred to as “the Corner House,” it looks on the outside like a quite stylish residential building. I walked right by it and had to retrace my steps a block or two away. Basically what the KGB did…
I’ve visited Amsterdam – about two and a half hours from home – more times than I can count. Hamburg is only slightly further away – three hours by car – and I’d never been there. It was time. My husband, Albert, and I decided to spend a weekend in Hamburg and I was fortunate…
Bitemojo food tours are not like other food tours. That’s not to criticize other food tours, mind you. I love learning about a place’s particular customs and foods. Bitemojo tours are different, though, in that they don’t include a tour guide. Instead, the tour is led via Bitemojo app, which leads you from “bite” to…
Crazy Guides’ communism tour advertises a visit to Nowa Huta, a “model communist city.” Built starting in the 1950s, this experiment in communist community-building is considered a landmark of Soviet-era socialist architecture and urban planning. I signed up for the tour with low expectations. I thought that the phrase our tour guide kept using, “worker’s paradise,”…
After learning about how “Rosie the Riveter” constructed Liberty Ships in the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, across the bay from San Francisco, it seemed to me that the obvious next step was to tour an actual Liberty Ship. (See my post on the Rosie the Riveter Museum here.) I ended up seeing not only a…
The Elie Wiesel Memorial in Sighet, Romania, where Wiesel lived, is a small museum with a big, important message.
A Communist Consumers Museum? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? I mean, in the Cold War, we in the West were the consumer society. We still are. They were, well, communist. So what could a Communist Consumers Museum even show? When we passed through Timişoara, Romania, this summer, we didn’t really have any plans. Picking…
If you ever take a Bitemojo tour, make sure you start with an empty stomach, good walking shoes and plenty of time. You’ll need all three. Disclosure: I took a Bitemojo tour in Jerusalem because I could do it for free as a participant in a TBEX conference for travel bloggers. It’s not something that…
Five synagogues in Prague and a cemetery are what remains of Prague’s once-thriving Jewish neighborhood. Under the umbrella of the Prague Jewish Museum, they are open to the public, each serving a different function. Tourists can buy a ticket to all or part of a route through all the Prague synagogues. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate…
Note: I wrote this a couple of years ago, but the argument I make here still applies. Where I mention a terrorist attack from some time ago, just fill in whatever the most recent one was. The attack on a Berlin Christmas market last week got me thinking about how terrorism affects travel and tourism….
Whenever people ask me “How do you like living in Holland?” part of my answer has to do with travel. You see, living in the Netherlands means I can travel to other European countries very easily. In fact, I can drive into Germany in about a half hour. Belgium is about two or three hours…
In my last post, I wrote about the Berlin Wall as a gash across the city. What brought me to the Berlin Wall Memorial was my visit just the day before to the DDR Museum in Berlin. That museum and its hands-on portrayal of life in the former DDR (called the German Democratic Republic or GDR in…