Circling through Poland - with a bit of Germany thrown in.

OZDUCK

Established Member
Joined
Aug 1, 2010
Posts
4,510
This was a bit of an unexpected trip. We usually plan our trips a year or so in advance. In this instance early this year a friend of my wife was going to a "Sketchers" symposium in Poznan Poland and asked her if she wanted to come along and then see some other parts of Poland. This is not a meeting for shoe fetishists but for people who love to sketch. My wife agreed and asked me to plan the logistics as the friend was getting stupidly expensive travel quotes from Flight Centre for J tickets.


I worked out an itinerary and as often the trip started with a flight to Singapore from Perth in ScootPlus. Then QR would cover the Singapore - Europe leg. It ended up much cheaper using Berlin as the arrival/departure point in Europe with the rest of the trip being via train. This reduced the airfare costs by about 50% compared to the original quotes. By this time my wife was a bit concerned about how she was going to handle the train transfers etc and asked if I would like to join them. After some hesitation I agreed to do so.

We took virtually no photos of the trip to Singapore. It was a duplicate of one we had done only a couple of months before hand.

However, just a reminder that you do not get QR Business Class food on TR. But it was hot, tasted ok and was enough for a short evening trip. Once again the cabin crew were excellent and we arrived on time so everything was fine. My wife prefers the plastic cutlery on Scoot compared to the wooden stuff in QF Y. Except for some water this is the sole offering included in your fare.

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We have been in Singapore a lot over the last 12 month so once again we took very few photos.

Our hotel on Jalan Sultan in Kampong Glam

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It is made up of about 6 former shophouses so it has pretty disjointed floor plan and you often have to go outside to get to your room.

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The Sultan Mosque is basically right behind it and you can usually hear the morning call to prayer.

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The Arab Street area is also nearby. It has certainly been spruced up over the last few years.

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Our friend went to a Sketchers gathering by the Kallang Basin

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After a couple of hours all the sketches are displayed and a few winners of small prizes chosen

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While we were waiting for her an otter turned up to please passers-by.

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.He had caught a pretty big fish and was having a nice feed.

 
I will quickly get to our arrival in Germany

While we were there Singapore was celebrating its 60th Birthday and we caught the tale end of a practice military parade.

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We did have a very nice Indian vegetarian meal on Serangoon Road in Little India

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We left Singapore at 10:30 so we went to the QR J lounge and had a small but nice breakfast. The staff were attentive and kept offering us more food but we declined.

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The weather for our departure was pretty awful

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As you c an see we were in the clouds virtually inside the airport perimeter


Until we got to the Indian sub-continent we were either in clouds or just above them. It was not as rocky as our flight across the Bay of Bengal a few weeks previously but it was still a bit uncomfortable.

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I refused to pay QR their ransom to select J seats - around S$120 per seat per leg. I tried to check in the night before and select seats but the system wouldn't co-operate. We prefer to sit in the single window J seats on QR. When we checked in at Singapore we had been allocated window seats in the 'old' J seats on a B787 from Doha to Berlin. However for the first flight on a Q Suites equipped A350 it seemed that we were going to have to sit next to each other - the horror - in the centre backward facing seats. When I went to sit down, in the smaller rear J cabin, a young German couple next to me were asking the FA if they could be seated together as they had a 3 year old with them and they wanted to share the workload. They were being told the cabin was full when I pretended to be a gentleman and nobly offered to swap our centre seats for their two window seats. They were extremely grateful and jumped at the offer so I ended up with a rearward facing seat and my wife had the forward facing seat she prefers. At the end of the flight I was telling them how go their kid had behaved and they once again effusively thanked me for forgoing the chance to sit next to my wife. I actually felt a bit ashamed of my eagerness to do the swap but everyone ended up happy.

Settling in

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The irritating Kevin Hart 'Safety; video

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Our flight path

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The amuse bouche - of something

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Mezze

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Qatari chicken mashkool. I can't remember anything about it so I assume it was ok without being memorable.

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A bit of sand in the air

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Coming to land at Doha

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We avoided a bus 'gate' this time at Doha - not so lucky on the return leg. Our lounge of choice was the Al Mourjan lounge as this was the first time we have transited Doha since it was opened.

Looking across the garden from the lounge

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It actually wasn't a very pleasant stay as although the lounge was pretty empty it was also extremely hot. It was in the low 40's outside and probably in the low 30's inside. The A/C system had obviously had failures. Repairs were being made and large temporary A/C's being used.

You can see the cordoned off area in this photo were work was being done.

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In the distance you can see a worker up a ladder and large plastic 'tubes' attached to the A/C outlets. My wife did point out the odd placement of the toilets as has been discussed on here before.

We only had a quick drink and toilet break before moving out into the cooler part of the terminal. I assume that the reason the lounge was so quite was because of the A/C failure.

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Again we took very few photos on the leg to Berlin. I think my wife and I were both a bit 'over it' after the Etihad flight over a similar route about 7 weeks before this one. We were given pyjamas on both legs to Europe. This was not the case on the return trip.

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Vegetable volute soup - very nice

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Angus tenderloin - pretty good for an 'aircraft' steak.

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I can't recall exactly what this was but I do remember how nice it was.

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One of QR's destination themed small pillows

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Arriving in Berlin we got a nice view over the lakes and rivers south-east of the city. We would be passing through here in a few days when we went to the Spreewald.

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As you can see the sun was pretty low in the sky as we arrived

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The Müggelsee. We took a tram ride around half of it in 2013. Our last day in Germany this year was spent near the northern tip in Köpenick. Tram 68 from Köpenick has been rated as the most scenic one in Berlin.


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The centre of Berlin in the distance

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Our arrival experience was pretty good here. There was no-one in front of us at Immigration and although we were delayed a bit by the somewhat slow arrival of the luggage we were still sitting in the train for the trip into Berlin in just under an hour from when the wheels touched the tarmac'
 
This was our 4th visit to Berlin so we mainly concentrated on specific areas that we had either missed before or wished to see again.

For a start - Karl Marx Allee. Built to showcase the 'triumph' of communism in East Germany - "designed in such a way as to impress upon the visitor the magnificence of the people and politics responsible." "Originally named Stalinallee in 1949, the street would be renamed in 1961 as part of the de-Stalinization process in the East – instead since called Karl-Marx-Allee."


Most of the buildings were built in "Wedding Cake" style or in Berlin Zuckerbäckerstil (English: patisserie style). I have read that it was originally inspired by some of the Art Deco skyscrapers in New York. It is a 2 km stretch of political expression.

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One of the main architects of this street also designed the Berlin TV Tower here seen in the background

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These are recreation of the original streetlights especially designed for this project.

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Names from the past

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Built wide for triumphal marches and the like

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The last big parade of the East German regime was held on this street in October 1989 to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the creation of East Germany. The regime fell a few weeks later.

 
Cafes and coffee bars were included in the plans. The Café Moscow was temporarily renamed Café Kiev after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. There were apparently plans to make the name change permanent but the local residents association fiercely, and correctly in my opinion, opposed the change. They apparently had read George Santayana - "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

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'Socialist' mural

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How looked in the days of the DDR

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The famous Kino is currently undergoing major renovation work

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One afternoon I split off from my wife and went to see a building I had never managed to get to before.

The AEG Turbine Factory. A "protected historical monument" since 1956. "The 100 m long steel-framed building with 15 m tall glass windows on either side is considered the first attempt to introduce restrained modern design to industrial architecture."- "It was a bold move, and world first"

AEG Turbine Factory


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I had ran across the architect Peter Behrens before. He was a luminary at the Darmstadt Artists' Colony - Mathildenhöhe which we have visited twice. Also he was deeply involved in Industrial Design like the fan and heater below.


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The steel frame is on full display

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A few hundred metres down the road are part of a Siemens complex showing the previous 'historical' style of German industrial buildings.

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Continuing on the Siemens theme we went to the housing estate of Siemenstadt



We took the U Bahn to the appropriately named Siemensdamm station with a ventilation structure also providing a sort of symbolic welcome to the area.

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Close by the station is this large former Siemens building that now houses the TechnoCampus Berlin. It was built as the Schaltwerk Hochhaus - Europe's first high rise factory - in 1928 to manufacture switchgear.

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We then headed off towards the housing estate passing under a disused railway bridge. I believe that this was once part of a branch line of the S Bahn built just to get Siemens workers to the factory site. It was called the Siemensbahn and was privately built by Siemens itself.


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And now we enter the housing estate area

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The buildings were designed by people such as Walter Gropius founder of the famous Bauhaus School


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another who contributed designs was Hugo Häring


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"Thanks to the close proximity of the Siemens plants and the existing rail transportation lines, the Siemens-owned building society was given permission to build a large-scale residential estate (with some 18,000 units for Siemens workers) on an undeveloped site."

Looking a bit more closely at some of the buildings

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