Day 14 in Brugge & goodbye

Some cities are more beautiful than words.
That’s the story of Brugge, Belgium.
The city dates back to when it was the main city of northern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. World capitalism got its start here. And the architecture and culture it left behind linger, caught in time and somehow able to escape the ravages of world wars and development.

Let the pictures tell the story.

And the end of the RIAS Berlin/Brussels/Euroepan adventure.

Day 13 at NATO

Nope, can’t show you that.
Nope, can’t tell you that.

Went to NATO. No pictures.

Off the record conversations with diplomats.
But I can tell you that American-led and financed NATO is the balance to the softies at the EU. We’re the muscle to their flabby underbelly.

I can also tell you about the World Cup. You can’t get away from it in Europe at the moment. Every bar, every square and every TV set everywhere is turned to it. Imagine if the Super Bowl last all month. Oh, wait. It does.
Nevermind.

Day 12 in Brussels

We’re not in Germany anymore.

You can tell by the messier streets, the smaller cars and probably the most telling of clues: everyone is speaking French.
It’s Brussels. Belgium for those of you without a map or clue.
The central market square of this city is amazingly beautiful with buildings dating from the 1690’s. A real time warp for an American boy. Even compared to Germany, this is ancient.

But this is a work day. All day at the European Union. Depending on your views of bureaucracy, this is either heaven or hell. They take their pseudo-government very seriously here at the EU. But not their security. After lunch we walked into the EU building through a side door. We weren’t checked, we didn’t go through a metal detector. It’s all very strange for someone used to emptying pockets and taking off shoes at security checkpoints in small-town courthouses in the US.

The EU is a babble of voices with a common enemy: America. At least that’s what the lefty intellectuals believe. They don’t necessarily run the EU, but they have always run the political and public discourse in the media.
Ya, it’s just like America that way.
Remember, it was the lefties who wanted to work with the communists. Now they want to negotiate with terrorists while making the world a safer, green place to be.
Educated beyond their intelligence, as grandma used to say.
The EU is more concerned with the alleged greenhouse affect than it is with terrorism. Once I learned that, I understood why their security system was such a joke. As long as I’m driving a hybrid car, I’m obviously not a threat, even if I have an IED attached to my chest.
The European elite see America as the greatest threat to peace in the world today. These are the same class of people who negotiated with Hitler. This generation will have a similar experience of success, I suspect.

Day 11 in Schwerin & Brussels

I have TV station envy today. First thing I did this morning after admiring the intensely blue sky over Schwerin was visit the local TV station, NDR.
Unbelievable.
I haven’t seen a station that nice since visiting the MSNBC studios in New Jersey. German journalist Andrea Gottke gave us the complete tour, even offering her belt to one of RIAS fellows.
Now that’s above and beyond the call of duty. It’s a chick-thing. An international chick-thing.
Every American TV station I’ve been to is chaotic, cluttered and shows sign of constant use. NDR looked like it had just been unwrapped from the box it came in, but had been a working TV and radio newsroom for ten years. I guess those notes forbidding food and drink are actually followed in Germany, while they are studiously avoided in America.

It’s a travel day after that. Bus ride up to Hamburg’s airport and then a quick flight to Brussels. I wish I could have seen more of Hamburg, but we’re in a rush. It looks more American than any other city I’ve seen in Germany, even more so than Berlin. It reminded me a lot of Chicago. Go figure.

And then there is Brussels. It’s funny how just a couple of hundred miles changes everything in Europe.

Day 10 in Schwerin

It’s just a little cooler than 168 degrees outside. Celsius. That figures out to about 1002 degrees Fahrenheit. And there’s a seldom told secret about northern Europe they don’t tell you about in the brochures.
They don’t believe in air conditioning.
Not in this hotel. Not in Schwerin. Which means that when I wake up at 4:30 in the morning to a sauna in my rooms, it’s the perfect opportunity to tour this gorgeous town. Picture in your mind the perfect-looking German city, with obligatory castle and lake. This is it.

Of course, not everything is as it seems.

Schwerin was a bustling place when the communists had it. They built a plastics factory and brought in tens of thousands of workers. Those workers really didn’t do much at all since there was no need for a plastics factory in the middle of Schwerin. So when the Wall fell, so did the economy of Schwerin.
Now, the city of 50,000 is like small towns I’ve seen dotted around the American landscape.
Lots of tattoo parlors. Teenage girls pushing baby strollers. Skaters roaming the parks. And a hilarious and somewhat random graffiti artist who paints ‘judy garland’ all over the city.

It all makes more sense when we get a city tour of a communist-built ghetto. I’d like to say it looked awful, rundown and ugly. And it sort of did. The communists weren’t big on style. But Schwerin’s got a long way to go to match the public housing of Nashville. The buildings were well kept, I didn’t see drug dealers and single mothers hanging around in the middle of the day, oblivious to the benefits of work.
In other words, if this is the ghetto, Schwerin ain’t doing too bad.
But the Germans are ashamed of it and tearing it down anyway. Maybe I can get them to come to Nashville and rip out the Section 8 housing that rings this city’s downtown core. They obviously have a better way of dealing with it than we do.

The mayor of Schwerin smokes a pipe. I know this because Lord Mayor Norbert Claussen smoked his way through our meeting with him in the afternoon. He’s a West-German who came in to transform the town from communist to capitalist. He, quite rightly, sees tourism as the answer to its economic woes. But he wasn’t too happy when I said his townsfolk seemed suspicious of westerners and Americans in particular. Understandably so, looking at history. Since the 1930’s Schwerin was under totalitarian control by either the Nazi’s or the Communists until the Wall fell. That’s generations of mistrust. And you can see it in the eyes of almost anyone there over 30.

Day 9 in Rostock & Schwerin

Discovered something new about Rostock today. The town’s disappearing. Not sinking, like New Orleans, but the people. They’re leaving every day.

The city lost 50,000 people in 15 years since the Wall fell. One out of every five left and probably isn’t coming back anytime soon. Those leaving are young, ambitious and educated. That doesn’t bode well for the future.

Who’s gonna wipe grandma’s nose when she can’t do it anymore?

Met the mayor of Rostock – Roland Methling. Nice guy, but he didn’t seem to understand he‘s sitting on a tourism goldmine. There are millions of people stepping onto his docks every year, but that didn’t appear as important to him as going forward with shipbuilding. I could have seen his point, except even the shipbuilder we talked with earlier in the day wondered whether Germany could be competitive in a global market.
China can build ships cheaper than Europe and they’re building as many as they can as fast as they can.
ManfredMuller-Farenholz is the top dog of the Neptun Shipbuilding company. Before reunification, the communists had 6,500 people ‘working’ there. Now there are 400.
And that’s why the last person leaving Rostock’s shipyards may have to turn the welding torch off.

Going south now to Schwerin. It’s the capitol of the former East German communist state we’re in. I was hoping for a glimpse of 120mph exotic sports cars on the autobahn, but this is the former East Germany so the roads are two-lane, tractor-blocked ribbons of black asphalt.
Beautiful, flat country. It looks a lot like the northern plains with pine trees and dark green grass.

Driving into Schwerin, you get the idea of an idyllic land lost to time. I brought out my ipod, blasted the tunes and walked the city.
I was right, time has forgotten Schwerin. And if it’s not too careful, so will the future.

Day 8 in Rostock

Sunday in Germany is quiet in the way that America used to be quiet on the Lord ’s Day (back in the day, as they say).

Nothing is open. Nada. No restaurants, no stores. At least not in town.
So it’s off to the beach where the bars are wide open.
Take that, Tennessee.
The beaches are gorgeous. Sand as silk. And bathing suits are minimal when they’re not optional. Which can be a good thing or a scary thing depending on who’s showing what.
While there were plenty of topless women (good), many of them were grandmothers (bad). And many of the men (and very hairy men, mind you) word Speedos, which is very bad, except for the men who wore nothing at all, which is worse.
Oh ya, they were playing in the sand with their kids, who also wore nothing at all.
Good God I hope they believe in sunscreen. That’s going to be a very painful burn if the sun shone where the sun don’t shine.
I touched my toe in the Baltic Sea. I feel healed.

Day 7 in Berlin

Buy-bye Berlin, home of a trillion tacky, wacky and cool World Cup souvenirs and hello Sachsenhausen.

It was an abrupt transition to say the least.
Sachsenhausen is a small town about 30 miles north of Berlin, home to a concentration camp built first by the Nazis, then taken over by the Communists.
If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, you get the irony.
The truth is, there are no words to describe the horrors of a concentration camp. You have to see it to be completely enraged by it. Reading the biographies of just a few of the thousands of victims of the camp puts faces and names on the otherwise anonymous victims. Disgust and anger were my first emotions. The sadness comes as you spend more time walking the same steps as the condemned. There was no way out.
And there is no way out for Germany in coming to terms with a genocidal past. The society confronts it. And this alone may be the reason why Germany is now one of the most pacifist nations in the world. That’s a good thing, for them and for us.

After that, it was another abrupt transition. This time, beach blanket bingo and the coastal city of Rostock. A very beautiful town with an architecture that looks straight of a German travel brochure. But like every city in Germany, it’s all a façade. Rostock was bombed extensively in World War 2 and the town center was rebuilt from the ground up to look old. It’s like Hollywood. Faces are reconstructed to hide an ugly past.
But the weather is beautiful, the townsfolk are friendly and just a little surprised when Americans show up at their doorstep.
This was communist East Germany until 16 years ago. Rostock seems to have recovered. A travel haven for Germans and northern Europeans, it’s used to visitors. Not so other isolated former East German cities.
But more on that later.

Day 6 in Berlin

Had breakfast with an American journalist in Berlin. All journalists, or at least all good journalists, are thrill-seekers.

Adrenaline junkies. Lou Charbonneau of Reuters is such. He’s an American who flew over to Europe after the Wall fell and decided he needed to stay. He didn’t have a job, but he knew a few words of German and that was enough. Now he has a career and a life that includes skipping across Europe and much of the world for stories.
Yes, I’m envious. Although, let’s be honest, the back hills of Tennessee (can anyone say Trousdale County) are about the same as Europe’s underbelly nations like Albania. Neither speak English; education is an after-thought and the smart ones get out as soon as they can.
After that, it was on to visit Germany’s Minister of the Interior. When Peter Altmaier walked into the room, everyone knew it. Kind of a Clinton-type energy that changes the temperature of a room. Mr. Altmaier was very frank on one thing: If Germany doesn’t change its economic ways and lose the socialist shackles, it’s in for a long slide into poverty and economic oblivion.
And looking a lot like France, God forbid.
And speaking of oblivion, next up was the Trade Union chieftain, Wolfgang Lutterbach.
He’s the head of Germany’s Federation of Trade Unions. In Germany, the trade unions have an enormous amount of political strength. Imagine America during the 1960’s; England before Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. That kind of pull.
And they’re not giving up, despite dragging down the economy and refusing to acknowledge globalization. German Trade Unions refuse to let shop owners open when they want, refuse to let companies fire people during economic downturns.
Basically, they call the shots.
And as we all know, if there’s anyone who knows how to run a successful, profitable business, it’s a union. Well, ok, maybe the Mafia can, but that’s a different kind of union (think longshoreman) and profitable in a way that requires breaking many rules and not a few laws – something Germans are loath to do.

Friday evening, it was World Cup time. Germany versus Costa Rica in the first game. You could have heard a pin drop in Berlin. The streets were that quiet. Only the bars showing the game were boisterous. After the 4-2 victory, the town partied like it was 1989. For the first time, German flags were everywhere. This is not a normally patriotic people - and they were going crazy with flags, banners and impromptu songs.
In the U-bahn (subway) after the game, I was greeted by a couple of young guys who asked if I minded while they snorted cocaine on the train to the city center. Afterward, between cheers and songs, one guy told me about how a hotel in the Netherlands refused to let him stay there because he was German. The guy told me ‘three generations later and still nothing has changed.’
That’s a picture of Germany you don’t get watching the games at home on TV.

Day 5 in Berlin

Every now and then you meet someone who gives you a new understanding of life. Hubertus Knabe is such a man.

Dr. Knabe was a West German (read free German) abducted into communist custody when he was 25 years old. That was in 1953. He was accused of being a spy for the dreaded Americans.

Dr. Knabe wasn’t.

But the communist East German security police weren’t buying his story of innocence, so the psychologist spent seven years of his life in a dirty hell-hole of a communist prison. Kind of like Guantanamo, called Hohenschonhaus. But America would never do that, right?
After seven years of psychological torture where he wasn’t allowed to contact family or friends, the kind communists set Dr. Knabe free. He was given enough money to buy a meal and a beer and sent home on the subway. The entire time Dr. Knabe had been in prison it was in East Berlin, just a few miles from his home.
Today, Dr. Knabe gave us a tour of the prison where he had been held inside a windowless jail cell with a bed too small to extend his body. Dr. Knabe is now 78 years old and wanted to thank America and Americans for helping him and his country remain free.

Day 4 in Berlin

You can always tell a journalist. You just can’t tell him much.

We met a couple of German journalists today. Even with a language barrier, you could’ve known they were reporters. Funny, smart and quick. And cynical. I guess that goes with the territory, doesn’t it?
There are competing government-sponsored German TV stations. Can you imagine PBS having to go head to head with PBS? And winning in the ratings? Some things just don’t translate at all. The correspondent we met, Dr Peter Frey (and, ya, he has a PhD) believed government paid reporters could keep their distance and objectivity while covering the German government.

Let your own inner-cynic decide.

Then it was off for a meeting within the German equivalent of the White House. We met the Tony Snow of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Just so you know, spin sounds the same no matter which language it’s in.
Babble, it seems, is an international tongue.

Finally, it was off to Fan-fair. No country music though. This was a concert to kick off the World Cup. The crowd was so thick, at one point there was no way to exit. That’s a whole lot disconcerting. When you realize you’re stuck listening to “Right Said Fred” sing ‘I’m too sexy’ either panic attacks or overwhelming angst are the only reactions possible.

Day 3

Day 3, 6.6.06

Well, the world didn’t end, did it? Sorry all you apocalypse freaks. Maybe you’ll be right next time. I hear there’s a comet coming your way – so get your sneakers and special kool-aid and get ready.

Speaking of kool-aid, I saw WKRN consultant Michael Rosenblum in Berlin yesterday. But more on that in a moment.
Got to hang with a Berlin city councilman. Fritz Felgentreu walked us through his “ghetto” neighborhood. High crime, low graduation rates and filled with immigrants.

East Nashville should look so good.

Onto the German Bundestag, this is their Congress/Parliament. There’s graffiti on the building…inside. Which isn’t unusual in Berlin. This city has a second coat of paint, courtesy of taggers and graffiti artists. But the graffiti inside the Bundestag is historic, left over by American and Russian soldiers.

Met Germany’s secretary of urban affairs & transportation Wolfgang Tiefensee. Tell me if this sounds familiar: In order to compete globally, business has to shrug off red tape created by a bureaucratic nightmare that is the government. Good luck with that.

Then: Opera. It was a wonderful time to drink, nap and wonder what in God’s name is it about opera that anyone enjoys. Hello, anyone?

And then there’s Michael Rosenblum. I was with my group at high-end restaurant called “Lutter & Wegner.” No one walks out of this place without dropping a couple of hundred dollars. Anyway, so I’m giving my order to the waiter and look up to see a tall, blonde woman who looks very, very familiar. But I can’t place her. Then, after I blink, I see the man who changed WKRN and brought about the whole VJ-world single-handedly. After I got over my shock, I got up to say hello, but Mr. Rosenblum was already gone into the cold Berlin night.
Looks like they’ll be vj-ing in Berlin very, very soon.

2nd Day in Germany

Germany Day 2

Ok, half day report. It’s all about yesterdays. Did a quick tour of Berlin. Answered my question about why this city seems younger than even Nashville. About half of it was destroyed during World War 2. Much of which survived was destroyed or abused by the communists. Now, the city’s rebuilding, but it’s trying to preserve the look and feel of history. So it’s constructing all these buildings to look old. Truly, it’s hard to figure out what’s real and what’s not.

Call Berlin a pseudo-city.

And then there’s the wall. Or, more correctly The Wall. Or what’s left of it. Our tour took us on the same winding path that The Wall once occupied in Berlin. Past the monuments to those who died trying to escape communism. Beside the still empty fields that were the 150 yards of no-man’s land where few escaped the Soviet bu

First Day in Germany

Germany, Day One

After 12 hours, three airports and a serious lack of legroom on Continental Airlines, we’re here.
Berlin’s airport looks a whole lot like Nashville’s, except tidier. Not the kind of huge international extravaganza you’d get in Paris or London. But then, Berlin is still trying to figure out if it wants tourists.
It’s a little too late for that this month. The city is one several in Germany hosting games as the country is the site for the 2006 World Cup of Soccer. The city is in fever pitch for an event that most Americans don’t know even happens. Or care, for that matter. And I sympathize. Soccer has all the excitement of baseball, but without the benefit of steroids for record breaking performance.

Berlin will party through the World Cup.

The Brandenburg Gate, which is of huge national historical significance, will be part of a stage for bands and DJ’s to play and get the rhythmically challenged Germans to dance. The stage game me inspiration: We need to have an all-night, police excluded rave at Nashville’s Parthenon. That might help the city’s hip factor.



To end our first day, we went to a multi-cultural parade in one of Berlin’s less prosperous neighborhoods. When I’ve had the misfortunate of going to these things in America or Canada, they are always ominously dull. But I went anyway.
In Germany, multiculturalism is a different world.
No worthless political speeches, no do-gooderism. Just one float after another of DJ’s blasting their dance music at supersonic levels. And many, many, many drunken Germans dancing as they walked/stumbled behind the floats. I did what anyone caught in that situation should do: I bought a beer (oh, and they do drink on the street here…all day long, all night – even on Sundays) and joined the parade. Finally, a parade that adults could enjoy; although I noticed a lot of children with their parents as well. And a lot of drinking teens. Drinking age here (at least for beer) is 16.