Day 9 - Roadside veg south east of Berlin
Trip Start
Aug 31, 2008
1
10
14
Trip End
Sep 13, 2008
Frankfurt an der Oder,
Germany
Monday, September 8, 2008
It's no exaggeration that there is still a visible difference between eastern and western Germanys. In all my time in the east, about five days now, I have seen perhaps ten Trabants, the favourite (almost the only) DDR family car available at the time, and five of these were brightly painted "Trabi Safari" vehicles chucking out clouds of evil smelling smoke. Just think back in the 70s and 80s when all the two-stroke eastern vehicles polluted like this - it's amazing the comparison with more modern cleaner cars. If anyone says that cars are polluting the planet, they are not doing it a tenth now as well as the Trabants could do. Plus the noise, a bit like a ropey hair dryer engine on a squeaky suspension. Sadly though, these beasts will have died out completely in another ten or so years. Glad I've got some photos while they were still around.
Buildings in the east were never what you could call attractive. Certainly the public buildings were grand, with sometimes good sculpture work, but then these were paid for by the state, and were meant to impress. That is not to say though that normal houses are not clean - they certainly are. But the style was dictated by the socialist government. So exterior walls were very plain, invariably of grey concrete. The only concession to colour was to have several shades of grey. Now I'm glad to say you see lots of oranges, yellows, creams and whites.
The people who live in such places must be a bit unimpressed to say the least, so they try to brighten them up with flower boxes. And very impressive they are too. Something you don't see much in Scandinavia or the UK (apart from small villages which were smart to begin with) is rich flower boxes, and they certainly do brighten up the east German buildings. Actually you can say that about the town centres as well. Built to a strict pattern, there is usually a rather drab looking central square with monolithic bleak looking public buildings around it. Only now, many of these squares have been replaced by lawns and some with fountains - a huge improvement, and somewhere that the locals can relax and play. Also very cheap to maintain.
Every now and again you come to a town which has cobblestones in the streets. They are dealt with fine by modern vehicles, with good suspensions, but imagine what they must be like driving on in a Trabi. My mum and dad used to have an old model Ford Anglia, basically a metal shell with little suspension, and plastic seats. I can remember being uncomfortable in it, and being deafened by it, when travelling over cobbles in Birmingham in the 1960s. So much for the good old days - I'm glad we don't have to put up with that any more.
Sorry, I'm rambling. Anyway, the cobblestone roads in these towns are all very quaint to look at, but they must be a devil to keep repairing.
One of the really great things I remember from my first visit here in 1991 was the custom of displaying fruit and vegetables, grown locally, on tables on the pavement. There was an honesty box, where you just put in whatever you wanted, though they suggested a euro for each bag of apples, tomatoes, marrow, squash or whatever. A great idea this, and I can only dimly remember this in parts of south Wales in the 1960s, and it died out there a long time ago.
The local east accent is also interesting, and a little tricky to get used to as you are never taught this in language lessons. The word for a road, weg, is usually pronounced (at least in the west) as veck. Here it is more like veeg, which to me sounds nearly Dutch. I heard it a lot in Berlin, so it wasn't too much of a surprise to hear it further east.
Eastern Germany doesn't really do lay-bys like in the west, though there are plenty of woodland car parks - you just have to look out for them more. In fact there are so many woodlands here and forests that you wouldn't really have problems finding off-site places to spend the night.
Many of the eastern roads are lined by well established trees, usually birches or oaks. All very attractive I must say. Nearly all of them have a large square of white painted on them, which I presume is to try to add reflection when driving at night. There are so few street lights out of the towns that driving into trees could become quite a popular pastime and easy to learn.
As for the people - all the ones I have met so far have been really friendly, and actually quite impressed and maybe slightly honoured (perhaps that's too strong) that a Brit is happy to drive around and sample their country, and not keep making comparisons with the west. That's the great thing about motorhome holidays, you don't really need a definite plan, and you can - employing some common sense - stop where you like.
I am now at a lovely campsite next to the Helenesee, a few km south of Frankfurt an der Oder. Tomorrow I will be driving north probably as far as Bad Freienwalde, then gradually coming back west. Poland will have to wait another year.
