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December 21, 2019January 26, 2020

National museum

The national museum was the first point of interest I visited when coming to بيروت, Lebanon. Having seen nothing of the city before I was really surprised how modern and well designed this museum of archaeology is. The museum was founded after World War II and contains around 100,000 items from excavations in Lebanon. Highly decorated sarcophagi, fantastic mosaics, ancient coins, statues and also some mummies can be found in the exhibition – with items also dating back to the bronze age.

December 20, 2019January 3, 2020

Coral Beach Hotel and Resort

The Coral Beach Hotel is a nice hotel in the South of بيروت, Lebanon. It is very recommendable especially in summer – with a wonderful pool between the buildings and access to the Mediterranean sea, even as there is no beach. It formerly belonged to the Sheraton group and has large rooms and a good restaurant. The location of the hotel is the big advantage in summer, but also a big disadvantage as you always need to take a taxi to access the city centre. It is a ten minutes taxi ride from there to the city and also to the airport.

December 20, 2019January 26, 2020

Rafic Hariri International Airport

The Rafic Hariri International Airport (BEY) at بيروت is the most important gateway to Lebanon. It is a smaller but well-working airport located 9 kilometres south of the city centre. The airport has just one terminal but three runways and was renovated in 2019 – the old terminal is still standing and looking like a ruin. The airport was named after former prime minister Rafic Hariri after he was assassinated in 2005. It is also the home base of Middle East Airlines (MEA) which is said to be a good airline with well-trained staff.

December 20, 2019January 26, 2020

İstanbul Havalimanı

It is the new, vast and shiny airport of Turkeys capital city: the İstanbul Havalimanı. It replaced the old Atatürk International Airport in April 2019 and has three terminals and four runways. The airport is modern, beautiful and flights often arrive after a nice loop over Karadeniz. Disadvantages are that the airport is very large so that you’ll have to walk very long distances and that it is much further away from the city centre than the old one.

December 18, 2019December 19, 2019

Gläserne Stadt

The Gläserne Stadt (vitreous city) is a beautiful artwork that was hidden in the underground: it was created in 1968 by artist Dieter von Andrian for the one and only underground tramway stop of Kassel, Germany – located underneath the main railway station (Hauptbahnhof, now Kulturbahnhof). It is 14 meters long and 2.5 meters high and shows a detailed map of Kassel, from the Unterneustadt, the river Fulda and the Karlsaue up to the Bergpark. You can easily spot the Königsplatz and the Wilhelmshöher Allee as the main (but broken) axis through the city. The artwork is illuminated in the evening, and it is most beautiful to visit it in the evening hours.

December 14, 2019January 27, 2020

Elbtunnel

Hamburg, Germany, is located at the river Elbe which splits the city into two parts: the city itself with the residential zones in the North and the docklands / industrial zone in the South. When tourists today want to see musicals in the harbour they cross the river by boat. But what about the workers that needed to cross the river twice a day? For them, the St.-Pauli-Elbtunnel or Alter Elbtunnel (to distinguish it from the motorway tunnel opened in 1975) was opened in 1911: a tunnel under river Elbe that can be passed on foot as well as with cars.

December 14, 2019January 27, 2020

Landungsbrücken

The St. Pauli-Landungsbrücken at Hamburg, Germany, are an ancient pier for passenger ships dating back to the year 1839. These ships were by that time powered by coal and it was, therefore, wanted to keep a distance between the ships and the harbour buildings to prevent fire. The pier is 688 meters long and from here big ships went on long journeys – a place that must have seen many tears of joy and sorrow.

December 14, 2019January 27, 2020

Kunsthalle

The Hamburger Kunsthalle is a fantastic art museum close to the railway station of Hamburg, Germany. It consists of three buildings dating back to 1868, 1921 and 1996 and also the art shown here covers a long time period from the Middle Ages to modern and contemporary art. The collection is presented on 13,000 square meters throughout the interconnected buildings and you can walk there for hours enjoying fine art.

December 14, 2019January 27, 2020

Tierpark Hagenbeck

Hagenbecks Tierpark at Hamburg, Germany, is a well-known zoological garden. In fact, it consists of two things that can be visited separately: the tropical aquarium and the zoological garden. In 1907 it was the first zoo without fences, but its roots go back to 1848 when a member of the Hagenbeck family started to exhibit six seals in the city centre. Today you can see more than 1,800 animals of 200 species in the zoo and 14,000 animals from 300 species inside the aquarium.

December 14, 2019January 27, 2020

Maritimes Museum

You can’t get to Hamburg, Germany, without learning something about seafaring. It is a necessity like eating fresh fish or visiting the Reeperbahn. A very good place for this is the Internationales Maritimes Museum (IMMH) located in an old storage building at the Speicherstadt. It was opened in 2008 and exhibits on nine floors nearly everything about people crossing the sea on a boat. This includes 50,000 miniature boats, numerous paintings about seafaring and special things I never heard about before like ship models made from bones.