Category Archives: Walks

City Strolls with Slow Travel Berlin

Next week Slow Travel Berlin are launching a couple of new “City Strolls” of neighbourhoods around Berlin as part of the ITB and the related Travel Massive gathering of the travel industry, blogging community and travel media. The idea of these walks is to offer the visitor, or maybe the curious Berliner from a different part of the city, the chance to take part in “informal but well-researched strolls that draw on history, literature, architecture and other cultural phenomena to provide unique, un-clichéd insights into the city’s past and present.”

One of the tours is led by me and will take a small group through my neighbourhood of Wedding, where I have lived for the last couple of years. As you might have seen on Under a Grey Sky over the past year, I have been enjoying exploring the places just beyond my front door as much as more further-flung expeditions, and I think it is going to be really great to have the chance to share the cultural past and present of my home with those who come along on the tours.

As well as my tour, Slow Travel Berlin head honcho Paul Sullivan will be leading a tour through Prenzlauer Berg (as well as hosting a Photography workshop) and German history expert Richard Carter is hosting two tours, one taking a stroll through Berlin’s historic heart, whilst the other explores the architecture of East Berlin. I will be making a page here on Under a Grey Sky about the tours in general, but if you are interested in the tours taking place on the 3rd or 5th March, you can find more information and book one of the extremely limited places, here on Gidsy.

(Photo by Katrin Schönig)

Outside the front door – A walk through Wedding, Berlin

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Since we moved to the neighbourhood of Wedding* at the end of 2010 we have enjoyed exploring and getting to know a new corner of the city. Not long after we moved, I wrote about my experiences and first impressions for Slow Travel Berlin, and even then I was quite taken by this corner of the city that has a pretty poor reputation in the city and yet has not only a fascinating history, but is also home to a number of really interesting grassroots cultural, artistic and community projects that reflect the diversity and also the “neighbourhood pride” in an area where the population is mixed between those with long-established roots here and those of us who are in the 35% who were born in another country – the highest percentage of foreign-born residents anywhere in Berlin.

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The Road Not Taken, Amherst

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By Phil Scraton:

I was 17 when I first heard The Dangling Conversation. The song’s simple beauty contrasted with the complex emotion of its lyrics. The mood, the characters, caught my imagination. Written by Paul Simon, recorded with Art Garfunkel, we are introduced to the lives of two lovers caught in the quiet solitude of a seemingly lost relationship. ‘You read your Emily Dickinson’ and ‘I my Robert Frost’; we ‘note our place with bookmarkers’ that ‘measure what we’ve lost’.

Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm,
Couplets out of rhyme,
In syncopated time
Lost in the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
Are the borders of our lives.

In a ‘lost’ relationship, ‘out of rhythm’, ‘out of rhyme’ what was the relevance of the Emily Dickinson/ Robert Frost juxtaposition? I soon discovered that both were fine North American poets, two generations apart. Their personalities and lives had little in common; she a virtual recluse and a home-based correspondent, he an affable teacher with a love of the outdoors. Yet comparisons of their poetry have been endless – books, theses, articles, essays.

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A walk by the river

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A few weeks ago we were in Greifswald, an old Hanseatic League city in the north of Germany, made famous by its university and the paintings of Casper David Friedrich. Whilst we were there, Katrin and I took a walk along the River Ryck, from our hotel in the fishing village of Wieck to the old town of Greifswald itself, and back again. The short piece that I wrote about the walk for Caught by the River was published yesterday:

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A walk on the Contraviesa, Southern Spain

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By Sheila Scraton:

We were staying at our cortijo in the Alpujarras that lie to the south of Granada on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. We had had a great family Christmas in Bad Saarow, Germany and were now enjoying unusually mild winter weather in Spain. Most people who know that we visit Spain seem to think that this means an escape from the cold weather of the UK and relaxation in warm Spanish sun. Whilst this can be the case, we have regularly experienced long icicles from our patio roof and deep snow making even access to the house a bit tricky.

However, this January we had two weeks of wonderful weather – blue sky and warm sunshine. The air temperature can be cool, we are at over 1500 m (above the height of our highest mountain in the UK, Ben Nevis, at 1344m) but this is more than compensated by the strong sun coming directly from the south and North Africa. Today we met up with our friend, Jeremy, who has lived and worked in the Alpujarras for 20 years as a walking guide. We were doing one of our favourite walks at this time of the year, along the Contraviesa, the mountain range between the Sierra Nevada and the Mediterranean Sea. It is a favourite winter walk because its mild location means that it’s not possible, or at least comfortable, to walk here in the summer months. It is also the area that we look across to each day and evening from the patio of our cortijo, making it a nice change to reverse the view and look back to our village and the high mountains behind.

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Burning houses and a walk in the woods

A walk along the Panke, at the edge of winter

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A few Saturdays ago I was invited north from our (west Berlin) neighbourhood of Wedding to the north, and our friends in the (east Berlin) district of Pankow. These two once stood on opposite sides of the wall, but even through those long years of division they were linked by the bridge on the Bornholmer Straße, which would be the first breach in the structure on that famous November evening in 1989, as well as the waters of the Panke that run south from its source just beyond the Berlin city limits, through Pankow to Wedding and eventually into the River Spree. It also runs past our house, so it seemed like the most logical (and traffic free) way to head north, following the footpath and the neatly painted signs that mark the route of the Panke Way.

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The hills above Belfast

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When I began this website back in December of last year, I knew only that I wanted to create a place that would be an interesting diversion for those who subscribed or stumbled across its pages, giving people the chance to explore not only places but also books, music and anything else, and hopefully inspire others to get out and search for what is there to be discovered beyond the front door. Many of the pieces have come from my own experiences, but one of the most gratifying things about Under a Grey Sky is the number of people who have contributed their own words, pictures and experiences to these pages, helping to create this virtual flea market of stories and images through which visitors to the archive can rummage.

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Through the forest to the lake: Tegel, Berlin

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We climb down from the U-Bahn and onto leaf-strewn streets of a distinctly French flavour. Here, where the French military were based during the years of occupation, the roads are marked “Rue” and the avenues, well, “Avenue” in a small cluster of a community on the northern fringe of the Tegel airfield. Most of the French community is gone now, and the doorbells and postboxes are labelled with suspiciously German names, but the site of neatly laid-out petanque courts of the “Boulodrome” remind us that we are in one of those places in Berlin shaped by the unique history of the city.

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Karl Marx Allee, Berlin

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On a fine autumn morning I was invited to join a tour exploring the architecture of “divided Berlin”, starting with the wonderfully grand and only slightly-preposterous stretch of Karl Marx Allee that was built as a showcase to the wonders of the newly-established and socialist German Democratic Republic back in the early 1950s. A few days later, when the boulevard was once again bathed in autumnal sunshine, we returned for a stroll and to capture its glories on camera.

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