Travel Maven blog

Oasis of the Seas, a Floating Island, says TIME

The $1.4 billion megaship--the largest passenger ship ever made, with room for 6,296 guests--is nearly half again as big as the last biggest cruise ship, RCL's Freedom of the Seas. She's as big as a supertanker or a container ship. Flatten the deck and you could launch F-18s off it. If you were sitting on the 20th floor of a high-rise next to the ship, you'd be able to talk to the sunbathers beside one of the pools.

via www.time.com

This is the best reporting on the cruise business I've read. If you wonder why the cruise industry keeps building huge new ships, such as Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas, read on.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1945368-1,00.html#

Germans celebrate 20 years after the Wall

As Germans celebrate this next week and the world watches -- 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain -- here are some Internet sources for remembering, with maps, pictures and perspectives. 

You might start with my series: Remembering the Berlin Wall and Cold War, including ideas for travelers to explore Eastern Germany and Berlin, experiencing old lives, chills, and fears. 

Others I recommend:

Twenty years later, how Germany has healed the scars of the Berlin Wall.

You may comment on the Berlin Wall Twitter site.

Take a historical and geographical journey of the Berlin Wall through the memories of those whose lives were shaped by it.

Cycling the Berlin Wall, a peaceful ride where guard dogs once roamed

Museums where you can see glimpses of life under communism

The Trabi revived as an electric car

"Wind of Change" is the anthem most associated, cigarette lighters aloft, with the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this November 9.

Vacations in Germany, planning a trip

Germany, the revolution of candles and prayers

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his seventh blog.

Eastern Germans remember 1989 as the year of the big surprise.

Decades had rolled by without much reason for hope of democracy. Then, in a matter of months, the old East German regime fell apart, and freedom arrived overnight.

Most of the world did not know in 1989 that the Cold War of more than four decades was crawling toward an end. The Soviet Union -- a collection of countries tied forcibly to communist Moscow after World War II -- was collapsing economically, though that, too, was kept under wraps.

Meanwhile, the people of Soviet-dominated countries such as East Germany, kept taking baby steps toward freedom.

Germany, lies and dreams east of the Iron Curtain

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his fifth blog.

Behind old enemy lines, Germans have stories to tell. 

Delightful cities of music and religious history, such as Eisenach and Leipzig, offer also a journey through the old East German world of hidden bunkers, secret police and a life so fearful that  citizens didn't dare let their children talk at school about family time at home. They feared any talk might lead the police to arrest them for social violations or government taboos, such as watching television shows beamed from the west.

"We lived a lie," said Ralf Paesler, an environmentalist in Eisenach, about 170 miles southwest of Berlin. 

Paesler said that in East Germany, when you walked out your door, talked on the telephone, wrote a letter or discussed anything in public, you presented yourself as a good, enthusiastic citizen in the repressive society of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR). 

Wartburg Castle, above, has dominated Eisenach for nearly 1,000 years.

Paesler must have been persuasive, as he tested government authorities when he claimed he was a conscientious objector to war -- this in a country that didn't recognize objections of any kind. 

Somehow, said Paesler, he managed to get through more than a year in the army without touching a weapon. He said he learned the concept from what he heard about America during the Vietnam war.

Germany, when East met West on peaceful soil

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his fourth blog.

In late October 1989, when there were two Germanies, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, sent me to West Germany to write articles for the Travel Section. Dour East Germany, behind the  Soviet Iron Curtain, was not much of a vacation destination.

During the first week of November 1989, I wrote that some residents along the Iron Curtain believed that the border fences, in place for more than than 40 years, would fall by Christmas.

Molyneaux in Berlin, November 1989

Folks I interviewed said citizens on both sides were ready to cross the border, and they believed that security personnel would not stop them. Before my story was published in Cleveland, German wishes came true.

On Nov. 9, Berliners scaled the hated wall. On Nov. 10, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain demanded that highway gates be opened and began tearing down border fences where country roads once met. Not a single border guard fired a shot. 

On Saturday, Nov. 11, I joined thousands of Germans who streamed through new holes in the fences to find neighbors and villages they had not visited in decades.

Germany, along the old Iron Curtain

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his third blog.

For today's young travelers who zip around Europe, where borders of countries sometimes seem irrelevant, Germany in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s may be difficult to comprehend.

Germany was two countries. Down the middle of what we now know as Germany, for 865 miles, was a highly militarized border with fences and walls, dogs and soldiers, cameras and machine guns. The border -- marked by what nations of Western Europe called an Iron Curtain and the Eastern Soviets called anti-fascist protection -- was the result of the end of bloody World War II. 

On both sides of this border, armies with tanks and missiles prepared for World War III.

Today, the border is gone, and Germany is unified as one country. Travelers can gain a sense of the past along the old border, in an area about 100 miles west of Berlin. These Cold War sites are an easy day trip from Berlin, Germany's capital, and most can be reached by train.