Everything is under construction.\u00a0 The Germans can spend plenty on their infrastructure because they do not have a large military and they are not (too) afraid to pay taxes.\u00a0 They did not have a military after World War II (remember, they were occupied!) until they entered NATO in 1955.\u00a0 That greatly helped their post-World War II recovery.\u00a0 After reunification, they inherited a large army from the DDR.\u00a0 They have been downsizing ever since, and now the military is a fraction of what it was before.<\/p>\n
One humorous commentary\u00a0I heard\u00a0on a German newscast was about Donald Trump\u2019s remark about Belgium: \u201cBelgium is a beautiful city\u201d.<\/p>\n
All of Europe is soccer (football) crazy with the European championships, which are held every four years. \u00a0After we walked past the crowds watching soccer on outside TV screens, we strolled to the banks of the river Spree, which in the daytime is teeming with tourists, but now was peaceful and quiet.\u00a0 Somehow that was a fitting good-bye to the city.<\/p>\n
The train trip from Berlin to Rotterdam went smoothly.\u00a0 We had a scheduled change of trains in Holland.\u00a0 Our next train was scheduled to depart two minutes after arrival of our first train.\u00a0 But our first train arrived three minutes early, so we had a whole five minutes!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Everything is under construction.\u00a0 The Germans can spend plenty on their infrastructure because they do not have a large military and they are not (too) afraid to pay taxes.\u00a0 They did not have a military after World War II (remember, they were occupied!) until they entered NATO in 1955.\u00a0 That greatly helped their post-World War … Continue reading “June 17: Random Impressions of Berlin and Germany”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pjgardner.com\/travel3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}