Tag der Deutschen Einheit / Legoland

October 3 happens to be a holiday in Germany. If you are like me, you have no idea what this holiday might be. It happens to be The Day of German Unity (Tag der Deutschen Einheit) which commemorates the anniversary of German reunification in 1990. Pretty awesome day to celebrate. I'm old enough to remember an East and West Germany. I remember when "the wall came down" in November 1989. I'm sure I've even watched a bad movie on Lifetime Television about a someone trying to sneak across the border from East to West Germany. Now that we live in Germany, we figured we should celebrate reunification, too. So The Gale Family did what any good German would do: we went to Legoland!


We actually had grand plans for travel. With Wednesday being a holiday, we decided to take Thursday and Friday off as well to make a really long weekend. We were to go to Legoland on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, Lucern on Friday, Strasbourg on Saturday, and then home on Sunday. Unfortunately, Carter became sick and we ended up canceling the trip and so we came home on Thursday.

We did, however, make it to Legoland for about 2 hrs on Wednesday and even became members (free to go back!!!). Despite being under the weather, Carter was a trooper. He had a blast. I can only imagine how much fun he'll have when we go back and he's feeling 100%. I spent the first 30 minutes at the park in "Miniland" snapping pictures of the mini city replicas. The detail was just fascinating. Many cities were represented (Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, Venice), Munich Airport, and even Neuschwanstein Castle.

Coolest thing, by far, at Legoland was Allianz Arena. It's a scale replica of the Munich football stadium and it took over 1 million Legos and 2 years to build. The pics here are hard to see as I didn't want to make them huge and take up too much space. For better resolution pictures (and the rest of our Legoland photos) click here.



** On a side note, I'm not sure there was much celebrating by the Germans for the actual Tag der Deutschen Einheit. As far as I can tell there were no fireworks, no backyard BBQs, no patriotic inspired outfits, no German flag waving. Perhaps the "growing pains" are still being felt and it puts on damper on celebration. Estimates put the cost of reunification at roughly EUR 1.3 trillion. The areas that were formerly part of East Germany are still trying to recover economically...unemployment can be as high as 25% in some industrial ghost towns.