Berlin Barnstormer

We've had the good fortune to travel to a lot of places we'd only heard about a few years ago.  Never thought for a moment we'd visit any of them.  Now that we have, we've got a short list of places we'd like to see while we're in Europe.  

Of course, we won't see them all and that's fine.  But there's one place we thought we should see - it's not officially in the top 10 most visited cities (yet), but you'd never know it by the article I recently read entitled "Help, the Tourists are Coming!".

According to the article by Frank Rumpf, published in Die Welt, a German newspaper,"European cities are fed up with the hordes of tourists that are threatening their quality of life."

The particular city I'm referring to is Berlin.  Although it's a 7 hour drive from our house, we've certainly driven farther than that.  But do we want to?

In 2009, nine million tourists visited Berlin.  In 2011, that number went to 10 million making it nearly as popular as London, Paris and Rome.  The newspaper article says there are "three tourists for every Berliner."

I kind of feel guilty about even wanting to visit this city that is obviously swamped with people like me.  But here's a little perspective . . . as the newspaper article points out - New York is the clear winner in terms of tourism with over 50 million tourists per year - more than the entire population of Spain!

So, New Yorkers may not have a problem with all the tourists, but Berliners, who seem to, can now purchase T-shirts that proclaim "I Am Not A Tourist."

They're in German, which won't mean a thing to anyone other than themselves, and that may be the point.

In a study by German consulting firm Roland Berger, most European capitals don't have a tourism strategy.  I guess this would be Berlin.  

But there's hope.  Hamburg, Germany.

Apparently Hamburg decided to capitalize on tourism rather than shun it and for ten years, it has grown to over 7 billion euros annually and furthermore, 96% of the residents say they don't have a problem with the tourists.

Perhaps we should add Hamburg to our short list.  After all, it's about 2 hours closer than Berlin and they're actually looking forward to our visit.