I had a couple of days of vacation and nothing much to do. Earlier in 2002, the Legoland Germany had opened, so I thought it might be fun to visit it. So I drove down to Güntzburg (where Legoland Germany is located) on Monday, visited the Legoland on Tuesday and drove back to Berlin on Wednesday.
The basic layout has 'Miniland' (which contains a lot of sightseeing attractions built from Lego bricks) in the middle, surrounded by the other park attractions, like two roller coasters, a 3D cinema, a castle, a water slide and various other stuff.
One of the areas in 'Miniland' features buildings and places from Berlin. Since I live in Berlin, this was the most interesting part for me, because I knew how the areas look like in real life and so it was easier to examine how realistic the things have been built.
I was quite impressed. If you remove the tell-tale signs from the pictures (like people standing next to the buildings), the photographs of most of the buildings look quite realistic on first sight. They sell a nice postcard of the 'Berliner Dom', which has been taken by night (so you can't see the area behind it) and looks almost exactly like a postcard from the real thing. Here are a couple of pictures from Lego-Berlin:
Among the other areas covered were Frankfurt and Venice:
Outside the sightseeing recreations in the 'Miniland', there a lot of other neat Lego sculptures. There is one 'Safari' attraction with a number of African animals, but there are also various animals scattered throughout the park.
There are also various other sculptures of other things, from knights to robots...
One thing that's very enjoyable in Legoland is that it's quite un-Disney-like. Stuff is much more
'down to earth' and less cuteified. For example, Berlin not only has 'nice' tourist attractions,
but there are also punks and drunks in the parks...
(It's hard to see, but the guy on the left has a bottle in his hand.)
...police vans are lurking around the corner...
...the Loveparade hits the streets...
...and there is graffiti on the walls.
If you look carefully at this picture, you will notice that there's a burned out appartment in the building on the right. They actually built barred windows and soot covered bricks from Lego. There are even some bits that have fallen off from the derelict facade. Quite an amazing amount of realistic detail.
And while it's not sanitized, it's at least sanitary...
This rabbit reminded me a bit of an old game called 'Wabbits Wevenge'. It has probably nothing to do with that game, since it's rather old and not that well known, but it also featured a chainsaw wielding rabbit.
Rather odd is also this nice and friendly looking granny with the book of pigeon recipes. I wonder whether this is supposed to be a warning to any pigeons trying to roost on the miniature buildings...
