Around 3 million Trabants were produced by East Germany until the Berlin Wall fell. Sales fell as Trabi owners abandoned their cars and the company had to stop production.

The iconic Trabant, the most common car in East Germany, was manufactured by VEB Sachsenring from 1957 to 1991, Two years after the Berlin Wall fell, the company made the last “Trabi,” marking an end to its 3-million-strong production.

Equipped with a two-stroke engine, a plastic shell and two doors, the Trabi could hold four adults and luggage space. Because of its low-cost material – the plastic was made from recycled material, such as cotton waste – the Trabi was inefficient, easy to break down, slow and polluting.

Despite its problems, the Trabi was the only vehicle choice for East Germans. And to get one cost nearly an East German’s entire annual salary and could take up to eight year to make it through the waiting list for one of the four models.

The Trabi Museum in Berlin displays cars from various years of production.

Germany has the Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW, among others, but today, the Trabi still putters the roads of Germany, as well as countries such as the US, where it has become a collector’s item, according to article by the Wall Street Journal, based on nostalgia and historical significance.

A Berlin and Dresden-based company called Trabi World, rents the colourfully painted cars for city tours and runs a Berlin Trabi museum in the afternoons not far from Checkpoint Charlie museum, on the site of the former border crossing between East Germany and West Germany.

See a Trabant photo slideshow here.

In 2010, a cross-eyed opossum named Heidi became an international star after a German tabloid featured of photo of the creature. With more than 180,000 Facebook followers and a song named after her, the beloved creature lived until the ripe old opossum age of 3 in the Leipzig Zoo.

One of the oldest zoos in Europe, The Leipzig Zoo ranks first on travel-rating service Trip Advisor among the 132 attractions in Leipzig, the largest city in the German state of Saxony. And in September this year, it will host the annual conference of the International Congress of Zookeepers.

The 67-acre zoo, almost 1.5 times larger than Victoria Park in Hong Kong, houses approximately 850 different species in six themed areas. And in 2011, the zoo had more than 2 million visitors.

“I don’t know much about animals. I ask the kids to describe the colours and the appearances of the animals,” said zoo visitor Heun, looking for a disguised green lizard known as the Asian water dragon in the full-screen terrarium with his two boys. “They give some hilarious answers such as ‘ugly’, ‘I like it’, or simply ‘I don’t like it’.”

Stefan, a visitor to the zoo, feeds the ducks bread. Feeding animals at the zoo is prohibited.

Stefan, who visited the zoo alone, tossed some bread into a pond and watched a duck take the prize, beating out two smaller ducks. “You don’t often have a chance to come to this close,” he said.

There are few cages separating animals from visitors. For the big cats, visitors view them from an open platform, the roars on the other side of a 10-metre-wide moat causing children to scream.

Every year, the animals at the zoo consume more than 210,000 kilograms of fruit and vegetables.

But no animals here are tame, evidenced by the landing of a peacock in the middle of the pathway, the standing up of a hairy black bear and the riot of a group of monkeys.

An endangered Siberian tiger roams the zoo’s “Tiger Taiga.” The zoo has housed more than 350 of the Amur tiger breed since 1957.

Involved in conservation breeding programs for more than 75 animal species, the zoo recently had to put down a sick week-old Asian-elephant calf.

Click here to see a photo slideshow of the zoo.

Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived in Leipzig, Germany for 27 years and died there, has become the calling card for the city.

But 2 kilometers southeast of the Bach Museum and St Thomas Church, where Bach worked, is an inconspicuous three-storey house dedicated to another musician: prodigy Felix Mendelssohn.

Christiane Schmidt, Concert Department Director of the Mendelssohn House, says the composer is responsible for Leipzig’s reputation as a music city.

“Without Mendelssohn, Leipzig wouldn’t be the music city it is now,” says Christiane Schmidt, the Concert Department Director of the Mendelssohn House. “Mendelssohn brought Bach’s music back to us.”

Bach’s music was frequently played during services in local churches after the composer’s death in 1750 without attendants knowing who composed it, Schmidt says. But it was Mendelssohn who revived the name Bach and brought his music to concert halls.

The 20-year-old Mendelssohn conducted Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829. This was the first time Bach’s work had been successfully performed to the public for 100 years.

Despite international acknowledgement, Mendelssohn was criticized during his time for being too old-fashioned and also conservative. Mendelssohn’s contemporaries — Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz— were far more aggressive in departure from the tradition set up by predecessors such as Bach.

But for residents of Leipzig, Mendelssohn’s contribution to the city is indelible, Schmidt says.

Mendelssohn developed the modern symphonic orchestra system when he was conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, now a world-class orchestra, and founded the first musical school in Germany: the Leipzig Conservatory.

According to the Mendelssohn biography by Peter J Mercer-Taylor, a music history scholar from the University of Minnesota, Mendelssohn tried hard to persuade the then king of Saxony to have the conservatory based in Leipzig instead of the capital city Dresden.

Mendelssohn seemed to have a partiality for Leipzig. He declined the offer of a more prominent position in Munich and was reluctant to perform his duty in Berlin assigned by the Prussian king, according to Mercer-Taylor.

In his diary, Mendelssohn wrote that people in Berlin worked for themselves, while people in Leipzig worked for the country. The open-minded bourgeoisie culture in Leipzig at that time attracted Mendelssohn a lot, Schmidt says.

A monument to Mendelssohn, erected after his early death, was removed by the Nazi forces in 1936 and his works were banned from performance and publication because of the composer’s Jewish origins.

During the time of the German Democratic Republic, the government promoted German classical music partly as a counterforce to the rising street culture. With its rich musical heritage, Leipzig was treated as an important base for the campaign.

Later, in 1989, the then conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Kurt Masur, launched citizen meetings in the concert hall as part of the negotiation with the communist government. The ensuing demonstrations in Leipzig played a remarkable role in the reunification of Germany.

Nowadays the Mendelssohn House is the only museum solely dedicated to the composer. The building, located in a quiet neighbourhood just beside the new Gewandhaus concert hall, was the home of the Mendelssohn family.

Compared to the Bach Museum, the Mendelssohn House is smaller and less visited by tourists. “Mendelssohn might be not as famous as Bach, but his music is no less great,” says Jochen Jacobi, a university student from Hamburg. Jacobi visited the museum for a school assignment.

The Mendelssohn House holds regular concerts of Mendelssohn’s music as well as by other composers, such as Mozart and Beethoven.

Concerts featuring Mendelssohn’s music are held regularly in the house. Some people unable attend the special concert on Christmas Eve, Schmidt says.

Some attendants weep in sorrow during the concert, Schmidt adds. “But after they listen to the music for a while, you can see that they are smiling.”

The monument to Mendelssohn was reconstructed in 2008. Now it stands outside the St Thomas Church where Bach once composed hundreds of cantatas and masses. Visitors coming to worship Bach pass by the statue of the man who rescued Bach from being lost to history.

See a photo slideshow of the Mendelssohn House here.