Berlin Berlin

I think my pictures in the attached album are fairly self-explanatory, but I’ll divulge the details anyway.

By the time we rode the S-Bahn back into the heart of the city, it was roughly 9pm and pretty much dark. We set off in a group of 11 (one of the Polish girls was meeting a friend in Berlin) passed the Reichstag to the Brandenburger Tor. After snapping pictures, we accomplished a feat once impossible for thirty years. We walked through it. Harry and I were the only ones that noticed the significance initially. We were among the very few who probably cared, too.

The group walked down Unter den Linden looking for a place to eat. Somewhere, we turned off to find a reasonably priced place to eat. We succeeded. The place we found was called Nolle. It had good food at good prices in a good atmosphere, situated under a train bridge leading out of one of the many stations in Berlin. Every 10 minutes or so, the ceiling would roar as another train rolled over. We thought it was cool, but I bet the staff at the restaurant has other opinions.

After dinner, we snagged one of the last S-Bahns back to our hostel and headed to our respective rooms. In the morning, we checked out.

Yup. That’s right. We checked out. Our fearless trip leader waited to book a hostel until the night before, even though the number of people going with was set a week and a half prior. At one point (three days prior), I took it upon myself to look for rooms, which I found, but was told to wait. And I waited, because I wasn’t about to book a place for that many people, only to find out some have issues with it and I get stuck with the price of 11 beds for three nights. So I waited. And they did too. And eventually we were left without a place to sleep for Friday night. We had Thursday and Saturday. No Friday.

The hostel was kind enough to let us leave our bags there since we were coming back for Saturday, but we could only get to them until 10pm. After then, the doors were locked and nobody was manning the desk. We ate our included breakfast, left our bags and set out to finally see Berlin during the day. Same thing as the night before. Passed the Reichstag (which had a massive line, so we opted not to wait to go up to the glass dome) to the Brandenburg Gate. It was there that I found out our fearless leader was set on following a walking tour listed in her guide book. I persuaded her to make a minor detour to see the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe sitting 300 meters (literally one block) south of the gate. Reluctantly, fearless leader followed.

Then it was back to the path, down Unter den Linden again, where we stopped to watch a group of break dancers perform, and on to Checkpoint Charlie. It was there that Monika and Tautvydas split from the group, sick of how slow we were blazing our trail. I would have joined them, but Checkpoint Charlie and one of the last stretches of the wall still standing nearby were on my list to see, so I figured I’d follow at least for a bit.

We checked out the Checkpoint Charlie museum which detailed the construction of the wall and the escape plans, attempts, successes and failures. Then there was a refusal to detour a block and a half to see the wall. “We’re going this way.” Which was passed the Germanischer Dom and Französicher Dom. Crossed the square where the Nazis burnt books by or about Jews, Democrats, Communists, and …well, basically anything that wasn’t Fascist. A clear, covered opening on the ground looks down into a room of empty bookshelves there. Then we eventually passed the Berliner Dom as well, on our way to Alexander Platz and the Fernsehturm.

We bailed on the line at the Fernsehturm after waiting half an hour. It was moving too slowly and we had to get back to no-longer-our hostel to grab our bags. The others planned on staying out all night at a club. After a day of walking the city, I was too tired for that; no way in hell was I about to subject someone dealing with jetlag to that torture. So Krista and I went our own way, walked thru the Tiergarten at about midnight and found two beds in a six bed room with four other sleeping strangers already there.

We were up and out by 10 the next morning and back to the original hostel to see if by chance our double room was ready. We were lucky. It was. We showered and set out well rested and refreshed. I texted the others to see what they were up to and how their night had gone. I received a reply that read:

"Wir sind Tot müde. Wir gehen zurück zu schlafen. Wir treffen uns vielleicht um 9 Uhr Abends."

So much for seeing as much of the city as possible (not that I’m still bitter about the train pass ordeal, or anything)…

Krista and I were happy not to have nine people slowing us down anyway. Day two started with a stop at the second of the three main stretches of remaining wall, further north where the former French zone was. It was primarily a stop for me so I could gather a picture of the reconstructed “death strip” display that stands there (for my presentation on the Wall i was giving on the Thursday of the upcoming week). Then we headed to Potsdamer Platz and ate lunch at a restaurant in the Sony Center. From there, we walked passed the first stretch of remaining wall that we had skipped the day before near Checkpoint Charlie. On our way there, we spotted an old watch tower that was left standing at the end of a dead end street. We walked passed graffiti artists at work on our way to the Jewish museum.

The Jewish museum was powerful to begin with. The basement floor (the first place you enter) was filled with individual stories of exile, survival, and tragic endings. At the end of the “axis of exile” was a door to the outside. It led to a sort of courtyard with a slanted floor and equally slanted vertical concrete columns. It didn’t seem like anything special at first, but the combination of tilts is enough to throw off your senses and make you walk like a two year old learning all over again. It was supposed to symbolize the surviving refugees’ task of adjusting to a completely new country, culture, and environment, wherever they ended up.

The rest of the exhibits were fairly boring but very throughout, starting with the beginning of Judaism and walking through 3 more floors of their history. But the museum is as much about the building itself as it was about the exhibits. The architecture creates eerie “voids” in the building that give a lot to think about.

When we had enough of the exhibits, Krista and I headed over the river to the Eastside Gallery, the third remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall. The eastside gallery is full of artistic displays, often political (mostly referencing freedom, peace, and unity), but not necessarily so. On our way back, I snapped a picture of Gleis 17, which I’d passed each day at the S-Bahn station nearest our original hostel. We called it an early night at 10:30.

Sunday morning we checked out. We threw our backpacks in a locker at the Friedrichstrasse station. Not the main station because the main one doesn’t have lockers. Just a left luggage desk with a massive line of people waiting to drop off/pick up luggage. Friedrichstrasse didn’t have any available big lockers, so I towed around Krista’s suitcase that she still had because she came straight off the plane to Berlin.

We made our way back to the Checkpoint Charlie area so Krista could purchase a souvenir she’d thought about buying and couldn’t get out of her mind after she initially decided not to buy it on the first day. Then we spent our last hour and a half walking through the Tiergarten by day, eventually following the river back to the Hauptbahnhof to meet the others for our 2:15pm departure.

The return trip cost just €7 each because it was a beautiful weekend. That’s actually the reason. In Germany, there’s a Schönes Wochenende Ticket for up to 5 people for just €35 and it covers the whole country for a Saturday or Sunday. So no need to buy the individual state tickets like they did on Thursday.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

At one time, one of my relatives posed for a picture like this: