Berlin, Germany
Trip Start
Apr 11, 2006
1
14
26
Trip End
??? ??, 2007
Berlin,
Germany
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
This is not the shortest of entries, not only because we stayed in Berlin longer than any other city of our German/Czech excursion, but also due to the fact that this city absolutely rocks. There is no reason besides it not being on the beach (or that I don't speak German beyond telling someone from Bavaria to take their pants off - read the Stuttgart part for explanation on that one), and of course for being so far away from all you people, that I wouldn't move there in a heartbeat. Now, on to why...
After a train ride that was ½ very nice and peaceful and ½ very tainted by obnoxious girls (assumedly from the US) right behind us, we arrived in what has to be the fanciest and most awesome - certainly the newest - train station in the world. Berlin's three-week-old Hauptbahnhof (for those of you not paying attention to the previous German lessons, this is the main station) is glitzy, shiny, enormous, and very functional. It is also quite a shopping mall, with everything from a pharmacy (apotheke) to restaurants to clothing shops, and more. Germans don't seem to be crazy about it due to its position in a largely unused area of town and the fact that instead of the lockers you would typically find at a train station, it has a luggage check room staffed by Deutsch Bahn personnel (these rooms apparently have been known to result in confusion and delayed or even lost bags). While it is located in a part of the city where not much development has happened recently, I'm sure its presence is enough to generate some new activity there, and we had no problems with the luggage retrieval system.
A quick S-Bahn (commuter rail, but with more frequent stops and closer-in to town than US systems) ride later into what looked like a pretty seedy part of town (Friedrichshain) due to the glut of graffiti, we walked about ten minutes to the Sunflower Hostel, at which we had reserved a private double-bed room for €45/night.
01 Hauptbahnhof
(We'd soon realize that the graffiti did not indicate anything in particular, especially a lack of safety - it is pervasive throughout the city.) We arrived and were well pleased with the lobby, the staff, and the general feel of the place. Our room was spacious and spare, with only a bed, a small table, two chairs, and a stand-alone closet, giving us plenty of space into which to explode our packs. The mural on the wall depicted a shootin' cowboy sheriff with a large chin and a cigar in his mouth being chauffeured, along with a large eyeball with a duck's head, by a horn-honking skeleton in a fire-spitting blue convertible with a '50s look about it. This unlikely trio was on its way to, or possibly from, a spooky, Scooby Doo-looking mansion behind which there was a large blue-gray moon. While this wouldn't seem at first to be the best scene for inducing sleep, it didn't bother us much.
We again dumped our bags and fled the hostel for food, using happycow.com's Berlin list as a starting-point for vegetarian fare. The man at the hostel's reception said that one was close and very good, so we made our way across the Spree River to Kreuzberg. Looking at the map, I noticed a park that was just a bit out of our way en route to the restaurant, so we detoured through it. Though I can't recall the name, this was the most densely-used park I have ever seen, including New York's Central Park and the large park near Victoria Terminus and the university in Mumbai (it was also possibly the worst maintained park I've seen).
02 Sunflower Hostel
People, mostly immigrant families (Berlin is said to have the third-largest Turkish population outside of Turkey) and young hipsters, were everywhere inside the park, which featured more dirt where grass once was than actual lawn area. Many had picnics and were playing soccer, some, despite the warm and sunny evening, were boiling tea on outdoor grills, and others were just enjoying the last hours of daylight in their weekend. Lots of people took advantage of the park's walking and cycling paths, as we were constantly being overtaken by bikes and moving sideways for people with strollers.
Near the end of the park, we passed a very cool outdoor-indoor café in a newly-remodeled building that looked to be a former warehouse or possibly train depot. Then, after noticing some kids playing on a concrete slide that was surely not very comfortable, we saw what we thought was our first glimpse of Der Mauer - the Berlin Wall. This was a thoroughly chilling experience, but we soon realized that we were well into the former East Berlin, not very close to where the wall would have been.
A couple minutes later we found Yellow Sunshine, a great (veggie/vegan) burger and sandwich joint with plenty of outdoor seating and organic beers. The young woman at the counter was very patient in explaining, with some difficulty herself, nearly all of the various choices on the menu. I think she and the man working with her were happy to practice their English, something that most Germans are very good at and quite happy to prove.
03 Park
Along with my weizen, I ordered a fake-chicken burger with fries; Meredith ate a veggie-version of the German specialty, currywurst (a big sausage). Filled with good food and still quite tired from our Munich-to-Prague-to-Berlin scurrying, we quit the restaurant and sunk into our comfortable bed back in Friedrichshain.Several weeks before arriving, we had decided to start our time in Berlin with a good broad surface scratching by going to Fat Tire Bike Tours. After our Fat Tire tour in Paris, during which we took a great evening ride through town and then cruised the Seine (wine provided), we were allowed a bit of a discount, so with our student IDs and FTBT Paris brochure, the admission was €14 each (when we go to Fat Tire in Barcelona, tickets will be cheaper and we'll get free T-shirts). Although the tour itself wasn't as informative as our Paris trip, our guide seemed to be more genuine and less of an actor than the one in France. We saw basically all of the sites in Berlin and stopped at a biergärten for lunch and beers in about four hours, so no complaints. For volunteering to keep watch in the rear of the group (you can guess what the nickname for this position was) and make sure everybody was still with us, I got a free beer and a free piece of the Berlin Wall, authenticated by I don't know what means. The tour gave us a great base of interesting things to see over the next few days, and provided me the opportunity to sit in the lap of a full-size-and-then-some statue of Karl Marx.
[A brief history, as best I can remember - skip onward if you know lots about or have little interest in Berlin: Upon the Nazi surrender, Germany was split on a North-South bearing, with the various Allies assuming responsibility for control, oversight, and rebuilding of their territories - this was largely to ensure that a resurgence of National Socialist politics did not occur.
04 Park
The former West Germany was further split into sections under American, British, and French control, while the East fell under the Soviets' watch; this would have put Berlin, the city that was said to be key to controlling Germany, which in turn was seen as controlling the future of Europe, entirely in Soviet (communist) hands. Upon realizing the disproportional power allocation, the Allies carved out their own small parts of Berlin and the Soviets retained the Eastern half. As reconstruction began to accelerate in West Berlin, the eastern part of the city in comparison seemed (and indeed in reality was) glum and undesirable. The subsequent ex-migration of East Berliners to the West led the Soviets literally to put up a wall prohibiting East-West travel of any kind without proper papers, cutting off husbands from wives, brothers from brothers, and children from parents.] Immediately after the tour, three Brits from the Newcastle area (who cycled with us) joined us in going to the outdoor Topography of Terror museum, an overview of life in Germany during the Nazis' reign and the resulting war crime trials. The museum itself is situated along part of the Wall in the "death zone" of former East Berlin, which existed in the space where one would be shot for trying to escape into the West, and is free to all, as are audio guides in several languages. The museum gives phenomenal, horrific insight into what life might have been like at that time and in that place (especially for Jews), and provides pictures and even audio from the trials of Hitler's chief strategists and implementers.
05 Park
Its only fault is that it offers perhaps too much information and spans too great a range of subjects to really enable visitors to comprehend fully all areas. We parted ways with our new friends upon leaving the museum and asked the guard, who indicated that he could speak a bit of English, whether he knew where any of our happycow restaurants were located. Funny enough, he responded completely in German and, although very nice about the whole affair, was not helpful in the least. No worries, time to grab some pizza and a Budweiser (the Czech one, not the American) and move on to the Reichstag, the restored German house of parliament. The great draw of the Reichstag, or Bundestag, is that visitors can take the (free) elevator up to the roof and examine Berlin from above, then walk up the ramps inside the new glass dome on top - allowing a view straight into the parliamentary chamber. This was constructed in 1999 to allow the entire world to look in on the German democracy and make sure that all is well.
Interestingly enough, the Reichstag and the nearby historic Brandenburg Gate are just about the center of Berlin's World Cup "Fan Mile" (imagine that happening near the US Capitol in DC), a huge circus of everything football-related. This is where you can go and watch the game on several colossal televisions when you don't have tickets, and if you have enough time to show up four hours early (recommended to us by the person at the gates). Maybe later...it was definitely time to ride the rails back to our hostel, and soon enough we were happily asleep.
06 Spree
Next morning, after eating our €3-worth of breakfast each at the hostel, we decided to visit the Checkpoint Charlie museum, right next to the former US Army entry/exit point. This place is possibly one of the quirkiest museums I've ever seen, probably in part due to its non-profit ownership. It covers a lot of history, but most notable are the various methods by which people tried to get themselves out of East Berlin. Necessity is the mother of invention: a famous musician tucked friends into large amplifiers, a group of families stole away in a hot-air balloon, one man created the world's first personal submarine (which was later sold as a kind of toy) that he used to get to Scandinavia, a woman hid her son in a pull-cart bag, and all sorts of automobile modifications were performed to sneak people across the border.
We had lunch at another veggie restaurant in Kreuzberg, this one more creative and just a bit less hipster than Sunshine. Afterward, we strolled by architect Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, which for all its hype is not a very impressive-looking building, on the way to see the Berlinischer Gallery's modern art. A well-designed structure, if not outstandingly attractive, this museum is a fine place to see an interesting and varied range of works. As with most museums of modern art, many galleries are large enough to fit sizeable sculptures or series of paintings - this openness contributes to the flowing, accessible atmosphere of the place. In addition to the typical features of this kind of museum, the Gallery features an architecture viewing room and a neat outdoor matrix of yellow letters that form various (Germans' ?) names.
07 Fat Tires
But our mutual favorite was the collection of different artists' work arranged in small boxes that functioned like drawers in a kind of chest. Nearby are two tables with chairs, and visitors are invited to pull out any or all of the boxes to look, listen, feel, smell, or otherwise sense what is inside of them (or outside - some used the box itself as the canvas). Notable inclusions were two boxes with portable tape players with Philip Glass-style compositions, another full of candy wrappers whose contents had assumedly been consumed by visitors, and some kindergarten-style dioramas. The exhibit stated that a German artist had contacted lots of her artist friends and others in an effort not only to create an interesting, interactive experience for visitors, but also to provide the opportunity for the artists to market themselves (many included catalogs of their work).
After exiting the museum, we walked around in search of the outdoor graffiti gallery that occupies the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall, but couldn't find it. Looking back now, I know that we did and just didn't realize it. Returning to the hostel for a quick change of clothes, we walked to a neighborhood bar next to another hostel for the Germany/Italy semifinal match. Though we showed up over an hour before game-time, we were two of the last people to actually get seats. As we planned on eating dinner at this place but they were not yet serving, I ran across the street for some take-out pizza and returned with plenty of time to strike up some conversation with a couple of international forestry students from different parts of Germany.
08 Me n' Marx
The prediction was a German win after a tough game.Unfortunately, they were only half-right. Though the Germans and Italians fought like hell in a nil-nil tie for the full ninety minutes of regulation and most of the half-hour of overtime, the Azzurri put in probably the best goal of the Cup with only a few minutes left before a shootout would have begun. Then, with the Germans playing all but one of their men up front, the Italians struck for another goal in a one-on-one situation with very little time left. Thus, after possibly the game of his life, German keeper Lehman was defeated 2-0 - one goal attributed to sharp-shooting and the other to lack of defensive assistance. The city was quiet and Berliners were obviously depressed, in high contrast to Munich after Germany sent Argentina home just several days earlier. This was easily one of the best games of the Cup - right up there with, if not better than, the France/Spain quarterfinal (both ended up two-goal wins after tightly contested play).
The next morning, things had not changed much in Berlin; in fact, it seemed that three quarters of the city had still not left their homes by the time we arrived at Museum Island, an attraction itself for its classical architecture and layout, around 11 in the morning. We stopped for lunch and then hit the Pergamon Museum, featuring ruins of a temple from the eponymous ancient city and lots of other ancient or at least aged art and artifacts.
While the temple, in addition to Babylon's massive Ishtar Gate, were truly amazing, fantastic, and basically impossible to explain, the museum really was an overload of old stuff.
09 Da Bears n' Mere
Certainly worth seeing for these two parts alone, the other standouts from the Pergamon, in my opinion, were some old atlases and globes from the middle part of the last millennium. Looking at some of this cartography, you might think that these people had a bird's eye view of the planet when they went to work - the accuracy, and also the beauty, of their work is astounding. For these reasons, even though the Pergamon is a bit pricey (though only €5 for students), it is well worth the admission - just don't try to "get your money's worth" by seeing everything there is to see unless you're especially interested.Next up was a trip to Schloss (palace) Charlottenberg, but not before Meredith got her picture taken with old Karl. Just touring part of the grounds of this expansive complex built as a summer residence for Queen Charlotte took us about two hours. Though the landscapes are not maintained to such a high standard (but better than most other parts of Berlin), the gardens, plazas, fountains, streams, ponds, and paths provide a very pleasant, serene, and free atmosphere for strolling around, bicycling, having a picnic, or walking a dog. We were thankful for a particular high-spouting fountain when the wind picked up and gave us the opportunity to catch some spray to counter the excessive afternoon heat. The palace itself is open for a pretty stiff fee to the public, but the interior was not high on our list of places to see before leaving Berlin that later that night (very early the next morning).
Needing a place to watch the France/Portugal semifinal, and assuming that the free Fan Mile wouldn't be packed full with people, we hopped back on the bus, then on the S-Bahn, and returned eastward.
10 More Bears
We found enough room for our two rear-ends to fit on the concrete base of a large light post within sight of a viewing screen, and I was off trying to squeeze myself into a game on the free foosball tables nearby. Within a few minutes a fellow American who was standing around alone and I were playing a couple of (probably) Turks. Twenty minutes or so later, we had won both games we played and decided that it would be best to go watch the game featuring actual human players running with legs rather than little plastic guys with metal rods through their torsos. I invited Kip to come sit with Meredith and me, and we watched the entirely boring game under the lamp post.Afterward, we gave Kip our street and transit maps, on which we had marked plenty of useful locations like our hostel, the nearest falafel stand (which we never visited), internet cafés, etc., and parted ways, wishing him a good stay in Berlin. We reluctantly made our way to the Hauptbahnhof to catch our overnight train to Köln (Cologne), scheduled to depart sometime around 12:45. The Hauptbahnhof was even buzzing at just around midnight, but most of the racket came from jubilant France fans celebrating the Blues' victory. Sure enough, the Inter-City Express train arrived on time and we were yet again off to see things new and interesting.
Anyone considering going to Berlin should buy their ticket right now. This is one of my favorite cities in the world, up there with Cape Town, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, and Toronto, even with its huge disadvantage of not being coastal or near mountains. Berliners (the people, not the jelly doughnuts) are amazingly friendly, the urban form and architecture is world-class in certain places, and the amount and quality of tourist activities, while absolutely overwhelming, does not overshadow the city itself - something I couldn't say for Prague or Paris. It's rare, but I think we could have stayed for weeks without really seeing all there is to see, though in the few days we were there, we got a pretty decent impression of what living there might be like. This is why Berlin is such a welcoming place.
Our biggest mistake in Berlin was buying the tourist pass - discounts on museums plus unlimited transit. The transit part was great, and you should get it if you're traveling to Berlin, but the discounts make no sense at all if you're paying student fares (discounts virtually always only apply to standard entry). The best part, I think, was just walking around the city, especially Kreuzberg, a great transitional district I wouldn't mind living in, with a little bit of everything and a pretty sizeable population of people. As far as tourist things, you can't go wrong with the Checkpoint Charlie Haus, despite or because of its chaos. If you go to Berlin, you will not be disappointed.
