BERLIN!

Okay! So this is going to be two posts (one per city) because they’ll be long, especially with pictures.

Caught the 8:20 train which ended up 15 minutes late along the way causing me to miss my connection in Nuremberg by 5 minutes… and thus I had to wait another hour for the next one. Not so thrilled with Deutsche Bahn. But I eventually got on the train and headed north! Nice scenery on the ride actually. Very sunny outside (figures since that was the day I was on the train… it snowed the other 4 days). Lots of windmills and we even passed through a very hilly/low mountainous area (which I knew where that was…). Got to Berlin at 3:05 and hopped a subway to the hostel where I dropped my stuff off and met up with Amelia who’d gotten in a few hours earlier. It was around four by that point. We decided to walk down to Potsdamer Platz, which is the commercialized (modern?) square of Berlin (the Times Square, I guess). She’s an architect so it was a hot spot. It’s got some cool buildings including the Sony Center which is a bit movie theater but has a really cool roof and open air center before you reach the buildings. It was freezing as the sun went down so we stopped for hot chocolate before circling around to the Opera House and walking along the Tiergarten (City Park) and over to the Reichstag. This is the German parliament building. It has a glass dome at the top and it’s free to go to the top to look out over the city or, from the top you can look down and see where parliament meets. Of course it was 8 by this point so the city was dark and parliament was not in session, but it was still pretty cool. Going late we missed the usual hour plus queue to get in. From there we headed back to the hostel. Went to bed early that night but woke up at 7 on Wednesday. Plan was to take the free walking tour (what I did in Amsterdam). We decided to walk through the Tiergarten to get there since the pickup was on the other side at 10:30. It was gorgeous in the snow but absolutely freezing. The Tiergarten has, along with lakes/streams/statues/momuments/fountains, the Siegesäule (victory column) in the center and the home/office of the Bundespresident. Made it to the tour pick-up, which was… a Dunkin’ Donuts. Not even kidding. They have taken over Berlin. Almost as many as in Chicago. We defrosted with hot chocolate and a donut, then set out again, with the tour. The tour took us to all the main places. The Brandenburg Gate, of course, the famous Aldon Hotel that Michael Jackson dangled his baby from, the Jewish memorial (which is a really cool memorial, by the way)… we got to see fragments of the wall all around the city, Checkpoint Charlie (the most famous cross-over between East/West Berlin), the parking lot that stands above the bunker Hitler hid out in, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church- it was bombed during the war and they decided not to restore it and instead rebuilt the church in a very modern style directly next to it). The French and German cathedrals are identical and face each other. The Berlin Cathedral is the massive one and very impressive. We saw the location of the book burnings and the memorial to them (you can look down into an underground room at that point. The room is completely empty except for empty bookshelves that would have fit the 25,000 books that were burned). We also met Ampelmann (Stoplight man), who is the apparently quite famous East German version of the stop/go at crosswalks. He’s so well known that West Berlin adopted him after reunification and there are entire shops dedicated to him (selling t-shirts and the like). The tour ended on Museum Island which is home to about 5 museums and isn’t really an island… the river just runs around it. From there we walked down to the Jewish museum, which is both a very impressive building in general (just looks really cool) and definitely worth the 2,50 Euro it was to get in! (Berlin has great student discounts just about everywhere). It covers the history of the Jewish people but there are a couple areas dedicated to the holocaust. See facebook photos if you can for some pictures/explanations. After that we ended up going to a dinner party. Amelia had randomly met someone she knew from New Zealand in the London airport (she’d been to London the week before flying to meet me in Berlin). This guy, Alex, is currently living in Berlin, two blocks from our hostel actually, and invited us over to his dinner party. The food was quite good and it was a lot of fun to talk to his friends, a lot of who were from England actually. That was a bit of a late night. Thursday, we split for the morning. Amelia wanted to go to Dessau, 90 minutes away by train to see some architecturally famous buildings. I headed to Schloss Charlottenburg, which is Berlin’s palace. I have to say that I wasn’t that impressed, but at this point, I’ve seen a lot of palaces and it was very pretty but no more impressive than Nymphenburg in Munich. From there I headed up to Alexander Platz, which is just north of the museums and the Berlin Cathedral. That’s where the TV tower is (which you can go up, but I’ve also been up a lot of tall things in Germany and the TV tower isn’t that tall/special considering), the Red City Hall (yes, actual name), another church, the Neptune Fountain (big fountain of the god, Neptune) and the Radisson Hotel. I read about this online. It’s got an elevator in it that is surrounded by an aquarium. It’s supposed to be really cool, but unfortunately was the way to get to Berlin’s SeaWorld, and the elevator world was not worth the 13 Euro entrance fee. From there I met up with Amelia and we went up north to an area of shops/cafes/restaurants Alex had recommended. We got dinner at one and then went to Museum Island. See Berlin keeps its museums open till 10 pm on Thursday evening and for the last 4 hours they’re all free!!! Turns out this isn’t completely true… the Pergamon museum (the one I really wanted to go to) had a special exhibit so it wasn’t free, but we went anyway and it was definitely worth it. First we went to the Altes Musuem which has the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti and a lot of hieroglyphics. Very cool. The Pergamon has the reconstructed Pergamon Alter, Ishtar Gate, Market Gate of Miletus and the Mshatta Facadeetu, all of which were collected from their native homes in the Middle East many years ago. Very cool. One of my favorite things in Berlin actually. It’s a very different museum just because the “artifacts” are all huge. By the time we got out it was after 9 and we were exhausted so we headed back. Friday morning we woke up early again to subway down to the East Side Gallery, which is the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall. It’s a little less than a mile, I think. Berlin hired artists to come in and paint it with their own idea of freedom (the opposite of the wall). Now it’s so covered with graffiti as well that it’s hard to tell what’s original and what’s not, but the graffiti isn’t bad, it’s more just the public’s idea of freedom, which is kinda neat. I had been told by at least 3 people to try to make it to Potsdam, which is about 30 minutes away by train, just outside of Berlin. It’s the “City of Emperors” and has over 70 palaces apparently. We decided to take the tour offered through the same group that does the free tours just because the free tours were so good. It was 12 Euro but since we had no idea what to see in Potsdam we figured it was worth it. Well, unfortunately it was raining in Potsdam and really, really cold… and our tourguide was doing the Potsdam tour for the first time. And there were just two of us. Amelia and I. The result was that the tour was probably not that good of an idea. (it also ended up taking 6 hours instead of 4…). Potsdam, however, is a cool place and definitely worth it. We saw about 7 of the palaces, and in his favor, we did learn a lot about the history of the place. I think if he’d had a little more practice, we’d moved a little faster and the weather had been a little nicer (I’m sure spring there is gorgeous…), it would have been worth it. Anyway, we got back close to 6, which killed my afternoon plan of the Checkpoint Charlie museum. Instead, I decided I wanted to go check out the Berlin Cathedral. Normally there’s a 3 Euro entrance fee. I don’t pay 3 Euro to go inside European churches. We did, however, read, that there’s free entrance for the prayer time from 6-6:20. Perfect. Our tour guide tagged along as he hadn’t known this and hadn’t yet been inside. Turns out “prayer time” means service… oops. Still worth it. Amelia and I headed home and picked up some food in the supermarket. We’d met a couple of Australian girls at the hostel and had decided to cook dinner together. Afterwards the four of us went to check out Berlin’s night life… and when they say Berlin has quite the night life, they mean it. We stepped into a cool looking bar/club only to find it almost completely empty. We asked the bouncer when it started to get busy. This was around 11:30pm. His answer? “5 am”… riiiight. Well, we won’t be around for that… We eventually found a place that was actually busy. Very busy in fact. We didn’t stay late because we were all tired, but were glad for the experience. Amelia was taking a very early train to Cologne so she could meet a family friend in Düsseldorf (30 minutes away) for lunch. My train was at 11, so I slept in till 8, checked out and then walked around the city for a bit. And the next section of my journey, Cologne, will continue in the next post.

Pictures:
The Berlin Cathedral!
A section of the Berlin Wall
The Jewish Memorial (or translated, "the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe")
Me with the Brandenburg Gate
Schloss Charlottenburg
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche
Me at the East Side Gallery (with the Berlin Wall)