Berlin
I’ve wanted to go to Berlin for a long time. Something about it’s history, the architecture and the culture of the place.
So after a couple of years of procrastination I finally stumped up the cash for a three night break in the Mitte district of the city.
Flights were from Glasgow with Easyjet and frankly they were unremarkable, clean and comfortable enough. After landing at the airport getting to the city proved easy thanks to the fabulous berlin-brandenburg public transport system. An express train every half hour takes you to the main city train stations and from them you can get the underground, the suburban rail, the trams or the busses. I changed at Friedrich Strasse station and took the U6 to Zinnowitzer Strasse station and there I was a full minute’s walk from my hotel.
The hotel deserves special mention – a huge room, with an enormous bathroom and rather nice continental breakfast thrown in for less than £45 a night.
The afternoon I arrived I wandered down from the hotel along Friedrich Strasse, which is now a seriously upscale shopping street – I made it past Unter Den Linden (Berlin’s Champs Elysee) and to the Gendarmenmarkt which is a stunning square with twin cathedrals at it’s north and south ends with a large Concert house in between. It’s pretty stunning. I got the U-bahn back to the hotel after a while and ate at Oscar Wilde’s Irish Bar that night. Actually a pretty low key bar with football on the telly and burgers on the menu. Can’t say it was the best meal ever but it was certainly filling.
Next day I was up and ready for the one thing I had planned – an all day walking tour of historical Berlin. This was an amazing experience lasting over 9 hours which barely left East Berlin and covered only about 400 years of German/Prussian history in the process. There was too much information to ever convey adequately in a brief post but to stand in streets where the Nazis pulled teenage Jewish girls out of their school and sent them off to die in extermination camps or in Frederick’s Forum where Frederick the Great had the Catholic cathedral built next to his opera house to show his religious tolerance (being nominally a Lutheran king) which is also where the Nazis burned 20,000 books in one night and there are two memorials, a small bronze plaque marking the event with a quote from the 1820’s by a German philosopher “He who burns books will eventually think to burn men” and the other is an underground room that holds empty bookshelves enough to hold every book burnt. So bloody powerful. We ate at a turkish kebab shop round the corner from Checkpoint Charlie and saw the largest remnants of the wall left. I stood on top of the bunker complex where Hitler killed himself. We ended the tour in front of the remodelled Reichstag in the pitch black with spotlights in the sky and the buildings lit up because of the festival of lights.
I spent the rest of the evening in a tex-mex restaurant for a drink with two folks from the tour – a guy from Bellingham, WA and a girl from Canada. German beer is good…
I got up late the next morning, sore from the walking and muzzy from the drink. After grabbing breakfast I made my way to West Berlin. The western half of the city is so much tackier. The result of being a commercial centre for 60 years, I guess. I strolled down the Ku’damm which is another upscale shopping street before realizing that the shop I wanted to see – KaDeWe – was in the other direction. KaDeWe is the largest department store in europe and has the most amazing restaurant level on the top floor. After browsing the shops I got the 100 bus which takes you on a circular tour of the heart of the city. I eventually got off at Unter Den Linden again and headed back to the hotel for a mid-afternoon snack. Where I promptly fell asleep until 5pm! I scoured the area for something to eat but ended up chickening out and having a Subway for my meal.
Friday was a case of packing up, checking out and heading back to the airport cos my flight was at 12.30.
Anyway amazing city – never got to see any of the museums I fancied, chickened out of the local food, hardly shopped. So I need to go back to get more of the place. It’s the first city I’ve visited abroad where I thought ‘I can see myself living here’. Oh well maybe if I win the lottery, eh?