Ich bin ein Berliner

Berlin has been a place I've been interested in seeing for quite some time.  Just the history and seeing the city, and meeting the people were something that I wanted to do.  So, we get off the train in the middle of the city right next to the river.  And we don't know exactly where we are going since we're trying to find an AirBnB and stay with someone that we've never met before.  We decided to walk across the bridge to get out of the station and get a bite for lunch.  So we end up at a place called the Capital Beach.  Beach must mean something something completely different in Berlin than Hermosa.  There was no sand, and we were sitting next to the river in a out door restaurant listening to techno music.  It even had a dance floor with laser lights going... at 2:30 in the afternoon.  Strange... but very German.

Let's back up a minute, we got up at 5AM to get on the train from Amsterdam to Berlin. It was nice and peaceful until we got about 2 hours from the city when a tour group  of German teenagers all pushed onto our train and started screaming at each other.  It was kind of crazy to hear all these kids yelling at each other in German and not knowing a word about what they said.  But the teacher or chaperon or who ever came over to us and said something in German, to which we both just stared blankly.  Then, "English?" and we said yes. and turns out we were in their seats.  So we figured out what our tickets meant and found our seats, who happened to have two Scottish guys in them that were in town for the German-Scottish soccer match.  They looked at us saying, "Oh sorry, can you read these tickets?"  So we showed them what they meant and they moved to their seats.  So that was really our first intro to Germany, this Capital Beach thing was no big deal.  

We went walking through the part of town known as Mitte.  It's in the dead center of town, oddly Mitte is German for middle.  And it's a pretty interesting part of town as we will come to find out.  

We find our place and meet our host, Julia.  She's nice, but I'll admit that staying in someone's place that you don't know at all is a little odd, but you get used to it.  Kind of like that first week of moving to college and meeting your roommate for the first time.  You don't really know what to make of it. 

Luckily there's tons to do in Berlin, so we just took off right away and walked by the Berlin Dome, a giant cathedral, and down the river Spree to the East Side Gallery, and our first introduction to the Berlin Wall.  

The East Side Gallery is the longest existing part of the Wall.  They use it as a gallery for street artists.  The East side is officially sanctioned by the city to bring in artists from all over the world, the west side is open to anyone to decorate as they see fit.  

We caught the train back to our place stopping by the local fusion burger joint on the way.  It was a very tasty burger in an Umami burger kind of way.  Again with the mayo for fries, gross.  And then we go back and get some sleep.  

The next morning, we get up and go to meet up with our tour.  I must say if you have never done one of the New Europe Tours, do one.  It's a great way to get a lay of the city and walk through to see what is going on and where things are.  

So we start at the Brandenburg Gate.  And our guide, Leo, tells us some humorous anecdotes about the French Embassy and we continue our way to the Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe, quite an explicit name.  

One thing that you notice as you walk through Berlin is the brick pathway through the city, that shows where the Wall laid when it existed.  So as you walk around town and you cross this brick path, you realize that you are crossing between East and West Berlin.  It's kind of crazy to see it split a road, or a sidewalk and realize that for almost 40 years, no one could continue the way you were going.  

 And this isn't ancient history, if you're reading this post, chances are this happened in your lifetime, and most definitely in your parents.  That's the part that kept blowing our mind.  A bit like the "Integrated" schools in Northern Ireland, this isn't stuff that happened long ago where you can think, "Oh, people were crazy way back when."  This is now.  Dividing a city and loved ones with a concrete wall.

Anyway, back to the memorial.  It's simply 2,700 blocks in a square in town.  The Architect apparently has never disclosed the meaning behind it, leaving it for interpretation by all that see it.  There is no plaque telling you what it is, it's just these dominant gray blocks covering an entire city block, left for every to make their own judgement about.  Walking into it is easy enough, and the blocks are slowly rising to be above head height.  But soon you are in a forest of blocks and you can't see which way you are going or if people are coming at you in the next intersection.  It's crazy, you see kids running through playing tag, and people trying to find their way through the thing.  So for me, it really represented the confusion that these people must have felt.  You become completely disoriented inside the thing.  You have no idea which way you are going or who is coming from which way, or where your family and friends are.  The only thing that is certain is the sky.  It's quite an eerie feeling.  

From there we went around the corner to see an example of Nazi architecture, the Luftwaffe HQ.  Crazy to me that when 90% of the city is left in ruin, the one major building that survives is the headquarters of the Nazi Air Force. Seems to me that might be a pretty strategic place to bomb. But, for what ever reason, it made it through WWII relatively unscathed and it shows a lot of the arrogance and sentiment of the Third Reich.  Instead of concrete, they built their buildings of marble so that they would stand for thousands of years and when the Nazi empire took over the world, people would come back and marvel at these ruins the way they do in Rome or Athens.  Weird to think that was a possibility.  But now it's the headquarters of the German Tax Board, I guess it's just meant for evil.  

Then it was on to see Hitler's bunker in the middle of Berlin.  Except that you aren't going to see the bunker, it's about 90 feet underground.  And so that there would be no memorial to him, they've left it pretty nondescript and it's just in the middle of a parking lot. 

Then we went to Checkpoint Charlie, a place where people were allowed to visit East Berlin.  Again the bricks were laid in the street so you can see where the wall was.  But this time, the actual wall was destroyed and the checkpoint was torn down in the aftermath of the wall falling.  Since everyone came to Berlin asking where Checkpoint Charlie was, they put up a Disneyland equivalent full with male models in US military uniforms to take pictures with. 

Then we finished with some churches, boy I don't need to see any more churches.  But our guide was pretty great, so we decided to take another tour with him in the afternoon.  This time it was about the "Alternative" side of Berlin.  No, not the alternative lifestyle side, this was about the counter culture that has been around Berlin since before the fall of the wall.  It included seeing a lot of the street art (graffiti) and explaining some of the squatting culture.  Because when the wall fell, almost everyone left East Berlin, there were tons of vacated buildings everywhere, so artists, and vagrants moved into east Berlin.  And because West Berliners were not required to do the mandatory military service other German residents were, many artists and free thinkers came to the city.  Graffiti and street art has been such a part of the culture in Berlin since the fall of the wall, it's actually decriminalized and almost encouraged in parts of the town.  People from all over the world come to Berlin to see it, and Berlin is the street art capital of Europe, Sao Paulo is the capital of the world, NYC would be for the US.  It really let us look at graffiti in a new light, very cool.  

The next morning we headed out to another part of the town to see the last remaining portion of the death strip.  This was the 50yd barrier between the inner wall on East Berlin and the Outer wall, which is what all of us consider the "Berlin Wall".  Again, seeing the city divided right through a side walk is crazy.  And seeing a guard tower, so they could watch the wall and were given orders to shoot on sight anyone attempting to cross the wall.  I guess 120 or so people were actually killed attempting to cross the wall.  One was even shot in the death strip and lay there screaming in agony while people from the west had to watch helplessly and the guards did nothing.

But, one of the more fascinating parts we happened upon by accident.  Getting back on the s-bahn (Berlin's Subway, which is super easy to use by the way) we saw a bunch of photos and monuments in the station.  Turns out we were in a "ghost station".  Since Berlin was a rather developed city they had a subway system since the early 1900's, but when the Wall went up, the trains didn't obey the new borders.  There were trains that ran from west Berlin, under east Berlin and back to west Berlin.  So those stations were closed, and the trains just went screaming through them, not stopping and the only people in the stations were East German guards.  The guards kept escaping so they actually locked them into bunkers to keep them on watch.  The east Germans also walled up the stations and pulled down all the signs of them being stations as to not let the public above know there was access to the West below.  

FYI - if you want to know what side of the city you are on just look at the cross walk guys:  

East:

 West:

So enough with the history, we had a blast in Berlin.  We didn't really go out partying or clubbing, but we spent some time wandering around the Tiergarten, Berlin's central park.

We also spent a lot of time wandering around the huge TV tower that was built by the Soviets to remind the westerns of their dominance.  It still stands today as one of the most iconic images of Berlin, long after the Soviets ironically.

But one of the most fun things we came across was a street musician playing great tunes in a section of town called Alexanderplatz.  It was fantastic, with everyone just enjoying the music right outside the train station.  

Berlin has a great energy, it feels like anything is possible when you are there.  It's a feeling that you can only get from a city that has rebuilt and re branded itself countless times. It's a beautiful feeling of resilience, it's really hard to put into words.  It's a super international city, hell we ate sushi our last night there, and it felt completely natural, not forced like some other places.  There are cranes everywhere building new super modern buildings. Berlin has to be the newest old city in the world. It's very organic and changing, and we both absolutely feel in love with this city. And it definitely lived up to my expectations of my top place to visit.  I think our guide put it best, "Athens will always be Athens, Paris will always be Paris, but Berlin will never really be Berlin."