Brrrrrr-lin

The last leg of our epic fall break journey was Berlin. It was the city I was most excited for, and with good reason. I actually did enjoy it the most of the three. Maybe because it was the last stop, maybe because we learned more about the history there than anywhere else, or maybe it was just because I told myself it would be my favorite! In any case, it was a blast.

The first thing that struck me about Berlin was the fact that everything looked modern. I learned later the reason for this: 90% of the city was bombed flat in World War II. And I thought the Allied countries had bad WWII damage! Despite the lack of historical buildings (although there are quite a few), Berlin has a long and tumultuous past.

Before discovering the history of Berlin though, Eddy and Victor and I had to eat something. We wandered a bit away from our hostel (the Wombat, again) and found a Mexican restaurant. When you're with two ethnic Mexicans, a find like this is hard to turn down. And so we feasted on Enchiladas and Burritos and Nachos con Carne. Delicious, and the language barrier disappeared in the little piece of Mexico. Of course I didn't do the talking, but Eddy and Victor handled it.

After lunch, the girls had arrived and we settled into the hostel. It was as nice as I expected after having been to the Wombat in Vienna. Once again, the rooms were clean and there was a well-stocked bar. This Wombat though, which is newer, had a rooftop terrace and was connected to a Cajun restaurant. We all took a nap for a bit since we had such an early train.

When we got up, we checked out the Wombar, had some drinks there, played some pool and ping pong, and then decided we should explore elsewhere in Berlin...although we only made it to the restaurant next door before being tempted. The Cajun food was actually excellent. They had a great creamy/spicy fish soup, there was gumbo, and shrimp too. All very good, although my Mojito was really weak.

Since the restaurant took so long, it was pretty late by the time we were finished, and we decided to go to bed.

Our lazy start to Berlin is excusable, however, because we got up and got downstairs by 10:00 for the free walking tour of Berlin - in the RAIN. Very very wet rain. But hey, it was free.

Our tour guide was a scottish girl named Em, and she was great. She was full of energy, was clearly passionate about Berlin, and was very knowledgeable. She also included a good mix of fact and anecdote in her tour. We started off at the Brandenburg gate, which like most old things in Berlin has lots of white patches from where they fixed bullet-holes left by trigger happy allies and desperate Nazi soldiers.

The tour proceeded to the site of Hitler's Bunker (which has since been imploded). There is a small sign there that simply lets the reader know that Hitler's bunker was there. The reason for the lack of recognition is so that Neo-Nazis don't have a place to pay hommage to Hitler or have a meaningful meeting place. The Germans are very fact-based and upfront about their history, and you really get the feeling that they will never forget their past.

Other sites on the tour included the holocaust memorial, which was made even more potent by the gray sky and driving rain; the headquarters of the Luftwaffe (Nazi air force), which is one of the only examples of Nazi architecture still standing; The square where the book burning happened; and a bunch of other buildings and squares with interesting stories attached.

The Luftwaffe building had a mural of happy communist workers and women on it: an example of East German communist propoganda. In the early days of East Germany, when quotas were doubled for workers and wages remained the same, a group of workers came to the Luftwaffe building, then a communist administration building, and stood in protest of the new standard. The guy in charge was in the building, and got scared, so he called the military, who proceeded to fire into the crowd and kill hundreds. That was the first protest against communist rule in East Germany and would be the last until the 1980s. Now, on the ground in front of the building and directly opposite the propoganda mural, is a photo of those protesting workers. It's exactly the same dimensions as the mural, but it's in black and white as opposed to color. It does a stunning job of contrasting dream and reality in Communist East Germany.

Yet another example of the Berliners remembering the past is a certain memorial. It was at one time, under the Nazis, called the memorial to the victims of Bolshevism (favorite enemy of the Nazis). Then, under the communists, it was called memorial to the victims of Naziism. Go figure. Now, the memorial is justly called the Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny. It is a simple, open room made of stone with a statue of a woman holding her dying son in the middle. The artist was a woman who lost her son in WWI and her husband in WWII.

We also so pieces of the Berlin Wall, and Checkpoint Charlie, the sole entry point from West to East Germany during the divide. It is where American soldiers and Soviet soldiers literally stared at each other all day across the border, the face-off point of the Cold War. There were second story cafés on each side that soldiers from the US and the USSR rented out to sit and spy on each other all day, so that each was spying on the other spying on them. Ridiculous. Em also had some hilarious stories about plans people cooked up to get across to West Germany (not many people were trying to sneak into the East).

After many more stops, the tour ended on Museum Island (great example of the German tendency to call things what they are and not embellish them). Half the group ducked out halfway through, because the cold and the rain really were quite the obstacle to enjoying the tour. It was a struggle to get through, and by the end my hands were shaking. I think it was Victor, Carly, Martha and I who made it through.

After a well-deserved hot shower at the hostel, and a short rest, we decided to take advantage of free museum night on museum island. We saw lots of old Egyptian stuff, Greek stuff, Roman stuff, whatever. To be honest I'm kind of museumed-out. It was unremarkable.

After the museum though, we ended the trip in a big way. We went up into the "TV tower." It's this spacey-looking needle thing that's really really tall, and was built by the Soviets to demonstrate how advanced they were, except that this was when they were clearly beginning to falter. They actually had to sneak in Swedish architects to finish the job because they couldn't figure out how. But we went up there, and the view of Berlin at night was amazing. We could see spots from our tour and thousands of lights twinkling below. We had a few drinks at the bar up there, and thought about how 30 years ago, soviet generals and politicians probably drank at the same bar.

It was a really cool way to end Berlin. One thing Em said about the city really resonated with me. She had already talked about how crazy it was that the city was separated, how families couldn't see each other for decades, how people in the east weren't allowed to be in groups of more than four in the street, how 1 in 6 people on the East side were informants, etc. It was a really dark time. Being there and hearing Em talk about it had a big effect on me. But she also said that it's one of the most exciting places to be, because it's really only 18 years old. The city has basically just been reunited, and there is still an explosion of construction and development. It has a very young feel to it.

The next day we had an afternoon departure on EasyJet back to Paris. We remembered, though, something that Em said: seeing a concentration camp, although not the most fun thing you will do, is probably one of the most important things you will do. So, being very proactive and a bit risky with our time, we decided to take the train out to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp about 35 km north of Berlin. It was the first one, and it was where all the other concentration camps received orders from.

The train ride up was nice. It took us a little while to figure it out though, and we stopped in a little town outside Berlin for coffee while we discussed whether to continue figuring out the train or to just take a taxi. The town was very small, and the people were as nice as the people in Berlin. Everyone seemed nice in Germany!

Anyway, we made it to the camp via train and had a couple hours to walk around. It was creepy to say the least. Seeing the roll call area, the dorms, gunning towers and razor-sharp electrified fences, it all made you wondor how anyone could think it was the right thing to do. Madness.

It was so quiet there. It sounds fake to say it, but you could feel something in the air, you knew something terrible had happened there. Seeing the prison inside the camp was scary too, and there were big wooden stakes in the yard with hooks on them where they would hang prisoners to torture them. The worst part of it though was Station Z, where they executed prisoners. It really did make your stomach turn to look at it. All that was left were foundations and metal pieces like the cremating ovens, but I could see it all in my head as it was before. They had awful ways of tricking the prisoners to cooperate up until the moment they were killed.

One thing I didn't know about the camp was that the Soviets used it in a similar fashion after they defeated the Germans. They housed German soldiers there and treated them almost as poorly as the Germans had treated Jews, Homosexuals, Catholics, and other "undesirables." It was really disgusting to see that people sometimes don't learn from the past, and a clear lesson that you can't fight fire with fire. Everyone gets burned.

We had to rush a bit back to Berlin and to the airport, and after ending the trip on such a serious note, there wasn't much conversation on the plane. Fall break as a whole though was such a blast. We saw so much in so little time. I was in 4 countries in one week. Taking into account the Madrid trip of the weekend before, I was in 5 countries in two weeks. I was exhausted when I got back to Paris.

But, I only had a little over a week to recover, because the next weekend it was off to Amsterdam!