Tear Down This Wall...a day in Berlin
- jill
- Oct 7, 2017
- 4 min read
As I ride the train from Prague to Berlin, I reflect a bit on all the train travel I've done over the past week. Some trains have food cars, some don't. Some have wifi, some don't. Some even have a food cart that goes down the aisles. Some have electronic screens to let you know where you are heading and where the stops are, some don't. They all seem exceptionally smooth. It is pretty easy for me to get motion sickness, but I never experienced it on these trains. I took one high speed train, and the rest were normal.
The countryside begins to change a bit as we head north. Lots of rain, of course, but also more trees (and more castles on hills). There was a river (the Elbe I think?) that ran alongside the tracks for most of the trip, which was really beautiful.
There were a few quick stops, then one longer one in Dresden, Germany. About 30 minutes outside Berlin, the train stops. For over an hour. I have no idea what was going on, since for the first time, they weren't doing announcements in English anymore (most trips did them in the native language and English), but only German and Czech. I don't know if it was a rain delay of some kind (it started coming down pretty heavy at one point) or something else. As it gets darker, I get more concerned since I have no way to let my airbnb host know that I am going to be late (and have no idea when I'll actually arrive). It is all very strange, as the trains here so far have been on time to the second. We finally pull into Berlin almost TWO hours late, and it is pitch black out (and wet).
I finally get to the airbnb and the host, Angelika, is clearly not happy and I don't blame her. I have a hard time explaining that there was no wifi on the train, and that if I had turned roaming on my phone it would have been prohibitively expensive so I could not let her know. She finally shows me to my room (nice one), and I head out for some dinner...a really good traditional Italian place, then back to my room for some sleep!
I went to ask Angelika about getting to the airport (and glad I did, because her info was better than the stuff on the internet), and wound up having a really lovely conversation. Her daughter is working on a degree in education, so we talked about the state of education in our respective countries. She also let me know that most Europeans do NOT think Americans are like our current president, and that made me feel better :-)
Got up and headed to the East Side Gallery, which is actually the longest piece of the Berlin Wall that still stands, and has been covered with street art on both sides. It runs alongside the Spree River, and features over 100 different artists. I didn't even make it all the way down to the end because it is so long! Also, it was cold and rainy, lol.
I then headed toward Alexanderplatz, walking alongside a wall that had some interesting pieces. Didn't find the artist I was looking for, though, sadly.
On the way to the Berlin Wall memorial, I stumbled onto this sculpture of Conrad Schumann, the East German soldier who defected to the West side during construction of the wall and was captured in a famous photo. The memorial itself is smaller than I expected...it has a small portion of the existing wall, and some memorial plaques, as well as metal stakes marking out the inner wall location (there was an inner and outer wall). One cool thing...the U Bahn station I exited from to get here (Bernauer Strabe) was ghosted (shut down and boarded up) from the 1960s-1990 because of its location to the wall.
I walked from here to the location of Hitler's bunker (now a parking lot after it was destroyed)...which is basically a sign. But better than this was the Memorial for Murdered Jews which features a huge swath of various sizes of marble stelae representing all the graves. There is a memorial museum underneath.
Made a pit stop here to enjoy more sausage, lol, and overheard a really obnoxious conversation at a nearby table. Americans really suck sometimes. I could see in the distance the Reichstag building (Parliament) and its cool metal tornado inside (so big you can see it in the photo), and something I've seen a couple of times on my trip...a tourist trolley powered by the folks sitting on it who pedal to make it move (there is a tour guide steering it). It also features a beer tap in the center. Drunken pedaling around Berlin? I wanted to get on that thing so bad.
Headed from here to the Brandenburg Gate and Checkpoint Charlie museum. Brandenburg Gate is immense, and beautiful. Checkpoint Charlie is a re-creation with a couple of actors in uniform posing with tourists. The museum is okay, but has SOOOO much stuff in it that is poorly organized and hard to navigate. Probably needs a larger building for all the things they have to make it more user-friendly. I did buy a couple of small pieces of the wall in the giftshop while I was there :-) As I was headed that way, I passed another large section of wall. Seeing these remaining parts of the Berlin wall have been one of the best things I've seen on my trip.
Knowing that I had a VERY early flight (720am, so I needed to be at the airport at 530), I headed back to the airbnb and had some of the most delicious pho I've ever had at a tiny restaurant on the ground floor of my building. It is at this point in my trip that I regret some of the things I didn't get to see thanks to my aching feet!
Impressions:
Berlin not what I expected....other than a few pieces of wall or an old building here and there, it is a mostly a lot of office buildings.
restaurants serve a LOT of food--it isn't just Americans who eat a lot!
birds come into some of the restaurants for scraps :-)
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