Berlin

Our latest trip was a quick two night jaunt over to Berlin.  Apart
from a stop-over in Frankfurt, this was our first time in Germany.  My
first impression was that they had a lot of space.  Germany is a large
country, and it's the largest economy in Europe, surprisingly it's GDP
is almost double that of the UK or France. We flew into Schoenefeld
International, which is located in former East Berlin.  We jumped on
an S-Bahn train (overland, faster train), then switched onto a U-Bahn
train (underground) to get to our hotel.

Our hotel was in north-central Berlin and was relatively close to a
U-Bahn station with an irrationally long name.


I was excited to find out that a breakfast buffet was included, so we
took full advantage of that the next couple of mornings.


We had booked this trip, simply because it was cheap.  For two nights
at the hotel and flights from Stanstead airport it cost us 99 pounds
each.  Because of this, we had a Friday evening flight into Berlin,
and a Sunday morning flight back to London, giving us only really one
full day.  So to pack in as much sight-seeing as we could we did what
we rarely do.  We joined a tour group.  It was a four hour
walking tour of all the main sights in Berlin.
Our guide spoke better English than most of us and had obviously spent
a lot of time in North America, and not England as he said things like
"Parking Lot" instead of "Car Park" and "Wash rooms".  He knew his
history extremely well gave a great history of city.

The tour started at Zoo Garden and then went over to the east side.
Interestingly enough, the former soviet controlled east side is now
much nicer than the west side of the city.  This is because the
soviets didn't rebuild much of the city after WWII, so when it because
capitalist in 1989, unified Germany spend trillions of euros on
rebuilding half of the country using modern architecture and restoring
old buildings to their original style.

The west side had already done this decades ago using 1950s and 60s
architecture and technologies, while contending with little things
like soviet blockades and a large wall surrounding their capitalist
island in a soviet sea.


The east end also has nearly all of the grand ancient buildings of
Berlin.  Because the soviets were the first to occupy Berlin at the
end of WWII, they got to choose first which quadrant of the city they
wanted.  They chose the historic imperial section with all of the
major buildings.  While the French, British and Americans got three
other sections which consisted of mainly suburbs.  The French, British
and Americans later merged their quadrants into what became West
Berlin.

Berlin itself was in eastern Germany, which was soviet controlled.
But because Berlin was the economic power-house of Germany, it was
deemed fair to also divide that city up to the conquering nations,
which is why East Germany had this anomalous little capitalist
section.  Only fear of nuclear war with the USA kept it from being
annexed by the communists.

Our tour brought us through Museum Island.  All of these buildings are
still riddled with bullet holes from nearly 70 years ago!


Restoration of these buildings is still ongoing, but you can see the
progress and the horizon is dotted with cranes slowly rebuilding after
years of neglect.


We visited the square in front of Humboldt University which is the
location where the Nazi Brown-Shirts stormed in the library and pulled
out 20 thousand books from authors that they didn't like and burned
them in a large bonfire.

Under the spot where the fire was lit, they've now built an
underground memorial to this incident.  There is a glass hole in the
centre of the square that looks into an empty, white-shelved library
that would hold 20 thousand books.

When we went back later than night, there was an older Italian woman
looking down into the empty library and she said in heavily Italian
accented English, to someone beside her, "Those sons-of-bitches".
Which probably sums up the feelings of a lot of world.

We saw the Brandenburg Gates, which used to be located in the "Killing
Zone" between the Berlin wall and the razor wire 100 meters away,
before the wall came down in 1989.


There is now a small brick line that traverses the original path where
the wall stood.


We then saw the Holocaust memorial, which was very neat.  It was 2700
concrete blocks of varying sizes, setup so that when you walk into
them, you get lost in the see of blocks and can' see out.  The ground
goes up and down and it looks very stark.  There was a lot of thought
and symbolism put into it's design.


There was an old blown up church from WWII in the very centre of the
city, left to show the folly of war.


The location of Hitler's Bunker is now a park.   There are no signs or
anything to commemorate the location of where Hitler killed himself
when he was surrounded by Soviet troops, its just a parking lot and a
little grass field and a playground off to the side, surrounded by
communist housing blocks.  Our guide said that it was fitting that
here is where people bring their dogs to poop.


The tour went on and on, and we learned a lot about this history of
Berlin.  One interesting fact that I thought was amazing was the
number of different governments Germany has had over the last 100
years.  In the early 1900s there was a monarchy, which was ousted
after WWI and replaced by a Democratic republic, which was manipulated
by the Nazi party and turned into a Fascist Dictatorship.  Then in
part of the country there was a repressive communist regime before
finally moving to a democratic capitalist government. Where else in
the world has there been so much systemic change in government in a
100 year period?

Berliners certainly have two great things going for them.  Beer and
Brockwurst.  Both are very yummy.  We had to cover our beer to keep
the little leaves from falling into our glasses, and the Brockwust
vendors gave you the oddest little buns with your sausage.


The transit systems, including the buses, trams, S-Bahn and U-Bahn
where amazing.  Perfectly smooth trains (nothing like the teeth
rattling London underground), and always on time.  Which is good,
because they will be hosting the World Cup next month!


It was a lot of fun, I just wish we had a bit more time.  At least we
know it's a place that we'd like to visit again.

Our next trip is a 6 night boat tour of southern Croatia.  We fly out
to Split, Croatia at the end of the month before traveling around
Italy and Switzerland in an uncharacteristically long trip, before
flying home for good in mid June.

Here are all the Berlin pictures.