I'm also a part of this blog post - at Claire's invitation. Currently we are in seperate places, Claire in London, me in Steenbergen. I'll add my comments in italics, like this one. Adrian.
we walked soooooooooooo much. we got to berlin on monday at about 11.30am, found the way through the city trains to our hotel. it was pleasantly, very impressive. we were welcomed by a blue-haired, blue-clad matron (i think she likes blue) who had a lot of younger minions running around after here dressed in white uniforms, similar to waiters. we were so surprised and impressed by the service, that being cynical, paranoid kiwis we worried that something dodgy was going on. my thought was that they were all part of a crazy sex cult and they were going to get us to join. but no, (unless they simply thought we were not physically worthy of joining their group), it was just good old fashioned service. upon arriving, our room was checked over while we were served coffee and mini-cakes and the blue lady explained some things to do in the city, using a map and rather impressive english. it was rather humbling i guess. our room was really good, the view out our window was of a ?? church. we didn't learn anything about it because it appeared closed but it was MASSIVE. i couldn't get over the fact that a church that massive wasn't a tourist attraction. later (probably when we get home), we will post photos so you can see.
Yeah, blue lady was creepily nice and helpful. I found it especially interesting that this massive church by our hotel wasn't even mentioned on any of the maps of Berlin we came across.
so, like i said, we walked a lot. my shoes are worn out. i was wondering why i was getting so many stones in my shoes, and especially that they were overwhelmingly gathering in my right shoe. then, when i realised i could pretty much feel every little bump in the road through my shoes (especially the right one), upon inspection i found that there are slits worn in the tread in the bottom. o well, new shoes when i get home :)
More shoes... oh geez...
packing berlin into 4 days is pretty hard out. we didn't go to any museums, since they require a certain type of energy and mood (which is often expended by walking a lot). some of the things we did (in order of most interesting, for me anyway):
- a free biking tour, led by a young, female british german/history major. she had very interesting stories. some of the things we saw were babelsberg square (definitely worth a visit) where there is a memorial to the nazi book burning fiasco, hitler's beloved opera house (that was bombed twice), the luftwaffe headquarters (which was not bombed - go figure), the site above hitler's bunker, remaining parts of the berlin wall, checkpoint charlie, the memorial to the murdered jews of europe and much more. the tour was awesome, and much to adrian's dislike, i felt the need to give the girl a generous tip, since they are voluntary and her passion (and humour) made for a very pleasant 4 hours (despite having a crazy spanish couple in our group who i swear did not once actually look where they were going). adrian and i mused about how in nz a biking tour would have to be preceeded by a safety breifing - road rules, helmets, lights, single file etc. in berlin, we just got on the bike. no helmet, no road rules. just 'remember, here we drive on the wrong (right?) side of the road' and your bike bell as your loyal guard. but it makes it more interesting this way :) Tipping isn't in my nature. If something costs "Tips only"then in my eyes it reads "Free". The brochure did say it was for all budgets, and I considered our budget to be on the smaller end of the scale, and yet I'm sure we were far more generous than the other people.
- i'm having trouble remembering the other things we did, alone, since for me the biking tour outshined anything else. i'll see what i can get, and adrian may fill you in on the rest. I'll post some things below.
- we went on the train to potsdam, a smaller city to the south-west of berlin. unfortunately this was a day that Claire was a little tired and being unfairly immature (i sincerely apologize, my love). we didn't really have a plan so we just kind of roamed around, had a bit of a walk through the gardens of the local schloss, went to a seemingly american-themed cafe for lunch... and not much else i don't think. Yeah, Claire really can be like a small child sometimes! Mind you, despite the hype about Potsdam from our tourist book, I actually found it fairly boring. After Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein I felt a bit schlossed out.
- shopping late at night at alexanderplatz in a massive shopping mall, got a few more presents (don't get excited, those who probably know they will get something - i haven't had much time to really get much at all), had dinner. I'm not really a souveniry kind of person, photos are good enough for me.
After adrian has read this, he can add his thoughts on berlin. i'll let him tell you about the excellent berlin transport system, with a possible fatal flaw in the ticketing system. Definitely defunkt ticketing system, I wish I had known beforehand. Between us we must have spent about €50 on public buses, trains and trams, but not once did anyone look at or ask for our ticket. The penalty for not carrying a valid ticket is €40, so you might think that provided you only get asked to show it only once a week, you'd be better off paying the fines. But my maths brain says that I can ride the transport about 25 times in 4 days and never once be asked, then in theory I could extrapolate out to riding the transport infinity times for infinity days and still not be asked. Still, Murphy's Law trumps the law of averages, so I still think it's a good idea that we paid our fares.
we got back to rheine on thursday at about 10.30pm. colin picked us up (thank you again!). on friday it was adrian's birthday and he had confessed that his only birthday wishes were 1) sleep and 2) to wear no shoes (our feet were very sore from walking so much). we slept in, but he had to abandon his other wish for a little while because we went back into rheine to do some last minute shopping before the wedding. I'm still hoping for a full day without shoes.
on saturday was claudia and colin's wedding. it was a lovely day, the weather was the best it had been since we got the germany. sunny, warm. i even got sunburnt (which is not saying much, my winter skin is very white). i think we will wait for next time for that report. I agree, this deserves a whole post.
love xxx
Photos to load:church
checkpoint charlie?
MMJ of Europe
potsdam schloss gardens
Extra thoughts about Berlin:
In general I found Berlin very interesting. There are some big cities in the world where you would struggle to entertain yourself for 4 full days. I came away from Berlin feeling that I still hadn't seen it all. We had heard good things about the various museums in the city, but given that we weren't hugely enthused about them and the queue for the Pergamon museum in particular stretched out onto the road, we gave them a miss. I figure we can see more of the city walking the streets for an hour than within the confines of a museum.
On day 1 we figured out our way to Checkpoint Charlie - the only inner city route between former east and west Berlin. It's a very touristy spot now, and I particularly liked the cleverness of the "Snackpoint Charlie" cafe next to it. As a country from the Allied side of World War II we often fail to think of the tragedy that the war really was for the civilian population of Germany. Sure, London and other parts of England got bombed for a number of dead civilians, but the whole of Germany got pretty much destroyed by the RAF and USAAF in return. Roughly 90% of all the buildings in all the major cities, both factories and civilian residents. Apparently the man who works at a munitions factory was as much a target as the factory itself. This is most obvious in the city of Berlin, which had a (understatement) difficult time after the war in which to rebuild. Even now the damage is still visible - although in part I feel that the people of Berlin like to leave it there to make English speaking tourists feel bad. The other notable feature is the city blocks that are completely neglected, with slabs of concrete haphazardly arranged and moss and weeds growing in between. We learned that many of these are former "Death Zones" from next to the Wall, which developers still haven't worked their way to fixing. Despite having the largest population of Germany's cities, Berlin is still one of the poorest.
Day 2, as Claire mentioned we visited Potsdam and did some walking around shopping malls. Potsdam is a satellite town of Berlin, and is where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt decided on how to split up Germany post WW2, amongst having other fancy people of history staying in the many fancy locations of the city. On our way home we had to walk from Ostbahnhof S-bahn (S = Stadt aka City bahn, as opposed to U-bahn for underground) station to our hotel at close to 10pm. We crossed paths with a group of men who looked like they had had a few drinks, which kind of set alarms bells off in my head since I definitely err on the side of paranoia as opposed to naievety. Given the number of people and tourists in Berlin, there was surprisingly little lighting at night time - we even saw some big streetlights that weren't even turned on. This marked the last night we would spend out late in poorly lit streets of Berlin.
Day 3 culminated in our city bike tour. An excellent tour that I would like to recommend to everyone. The morning of the day we went up the TV Tower, which is basically like the Sky Tower, except was built in 1969 in former East Germany. (FYI, east Germany used to be called the GDR, ironic, since it stands for the German Democratic Republic). The GDR wasn't exactly big on attracting highly skilled people like architects or engineers, so the TV Tower was designed by some Swedish people. This was a bit embarrasing for the anti-religious, anti-capitalist, communist GDR, with Sweden being a highly capitalist country. More embarassing still is the giant cross pattern that the sunlight gleams off the top of the tower - and no way for the communists to tear it down.
Day 4 we started off with an actual plan - to visit the Reichstag. This is the German parliament building, and includes a glass dome at the top where you can go up there, for free, and not only look over a large part of the city, but also down at the politicians while they work. This supposedly demonstrates the transparency of democracy, and if the politicians ever want to know who is in charge, they only need to look up. At the tourists. Unfortunately, a particularly cool attraction with zero entry fee attracts a large number of people. We queued up for an hour to get in, and only spent half an hour at the top. The rest of the day consisted of lunch and a visit to the open air (read: no proper building or gates, and therefore also free entry) museum describing the period of Nazi rule and (more understatement) descrimination against the Jewish people. We ended our time in Berlin with great big ice cream sundaes at the train station. Claire now has a passion for all things with cherries in them.
1 comment:
I'm so jealous of you people with your foreign travel and your crazy sex cults.
Oh well, at least I've got Spartacus. Apparently.
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