6 posts tagged “berlin”
I just found a blog though another blog that had posted this Guardian article, which says that a chunk of the Berlin Wall was surreptitiously taken down (supposedly in one piece) over the Easter holiday to make room for a development. The article says that the infamous "Trabi breaking through" section was taken down, but it also says the missing section was in Potsdamer Platz, which the Trabi is not. Though this is sad no matter which portion was taken, I hope it wasn't the Trabi, among other reasons because it was part of an art project called the East Side Gallery. (The more I poke around, the more I think it is not the "Trabi breaking through" that I have seen. But still!)
The truth of the matter is that I did not take as exhaustive notes on my trip to the north as I did on my trip to Switzerland. Thus, this entry is likely to be unimpressive and uninformative. But at least it's free, right?
I left for Berlin at 7:20 am on Easter Sunday. I never knew this before, but Easter Sunday, being the end of lent, is apparently cause for much drinking in Germany. Between 6:30 and 7:15, no less than two people dropped and broke beer bottles in the lobby of the Regensburg train station. Speaking of unimpressive.
I was treated to some lovely former-GDR landscape on my trip to Berlin, and arrived at 1:06, approximately. I have yet to draw any conclusions about what's different in the East vs. the West. There do seem to be more abandoned lots covered in graffitti in the former East, but it doesn't really seem conclusive. I don't really have a point here.
Upon arriving in Berlin, I was pleased to see the train station properly attired in bunny-related photography. I hope they know how much I appreciated it. I got to Jess' boyfriend's apartment around 1:30, and after looking through a few guidebooks, Jess and I set out to see the Sammlung Berggruen, which neither of us have ever heard of. It was one of the more impressive and smallest museums I've ever been to, housing dozens of paintings by Picasso, Klee and Matisse on three floors. Though it was a pleasure to discover Klee, I was most impressed with the Picassos. The man did paintings in every style imaginable, and he was good at all of them. It's so funny that he's only associated with cubism. I definitely recommend it if you're in Berlin, just don't cross the line on the floor or the alarms will go off. A concept too difficult for many patrons, it seemed.
After the gallery, we toured the exterior of Schloss Charlottenburg before heading out to the extremely tiny Schönefeld Airport to pick up Gretchen, who was flying in from Barcelona. We traveled back to Mitte in an S-bahn car with this totally cool wallpaper:
The next morning we arose at 8:30, and hit the snooze button, an event which repeated itself numerous times until we got up around 10. Among other things not worth mentioning, we went to Alexanderplatz, thus achieving my goal for the trip. "Alex" was a great source of pride to East Berlin, and is/was home to the Fernsehturm, my second favorite tower in Germany. (the first being the one lending its name to my dorm). There was a little Easter market on Alexanderplatz, where I passed up the most beautiful cotton candy in the world. Make a note. In fact, tell my dentist.
We also saw a very tiny baby goat:
From there we walked toward Museum Island, intending to go to the Pergamon. On the way, Gretchen and I had our picture taken with the Marx & Engels statue near Alexanderplatz (I'm waiting for Jess to email it to me). We also saw the Neptunbrunnen ("Neptune Fountain"), which was not un-neat:
The third distraction was the "Museum Insel" market, which usually only happens on the weekends. It was a long stretch of flea-market style booths. Jess found this crazy book called something like "The World in Pictures" from 1927, which is this large, thin book, and on every page there are two topics, and three photos and captions related to those topics. What makes it truly bizarre is the topics, and their juxtaposition. For instance, there is one page where the top three photos are "Japanese Film Beauties", and the bottom three are "German Canoe Champions". They also have like, cactuses, horse breeds, Javanese weaving techniques, tribes of East Africa, German runners, mother animals with baby animals...it just goes on and on. She also bought a beer stein that has a bicycle bell built into the little silver cap on top of it. Again, bizarre. I bought a gift for Greg that shall remain a surprise. Yipes, that reminds me, I need to send some postcards! Drop me a line if I've promised you one and not delivered, or just if you want one.
Eventually we did get to the Pergamon, which is more impressive than interesting. Except for the multiple-stories-tall-ruins-of-the-ancient-world-reconstructed-indoors-in-Berlin, the museum is pretty standard for a museum of that type. I hate to say it, but the amount that my feet hurt is the clearest memory I can salvage. I'm glad we went, though, the temple altar and city gates were pretty neat.
After the museum, we had about an hour before we had to meet Sebastian at Potsdamer Platz, so we headed over there early to go up to the viewing deck of the Chrysler building. That's a good hidden jewel to know in Berlin. It's cool because you can see the MASSIVE Sony center from above, as well as the Reichstag, Tiergarten, Siegesäule, and Holocaust Memorial.
We soon started to freeze at the top of the building, and went back down to have dinner. I had potato pancakes with applesauce. Good stuff, that.
COMING SOON:
- Marianna and Gretchen travel to Rügen
- MARIANNA STARTS THE SEMESTER ON MONDAY! OHMYGOD! (I'm a little nervous)
First, because I know what is important, an excerpt from a letter from my wonderful Grandmother:
"Oh, did you know that your cousin Philip has just gotten a new job as an assistant to the brew master in a new brewery just outside of San Francisco. He just started this week and is very excited about it. He can help you brew your beer when you come home - Is German beer really better than our American brew Sam Adams?"
Nini, I couldn't tell you. That crazy German purity law only makes the beer pure, not necessarily good. There is a brewery here which shall remain nameless that has some pretty bad beer. My friend Manu says it's because their water source runs under a cemetary (!!!). As for Sam Adams, I am not yet of legal age to consume such things in the United States, and thus cannot comment. (He he he.)
Second, Berlin! I had a very different trip this time than last. I finally made it to Alexanderplatz, which is where this teaser photo is from:
All of my photos are uploaded if you are interested in checking them out without commentary. Due to a technical problem, they're all out of order. If there's an ocean, it's Rügen, if there are skyscrapers, it's Berlin.
Okay, another teaser from Berlin:
Third, Rügen! I still can't decide if it's a kitschy beach town or a classic, timeless resort or a wholesome family place with lots of swimming and hiking available. It's the little (relative to what, I don't know) island on the north-east coast of Germany, in the Baltic.
Teaser:
Just above and to the left of that gentleman's head you can see the famous white chalk cliffs, which we did not see up close, but which were, in part, made famous by Caspar David Friedrich's painting, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen.
Last, I must vent my train frustration. The German rail system continues to blow me away, both in it's relative efficiency and the scenery I get to see when I ride it. That said, I was on trains from 8:30am until around 4:45pm today. I left Binz (Rügen) at 8:30 knowing only my travel plans as far as Berlin, and was able to get a train to Nuremburg within the hour, and one from Nuremburg to Regensburg that left 10 minutes after I arrived. It worked out pretty well, with a few notable and sadly intertwined problems. First, on the train from Binz to Berlin, though I had a wonderfully reclinable chair and no seatmate, screaming children kept me from sleeping. Second, the train from Berlin to Nuremburg was extremely overbooked, and I spent the first hour to Leipzig sitting in the vestibule between compartents (not cars, it wasn't that bad). There were two of us in the vestibule, and a seat opened up, and the nice fellow sitting with me said "go ahead!". The problem was that right next to that seat was a woman with a cat on her lap. She had taken it out of its carrier and was petting it the whole time, in what was surely an attempt to spread dander throughout the enclosed, dubiously ventilated space. I kept hoping it might bite her and make an adorable attempt at freedom, so I could cheer it on, sneezing between fist-pumps. It did not, and I remained in the vestibule while the German guy took the open seat. After Leipzig, a space opened in the dander-free cabin, and I moved there. I soon realized that the vestibule had been about 134587986734867598 times better than the three screaming/yelling/arguing-punching-my-seat-reading-aloud boychildren in the seats behind me. Though I smiled on the inside imagining how my going BACK to the vestibule/roar of the engines might finally send the message to the parents that the glares of the entire section did not, I just couldn't do it. The ride was 3.5 hours from there. On the train from Nuremburg, I was again given the privilege of sitting in the vestibule, only this time with four other people, three of whom were also sitting. The fourth was a large fellow with seemingly poor balance who insisted on standing up the whole time. I could tell that the other three members of our little gathering (including his apparent girlfriend) were wondering, as I was, how expensive body casts are these days. Luckily spots emptied out readily at the first stop, and I didn't have to back to any German hospitals.
The important thing is that it's over, and that I had quite a good time on my second adventure. Tales to come, I suppose.
Courtesy of Kay
More like, wir sind nach Berlin gefahren, but the above subject line is part of a German World Cup chant, and was thus available on t-shirts.
There were a handful of things in Berlin that I had heard about since forever. The Berlin Wall is/was THE BERLIN WALL, Christo wrapped the Reichstag, I had a Brandenburg Gate t-shirt in middle school - it's just BERLIN and I've wanted to go there FOR. EV. ER. Thus, it was funny that we passed half these things on just the bus ride to the youth hostel. From the bus, we saw KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens), Ku'damm (the 5th Avenue of Berlin), the Siegessaeule, and the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedaechtniskirche, which has been left as it was, damaged by bombing during WWII.
There is so much history in Berlin that I'm just going to have to put links to most things because any information I gave would be essientially cut & pasted. Besides being drawn to Berlin to see all of these historical structures, I also wanted to go because about half of my favorite movie, Walk on Water, was filmed in Berlin. In fact, the first thing I recognized in Berlin was the autobahn rest stop from that movie. Not a single other person in the program has seen it, though, and nobody understood why I was excited.
The youth hostel at which we stayed was really nice. We were put in quadruple occupancy rooms, and I got to know some girls from my program (but not my dorm) a lot better. Breakfast and dinner were included, and while the dinners were a little dubious, the breakfasts were classic german cold-cuts, cheese, fruit and tea, AKA a good way to start any day. The first night there, Kay, Regina, Will, Rachel, Gretchen and I went out to a club on Ku'damm called "Q-dorf". "Clubbing" does not appeal to me at all, but clubs with karaoke rooms kind of do, and we sang along to a fair number of German songs we'd never heard before.
The next day was a three hour bus tour in the rain. It was pretty grey the whole time we were there, actually. The tour was pretty standard in content, though it did strangely omit the Brandenburg gate. It took us passed an innocuous-looking square between two buildings, and the Jess and the guide both said "Hey guess what, this is where Nazis burned books!". That's kind of what Berlin feels like. I'm sure it goes away if you stay long enough, but if you're there to try to see everything, you are constantly reminded of the really nasty things that happened in Berlin, Germany and Europe. To that effect, the bus trip ended at the Holocaust Memorial, constructed within the last five years, just south of the Brandenburg gate. At first, the memorial is pretty confusing, because it just looks like a bunch of blocks of concrete varying in height from 1 foot to 3 feet high, and you think you're missing something. And you are.
The center of the park under the memorial dips down, so where you see (above) blocks of about the same height, you are being misled, because some extend further DOWN than others. Still, its a little baffling what it has to do with the Holocaust. But once you're navigating the paths of the memorial, you can see it much better. No matter what direction you walk in, you'll see people crossing your path for an instant and no longer, and who knows how hard it would be to find them again.
After the memorial, we went to the Jewish Museum Berlin, which has very tight security. The museum (in my view) has three parts: the rotating exhibit, the Holocaust portion, and the 2000 years of Judaism portion (both permanent). The current rotating exhibit was called "Home in Exile", and was about German jews who left Germany between 1933 and 1941 when it became clear that they didn't want to stick around. It was very interesting, as that's not a story that's often told. Did you know that a few thousand German jews set up a community in Shanghai?. I spent almost all of the rest of my time in the 2000 years of Judaism exhibit. I learned about mikvahs! Perhaps the highlight of my visit was discovering a television playing scenes from the 1937 Yiddish-language film "Di Dybbyk", which I projected for the Yiddish club last semester. Anyway, I sent a postcard to the Yid club, so someone in the Bayit should probably check the mailbox. That night we went out to ANOTHER club, this time without a Karaoke room, and Charles and I bolted after an hour or so and went back to the hostel and ate peanut butter sandwiches. We thought we were going to be taking the train home, but the trains weren't running when we got out, and a really nice German guy helped us find the right bus and made sure we got on it. I thought that only happened in southern Germany.
I feel bad not included how good breakfast was in every one of these day summaries.
On Friday, we went to a Stasi prison in Potsdam. The tour guide lectured for maybe 45 minutes, beforeou taking us to one cell in the complex, and then wishing us a good time in Potsdam and disappearing. Kinda weird. Those Stasi, though, not nice people. You could go to prison for 10 years for looking at someone wrong, and they used really awful psycological abuse techniques to make people feel like they had no identity of their own and were alone in the world. The guide said that there are a lot of former Stasi prisoners in life-long counseling for it. If you've seen "V for Vendetta", those prisons are what this guy made it sound like. Potsdam, itself, however, is great. They've got a beautiful downtown that's a little touristy, but not too bad, and is perfect for walking around. It could maybe be compared to Camden, Maine? Kay got her eyebrow pierced, and I finally found a copy of "The Periodic Table" in German. Charles really loves bookstores, so we seem to go to a lot of them.
Also in Potsdam is the summer castle of Friedrich the Great, king of Prussia. The castle is called "Sans Souci", or without cares, because Friedrich really prefered France and French to Germany and German. He didn't own any books in German, only owned French art, and modeled his castle after Versailles.
On Friday night we went out to a play by Heinrich von Kleist (hero to the late German filmmaker R. W. Fassbinder) called "The Prince of Hamburg". It was pretty weird and didn't make any sense. Dad, if you remember "Faust 2000", it was a lot like that, but with no set. The only props were the costumes, and constant RAIN onto the stage. It had its high points, I suppose. After the play, the program director took us out for a drink and pizza.
Saturday was our last day there, and also the only day during which we had time to wander around. We started out with a walking tour of the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin, which was extremely cold and uninteresting (the tour, not the neighborhood). We then took the Regensburg-tour-bus to Prenzlauerberg, on the way stopping at the East Side Gallery. The ESG is a 1.2 km piece of the Berlin wall still standing, on which artists were commissioned to do paintings. The east side of the wall went un-painted for so long because the soviet government was strict about that sort of thing. So when the wall officially came down, a bunch of artists were hired to paint the east side of it.
We didn't do much in Prinzlauerberg, just went to an open air market. It was beautiful and smelled great, but we didn't really need anything from it, and the crowds were a bit much. Then we were unleashed upon Berlin. Word got around that Prof. Lee was treating us to currywurst, and so we all followed her to Konnopke's Imbiss, which is like, famous or something.
I will post about Munich II later, please remember to take a look at the additional Berlin photos and videos.
Hey everyone, I will post about Berlin (and Munich part deux) ASAP, but I have a really bad tummy ache, so I am going to try to make that stop before investing my energy in typing. Let me just say that Bavaria rules, Berlin drools and I would very much like to eat Weisswurst for a living.
All of my photos from Berlin are posted, but without captions. They're tagged as "Berlin" if you want to view only them.
