The Berlin Blog

Posted on by Gaenor du Plessis

My darling friends,

I started this last Tuesday, and wrote and wrote and wrote, until I checked the word count.  At 2700-odd words I figured you’d sooner delete this post than attempt to find the time between fighting kids, working, and everything else that is more exciting! SO I pressed Ctrl, A and Delete to spare us all.  (Okay, I did that after transferring my mad scribblings to my Amazing Lemons site, only to keep it there as a journal entry, a reminder to me at some other point in my life.)

The truth is that our 4 days in Berlin was just so fabulous, that I felt compelled to tell you about every single experience.  I have had a deep fascination with this German capital city since Standard 7 (grade 9) history class, when we did a chapter on Hitler and WW2.  Hitler may have been a psychotic shit, but he certainly did build up a nation of very proud, strong characters.  While I can understand why 21st century Germans don’t want to remember their part in WW2 it was a pity that there weren’t any of the Hitler inspired buildings to see. Apparently huge parts of Belin were bombed in the Battle for Berlin, prior to Hitlers’ suicide at the end of April945.  Afterwards, not only was the city carved up and handed to the victors, but given the ensuing communism on one side of this city over the next 40 years, it’s no small wonder that any Nazi buildings still stand in Berlin. (On the other hand, there were many more memorials established in honour of Holocaust victims).

Anyway, what I am trying to say, is that there is so much to Berlin to see, it is impossible to keep this sweet and short.

Berlin is bloody far away from Strasbourg, and the drive up the A5 is not the prettiest drive across Europe.  Half way up, the highway got busy with trucks- for the most part they were Polish in origon, which just reminded me why it was Poland that Hitler succeeded in one of his first European invasions.  But seriously, the landscape was barren, and like south-african-wintery- a dull damp windy cold.  We stopped at a ‘picnic’ spot with loos available, and the girls preferred to stay in the car to eat their padkos.  Speaking of loo’s, I wonder if I’m ever going to get used to these lay-by toilet facilities.  Generally speaking, decent, clean, warm facilities can be found at fuel/café stops, but you need to have money on hand, and I guess you need to consider if 2euros  per toilet break is worth it.  SA’s- can you fathom forking out the same amount of money to pee as it would cost to buy 2 loaves of bread?  The alternative is a metal toilet seat inside a drafty cubicle.  Occasionally the toilet bowl is rusty, (which you can be forgiven for thinking is not rust), and there is often no toilet paper, nor hot water to rinse your hands.  Granted, the loo and water dispensers all sensor-type, but still, sitting my big fat ass down on a metal toilet seat is just so unpleasant.

So, what is Berlin all about?  Would I recommend it to visit? Definitely.  Like any capital city, it’s a sprawling vast area, with a long, exciting, emotive history to keep you busy.  It has something for everyone, you can be a trendy jet-setter and sip on Champagne on the red carpet of the opera house, you can be an urban hipster and drink craft beer and curry-wurst, you can soak up the history of The Cold War, or bird-watch in the Tiergarten.  You can bring your kids and let them learn about the Cold War without fretting about them running through expensive, fragile museum exhibits.  You can be a walker and try walk the city flat tracking the Wall.  You can be into art, and take in not only the classics in a posh gallery, but all the very vibrant or subtle street art that is everywhere.  I don’t think any city  prides itself so much as Berlin does with street art.  And if old relic architectural buildings are not your thing, you can be inspired by the new sky-scrapers with inspiring domes, the efficient parliament buildings alongside the river Spree or the Cold War telecommunications tower.  If you absolutely want to throw money into the economy, you can visit Madame Tussauds or LEGOLAND (for ridiculous prices), and just like an big city, there is a zoo, and an aquarium if the desire arises to see animals in captivity.

You can speak English relatively freely without feeling like being spat on.  You can dress up like a fairy in Doc Martens and be part of the furniture.  You can even have a soldier-actor greet you in Afrikaans at the Checkpoint Charlie site. You can soak up Berlins glamorous movie star history- there is a Hollywood style star walk of fame, with hologram images to see the German stars.

And you can consider what an amazing feat it must be to have your city divided for 2 generations, to be physically apart from your family, all the while being so close to them. To have 2 completely similar, yet totally different cultures being built over the same space in time. To have people rally against an institution to tear down oppression.  And then to move past their differences, to drop their judgements and build a nation so incredibly strong that nothing can break them.

So many times, I stopped and compared Germany to South Africa, because I believe South Africa could be so incredibly strong.  And I don’t often prattle about socio-political politics from here, but Germany talk of their 1989 Reunification.  South Africa wasn’t very far behind in her reunification.  No, that’s not the right word, because the bridge between our two worlds was in fact so much further away and you can’t ‘reunify’ anything that has always been separated.

But this stopped me in my tracks, because it has a link to being African.  Maybe, please, in another 20 years, we can stop fighting.

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At the bottom of this mural is the term Afrikanische Weisheit. Translated, it says African Wisdom.
(My apologies for that.  I just had to get it out.)

Back to being a tourist… Berlin is so much more friendly on your food budget that Paris.  Choose from Biergartens, dance-halls gastro pubs, Sunday afternoon tea shops with decadent cakes (oh yeah…awesome), Turkish kebabs, Chinese takeaways, Italian, Indian.  Like any city, it is full of choices, which don’t break the bank.  And I guess, if curry-wurst, sauerkraut and very mediocre potato salad is your claim to gastronomic fame, then you’re going to need to every other culinary delight the world has to offer. One thing that did elude me, was exactly why Germany does CURRY-WURST… Why?  Oh why?  And the other thing- what’s with the 50metr queue down the street in Kreuzburg for a street-food VEGETARIAN kebab?

If you ever find the need to visit Europe, and need to decide what to see and what not to bother with, Berlin is a must-do.  And I think my biggest piece of advise (which may be relevant to any place you travel) get yourself a friend to be your tour guide.  Berlin is fabulous, but I think we enjoyed it even more because we had Ramon show us around.  Nothing beats a local.

Check out some of my photos with a bit of a story behind them.  I have so many memorable ones, I may write a photo-blog next…

Also, take care of yourself, and we’ll chat soon,

Xxx

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View of the river Spree from the top of the Reichstag
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The Reichstag, the oldest German parliamentary buildings, which was ripped through by fire in 1933. This gave Hitler an excuse to move the chancellery to new premises, thus enforcing his position more than ever before that point.
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Brandenberg Gate (an impressive gate into the city dating back centuries)
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The labyrinth of cement blocks creatively built to honour the victims of the Holocaust and situated above the Holocaust Memorial. The city has a few memorials set aside for victims of the Holocaust, but as far as we could see, there was very little else that really stands out to remember WW2 and Hitler. Even the site of his bunker where he killed himself is random, and quite insignificant. I guess they don’t really want to remember their part in it, and who would?
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Check Point Charlie where we let a couple of actors encourage us into paying for photos with them dressed up as American soldiers. (They were cool, very chatty and even gooi’d a greeting in Afrikaans when we told him we were South African!)
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The Sony Centre and Deutshe Bahn (German railways) Tower built on Potsdamer Platz, which had become a desolate vacant no mans land in the Cold War. These 2 buildings are iconic of Berlins re-emergence into the modern world after the Cold War, and beautifully nestled under these towering architectural pieces, is a preserved portion of the great Hotel Esplanade that was once revered in the early years of the 1900’s. Through protective glass, we could see the chic decadent table settings that were used in the Kaisersaal in the ‘Golden Twenties’ .
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Glimpses of where the Wall carved through the city- stone paths laid down into the tar roads and concrete pavements, occasionally signed with a plaque embedded into the stones.
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On Alexanderplatz, we were directly below the Television Tower here. The TV Tower was the brain power of Stasi Germany; designed and built by East Germany in the middle of Germany’s Cold War. It is the tallest building in Berlin, and I reckon that back in the 1970’s, this was how they filled the poor East Berliners with buckets of propaganda.
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Bernauerstrasse, where the Wall almost carved its way through homes, dividing neighbours who had lived next to one another. The iron tracks buried in the grass was where house foundations were. This stretch of street had several tunnels dug underneath the houses as a means of escape.
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Seen from 4 stories up in a exhibition, we could view the Wall as if from the West. Beyond the Wall, was a stretch of gravel, a tar stretch for patrol vehicles, and another wall. In between were also steel structures to prevent cars from going down, spikes, and tower structures. The Wall was constantly being watched.
 

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