Long Awaited, The Spring Break Posts: Part 2

Berlin, Germany: 1 April to 4 April

On our first day in Germany we decided to push through in spite of how tired we were. We didn’t want to miss out on an entire day in the city and the weather was beautiful. Instead of being hardcore tourists, we wandered around the city to see what we could see on our own. Surprisingly, we covered quite a bit of ground in the first day: the Dome and Museum’s Island, Unter den Linden (a swanky street running through Berlin), the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, and Humboldt University.

The Reichstag was cool because you can go all the way up to the top of the building. When it was rebuilt after all the madness that was World War II, they decided to make a clear glass dome in the top of the building and allow anyone who wanted to go up to do so. The dome shows you right into the rooms where Parliament meets and discusses stuff. It’s supposed to be symbolic for the transparency that government should employ. Berlin is an interesting place because it seems like it is constantly trying to make amends for World War II. The scars from the war are virtually everywhere, and it’s really interesting to see such a modern, beautiful city marred by its dark past like that.

When we were on top of the Reichstag, looking over the city, I got a really strange feeling. It took me a long time to figure out what it was, until I finally realized it was the fact that Berlin is so FLAT! On top of such a tall building, you could see all the way to where the buildings of Berlin met the clear blue horizon. I honestly felt like I was on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean, no land for miles. It was a little eerie, because I guess I’m so used to the hilly/rocky/mountainous terrain that is Vestal/Middlebury/Glasgow.

After going up on top of the Reichstag, we were exhausted and decided to lie down in the sun on its big grassy lawn. This was a brilliant idea, except I got sunburned. Boo.

We wandered back to a little marketplace we’d seen earlier that was lined with restaurants that had terrace seating. We weren’t going to waste a minute of the glorious weather, since we’d been in the gloom for so long in the winter months of Scotland! Everyone else wanted brats, and I got a pizza. Delish.

The next day, we intended to go on the New Europe tour, but we were running late (because we had to stop at a street market!) and we missed it. No matter, we spent the morning in West Berlin, seeing what we could see, and then headed back slowly through the city. There’s this really awesome church in West Berlin that was almost completely destroyed in the second world war, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Church. The people of Berlin opted to leave the church standing as a testament to the destruction of the war (yet another reminder of WW2 and how they want to make amends). All through Berlin, it seemed like the motto was “Never Forget.” This church now stands in between two new buildings (which are absolutely hideous). The new buildings are where services are held, and the old building is a memorial.

We spent all day wandering back through West Berlin, ended up in Tiergarten Park for the majority of the afternoon. Once we’d made it back to East Berlin we had a picnic dinner with food we bought at the same market we’d visited in the morning. It was delicious! Fresh bread and cheesy dip things and sitting in a park overlooking the Dome. Very cool.

On our last full day in Berlin we made it to the walking tour. CONFESSION: throughout this whole post, I’ve been talking about East and West Berlin as if we knew when we were crossing in between one or the other. Which we probably should have, and I did that here (accurately, I promise) so you wouldn’t get confused. But, embarrassingly enough, we had it backwards the whole time. Our hostel WAS in East Berlin, but we automatically assumed we were in West Berlin. Why? I have no idea. It was really embarrassing when we made the hour-long trek to the West Berlin meeting point for the tour, and they took us to the East Berlin meeting point in order to combine the groups, and the East Berlin meeting point was a 15 minute walk from our hostel. Yeah. I know.

So anyway, the walking tour covered a lot of stuff we’d seen and a lot of stuff we hadn’t, and it included information about everything that we didn’t know so I liked it a lot. I also considered it a good 3 hours of studying for my Economic and Social Change Since 1914 final, as we focused on WW2 and its effects a lot. Legit. The walking tour covered: the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Holocaust Memorial: Hitler’s Bunker (no longer there, now it’s apartment buildings!), the building that housed the GAF during WW2 and the Soviet Union’s “ministry of ministries” during the occupation and is now the tax collector building, the Berlin Wall: Checkpoint Charlie, Gendarmenmarkt (supposedly the most beautiful square in Berlin): Bebelplatz and the Nazi book burning memorial (through a window in the ground you can see a completely white room filled with empty bookcases), Humboldt University (which holds a book sale nearly every day in order to make amends for the book burnings), and the Memorial to Victims of War and Tyranny (a really cool statue inside a tomb-like building, with a hole in the ceiling. The statue is of a woman holding her dead son, and the hole in the ceiling means she is exposed to the elements: when it snows, she gets dusted in snow, and when it rains the floor of the memorial fills with water and it looks like she’s standing in her own tears).

After this, we took a breather in the grass of Museum’s Island, then spent a few hours in the German Museum, which takes you through German history. Pretty cool. For dinner, we had another picnic, this time with kebabs for the others and falafel for me. We were in a different park and after we ate we noticed a huge group of people dancing around in an empty pool. Of course, we joined them for a bit, dancing like fools, and then headed home.