Berlin Day 1

We had absolutely beautiful weather for our long weekend trip to Berlin (May 30th was a bank holiday in Britain, similar to a statuatory holiday in Canada) - 25-30*C and sunny skies each day. We also got to fly out of our favourite airport, East Midlands, which is a whopping 14 minutes from our front door! It's nice to have such a close option, although the airlines don't always fly to where we want to go from EMA.

Our flight landed in Berlin around 9:30 am local time, and took advantage of their well-laid out (I've heard the words ruthlessly efficient, and they're not wrong) public transit to get from Schoenfeld airport to our AirBNB. Here is a transit map, to give you an idea of how easy it is to get around there:

And this is just the subway map, not trams and buses

We started in the extreme lower right corner, and ended up almost at the top left (Rehberge Station, on the purple line), within an hour. We found that we really got a lot of use out of our daily transit passes - unlimited travel in Zones A and B (this whole map) for less than 8 euros!

Also, this is what a subway system should look like, TORONTO (and Ottawa too, come to think of it). I will definitely miss European transit when we get home!

View from the train. They must sell a lot of spray paint in Berlin (more on this later)

Our AirBNB was really pretty - it was an apartment in a hundred-year-old building, which lead to some strange things like an improvised bathroom out of an old cold storage cellar for food. But we had huge windows and a nice balcony.

Great AirBNB. Not so great; Justin's dumb goofy face and me forgetting to take another picture afterwards

The first thing we did in Berlin was head to the centre and take a walking tour of the main tourist sites, both to make sure we saw them all, and to help familiarize ourselves with the city and neighbourhoods. On the way, we saw some weird sights!

We saw these pipes all over Berlin - in blue, pink, and purple - and had several theories about what was being carried in them. Water? Natural gas? Government documents?

Whatever they are carrying, Justin is claiming them on behalf of engineers

Turns out we were wrong the whole trip! Much like Disneyland, Berlin is built on a swamp and the groundwater level is just below the surface. When they are constructing new buildings and digging out foundations, they have to pump out the water to avoid flooding the sites. But that means that nearby buildings would settle and crack as the ground around them shifted. So these pipes perform a complicated maneuver of pumping water out of the building site to a nearby canal or river, while also pumping water back into the ground in nearby areas. Neat!

Here are some more pictures walking along the canal, and some examples of German architecture (the stark and the ornate).

 

 

The last building is the Reichstag, or Parliament building. It's actually fairly new but made to look old. Hitler had it burned almost to the ground before the start of World War II to frame and remove his political enemies, and it wasn't really rebuilt or used much before the unification of East and West Berlin in the 1990s. There is a transparent dome on top of the building which looks down into the government chambers, as a promise to the people that the government will always strive to be transparent from now on, and a reminder to the politicians that they are being watched. We really wanted to go in for a tour but unfortunately none were available that weekend!

There were also some crazy racist weirdos protesting outside the Reichstag while we were there. Asking others, in particular Russia (?) to save their great country. A lot of Germans are not happy that their country is taking in so many refugees (over 1 million in 2015 alone, by far the most of any European country) so there is a fair bit of tension there at the moment.

After passing the Reichstag, we found ourselves at the Brandenburg Gate! This is one of the city's most famous landmarks. This is where Ronald Reagan famously said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

*****
[Very quick history recap for those of you who, like me, don't feel that you learned much about the Cold War in school - the rest of you can skip to the picture of Brandenburg gate. All pictures in this section are from the Wikipedia articles on the Berlin Wall and Cold War.]

After the Allied Forces took over Berlin at the end of the Western Front of World War II, they decided to divide the city among themselves. Russia occupied the eastern half of Berlin, France the north, Britain the west and the USA the southern part of the city of Berlin, like so:

However, Russia took control of the rest of the surrounding area, so the French/British/American sectors were a tiny island in a sea of Russian influence. They controlled the yellow section, below:

The Soviets were communists and expected Eastern Berlin to be the same. To make a long story short, this made many of the young, educated, and highly skilled workers of East Berlin decide to leave - which they did by walking across the street to West Berlin and then hopping on a flight to the west of Europe. (It was incredibly difficult to leave the Soviet Union otherwise). Eastern Berlin lost 3.5 million citizens from 1945 to 1961, totaling 20% of the population! Knowing that this brain drain threatened the stability of communist East Berlin, the occupying powers built the Berlin Wall without any notice, starting in the middle of the night, sealing off access to West Berlin within hours. There were actually several walls built of wire and stone, with a 'death zone' of sand and traps in between, patrolled by trucks and dogs, and snipers in guard towers with orders to kill anyone trying to leave East Berlin. This is how it stood for decades, until 1989.

The right side of this picture is West Berlin, and the graffiti painted on their side of the wall was a form of protest against what had happened to their city, and the division between family and friends. The death zone stretches in between. East Berlin is to the left of the picture. Obviously no graffiti existed on the east side of the wall until it was no longer a functioning border

 [Here endeth the lesson]
*****

 

So the Brandenburg Gate was originally built in the 1780's, and has been an important monument throughout Berlin's history. During the Cold War, it was inaccessible to the West until the Berlin Wall came down. (Where we are standing to take this picture would be former East Berlin). It was heavily damaged during the Battle of Berlin during World War II, and it's really interesting to see the bullet and shrapnel holes and repair work still visible there today. 

 

There is a neat story about how the statue on top of the gate used to be Eirean, the goddess of peace, carrying an olive branch. That statue was stolen by Napoleon in the early 1800's when he took over the city, and taken back to France. When she was returned to Berlin, many years later, she became Victoria, the goddess of victory, holding an iron cross. She is staring a bit down and to her left, directly at the front doors of the French embassy!

I'm watching you, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys

We had time for a quick snack before we set off with our walking tour, and thought we'd pose for this jokey photo. Although it turns out that, sadly, this is a well-known myth instead of the truth, can anyone guess what famous speech we are referring to here?

Our tour guide (who was excellent, and a native of Missouri who has been living in Berlin for 9 years) made sure to point out this hotel in the square below Brandenburg Gate - not only is it where the rich and famous stay in Berlin, it's also where Michael Jackson dangled his son out of the window!

Our tour guide was really passionate and positive about the attitude of Germany post-war(s), and the steps they have taken to make amends and reparations. They have not just a 'Holocaust Memorial', but a separate, government-funded memorial for each major group of victims who lost their lives at this time. Due to the route of the walk, we didn't see the different memorials for all of the groups, but there were sites for homosexuals, Roma, disabled persons, political prisoners and many more. We stopped at the most famous, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

A huge city block is taken up by thousands of cement blocks of different sizes and depths, and the ground falls away to the deepest point in the centre of the memorial. The creator is adamant that the blocks are not simply to represent coffins, but rather 'whatever you want them to be'. It was an interesting memorial, although our tour guide was a little put off by people treating the blocks with disrespect (sitting on the blocks is apparently okay, and children playing hide and seek seems to be universally allowed, but standing on the blocks or jumping between them are a big no-no) and I can't say I disagree. (We'll circle back around to respect later in the post).

After this memorial, our next stop was a really interesting contrast. Most people know that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in an underground bunker just before Berlin fell. I didn't know before this tour that he had left strict instructions for his body to be cremated, to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy, and that his soldiers gave up on this task and fled as the Russians approached. The Russian army took Hitler's body (lying to the Allies about it, so there were sightings of Hitler throughout Europe for several years), removed his jaw for identification through dental records (and likely a 'trophy'), then cremated him and dumped his ashes in a river so there would be no permanent memorial for like-minded people (such as later Neo-Nazis) to visit.

And what happened to the site where the bunker used to be? It was found, destroyed and buried, and covered with this car park. There wasn't even a sign until a few years ago.

As our tour guide says, 'I can think of no better memorial for this man than this shitty, half-paved, poorly maintained parking lot where people walk this dogs and let them piss on his grave.'

We then continued on our tour through the streets, seeing some more sites, but I'm going to end this post with the big two: Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin Wall.

Checkpoint Charlie was one of the points in the Berlin Wall where crossing was 'allowed' (although heavily regulated) between the Russian and American areas. Our guide referred to it as "Berlin Disneyland" because it has become so commercialized - one tiny hut in the middle of the street literally surrounded by McDonalds and KFC, museums, and actors posing as American soldiers. In a delicious bit of irony, apparently several of the "American" soldiers you can pay to have your picture taken with are actually Russian citizens! Nevertheless, it's one of the few things I actually knew about by name from the Cold War, so I was excited to see it.

 

 

I do like the signs, but I think the guide was right. It felt a bit too crass and crowded to be genuine.

The opposite of crass was what we found on the street a few blocks away from Checkpoint Charlie, just mounted in the sidewalk and being walked on and ignored.

These are 'stumbling stones' and there are now 27,000 of them in cities throughout Germany. They are always placed outside the house or workplace of someone who was taken by the Nazis, usually dying in a concentration camp, and are a reminder of the individual stories and names of those lost. These three stones were outside the business of a Jewish family who had their factory seized, then their daughter (Meta) taken to a concentration camp where she is presumed to have been killed. Her father and mother Arthur and Charlotte committed suicide separately within the next few months. I thought these were an incredibly touching and personal memorial, and I will keep my eye out for more in the future if I am ever in Germany.

The last stop I want to talk about is one of the remaining sections of the Berlin Wall. This is how it looks in the downtown core:

As we crossed the street, Justin realized that, without any effort, we'd just done what hundreds of people had died trying to accomplish - cross the Berlin Wall. It was driven home by one of these plaques, which are placed in the cobblestone path that show the former location of the Berlin Wall throughout the city.

Our tour had ended by now, so we took time to walk alongside the wall and ponder the things that have changed, and the things that have stayed the same.

Not wanting to end the blog post on a down note, but this is when two upsetting things happened that unfortunately set a bit of a tone for the next few days in Berlin. I had set myself up at the end of this section, trying to get shots of the wall and the beautiful sky, when three Germans (I assume native Berliners) came walking along quickly and I took a picture with them more in the foreground than I usually do (see above for what I was aiming for, and the picture I'm describing below). Probably not the greatest thing I've ever done, but something that had happened to me literally hundreds of times that day while walking around the crowded tourist sites. I know I ended up with plenty of pictures with people walking through them, and I'm sure I photobombed dozens of other people's pictures at Checkpoint Charlie and Brandenburg Gate, where you were shoulder to shoulder at times.

The gentleman on the left picked up the pace and walked right up to me, getting in my face and telling me directly how rude and inconsiderate I was for 'shoving my camera in other people's faces' and then left while I was stammering an apology and at a loss for words (does anyone else hate when that happens?).

Okay, one rude German. Probably not the end of the world - let's gripe about it for a few minutes and get on with our day.

We had woken up at 4am for our flight, touched down in Berlin, dropped off our bags and immediately set out on a 3-hour walking tour, so we were kind of tired and hungry at this point. We had packed a lunch, so we decided to sit on the wide concrete bench at the far right of this picture, in a sunny spot, and eat some food.

As I recall, we were sitting beside a woman lying down sunbathing, and several other couples also sitting down, maybe eating as well, although I'm not positive. There was definitely a patio across the road playing music and serving drinks. We weren't loud, and in fact I recall we were eating mostly in silence because we were pretty beat and I was still upset about Photo Dick. While we were eating our dessert (some chocolate and sharing a whopper of a 200 mL bottle of local wine we'd picked up), a man on a bicycle and his wife stopped and said something to us in German. We replied 'Sorry, sprechen only English' and he started to tell us that 'bad things had happened here.' I thought at first he was referring to pickpocketers, and remembered turning my head to check the backpack and camera, then turning back to face him just as he finished '... so you need to think about what you are doing, and show a lot more respect!', then got on his bike and rode away.

I mean, I welcome your thoughts in the comments, but holy shit! I have an almost ridiculous fear of being disrespectful or inconveniencing people, especially strangers. I'm the one at house parties asking my friends to turn the music down for the sake of their neighbours. When a friend fell and broke a tooth in the bar on St. Patrick's Day in undergrad, I remember sitting in the emergency room trying to shush my drunken buddies so that other sick or injured people didn't have to listen to them shouting. I in no way meant to disrespect anyone or dishonour their memory. I just wanted to eat some food and enjoy the sunshine, which I feel like I haven't seen in Britain for about 8 months.

After we sat shocked for a little bit (and I'll admit, I had a bit of a cry out of frustration - I'd been in this city for less than 6 hours and two strangers had lectured me on being a terrible person), we realized that, given Berlin's particularly bloody history, I don't think there's a single place in the whole city where there *hasn't* been blood spilled. Tempelhof Field, a huge park where locals gather to kiteboard and picnic? Former concentration camp. The East Side Gallery, where we saw tons of people lying out in bathing suits enjoying the sun? Site of people gunned down trying to escape the communist regime over the Berlin Wall. Brandenburg Gate, where we started our tour outside a Starbucks and photographed a bubble-busker entertaining children? Hundreds killed in the Battle of Berlin.

I am all for standards of decorum. I, like our tour guide, hadn't been thrilled with the people jumping on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I wasn't taking selfies with duck lips in front of the Berlin Wall. I wasn't drinking heavily, shouting, or doing anything to inconvenience anyone.

Unfortunately, this and several other (thankfully smaller) incidents throughout the week lead me to believe that the stereotype of the 'rude German' may have something behind it. I'm sure there are plenty of lovely people in Berlin, and lots of jerks who live elsewhere. I'm sure I've inadvertently offended local sensibilities somewhere along the way on this trip through Europe. And I'm just as sure I've seen tourists acting like idiots back home without taking it upon myself to lecture them and ruin their day.

Have you ever run into a cultural misunderstanding when traveling? Do you have a better way of handling it than freezing in the moment, then stewing for days afterwards thinking up the perfect comeback? More than usual, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Refresh the page and you should be able to comment (it's a glitch in the blog that neither of us have been particularly diligent about figuring out how to fix).

More pretty pictures (and 100% less stories about Germans who are 'full of smiles und sunshine') in the coming posts!