Willkommen a Berlin - Oct 21-24

Now that I am in Germany I have found that I am both blessed and cursed, you see, I have blonde hair. On the plus side this means that in Germany I no longer stick out as an obvious tourist wherever I go. However this also means that people think I can speak German and I can’t. Before I left Italy someone already started talking to me in German and I just had to be like, uhhhh...English. So yes this is a problem. This is basically my first time being in a country where I don’t speak the language. (Amsterdam doesn’t count since somehow everyone always spoke English. It is very different and it makes me realize how much Italian I take for granted. Even if I don’t understand everything in Italian I never struggle to express myself or understand someone else. The only thing I know how to say in German is “Kein ghegenstein aus dem fenster verfen”, which means “don’t throw stuff out of this window” and has very limited application. I also just learned “Ich spreche kien Deutsch” (I don’t speak German) since I decided I’ll be using it a lot.

But yeah as a general rule in Germany there were far more occurrences where I stood there stupidly trying to figure out how to respond to someone who had spoken German. Not that it was a problem, just a trend. However as I headed from the airport to catch a train into Berlin I found that my Italian reflexes were kicking in annoyingly. I would respond to people with “grazie” instead of  “danke” or try to speak Italian to them, which was fairly useless. Regardless I managed to get myself on the train and arrived at the station near where we stayed at around 6 Friday evening. Signs of winter were very apparent. Not only was it significantly colder than Italy, but being outside and further north emphasized the fact that the sun was going down early.

I walked 10-15 minutes to get to the building where we stayed in East Berlin. I buzzed in and then began to walk up the stairs looking for the name that I saw on the buzzer. Unfortunately I kept walking up the stairs, all the way to the top. After 6 floors with bags my legs and lungs were quite spent and I literally tripped over the last step and crashed to the ground, where I laid for a few seconds to catch my breath. Luckily only Uncle Tim saw. I entered the apartment and found it to be a very nice and spacious home that we were staying in. Since Aunt Jill is all travel-savvy, she had arranged for a home swap. So instead of staying in a hotel and paying they merely traded homes for the weekend with a British couple in Germany. The owner of the apartment was an architect and had lots of architecture books that came in handy later as Aunt Jill continued her quest to educate me in the ways of the world.

After settling in and bundling up, the three of us headed out to get dinner. Aunt Jill and Uncle Tim had previously made reservations at a cool little restaurant called Cookies Cream. And although, there were neither cookies nor cream, the restaurant was quite good and had a cool collection of vegetarian dishes. I had a really nice appetizer with some sort of biscuit on smashed potatoes with veggies and truffle flavoring and then I cot some sort of beetroot and lemon dish for an entre. It was here where we began what would eventually become one of the themes of our trip: bad service. I don’t know if this is a thing in Germany or some sort of curse that we had on us, but everywhere we ate had poor service with the exception of one bar. At this particular place we waited forever for food and our waiter never checked in on us. So the meal was quite long.

Afterwards we on our way back to a train station (to get back to our apartment) we walked down an avenue toward the Brandenburg Gates which were lit up with crazy colors and quite cool to see at night. Then we walked a bit further toward the Holocaust Memorial (officially the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe). The memorial is basically a series of rectangular stone columns of differing heights with about two feet between them placed over a large square area. The stones range from a foot high to something near 20 feet.  As you proceed into the maze of columns it’s supposed to give you the feeling of sinking in to the ground and being somewhat isolated. You can catch fleeting glimpses of strangers elsewhere in the memorial as you pass between columns, but it is always fleeting and quick. It’s very intentionally disorienting and domineering and it definitely carries more symbolic and tangible significance than a statue memorial would. After that we headed back to the apartment to get some sleep for the next day.

The next morning was really sunny and nice, even if it was cold. We ate breakfast from the groceries that Aunt Jill and Uncle Tim had kindly purchased before I left and then popped out to the square right beside our apartment where there was a Saturday morning market. We got some fresh vegetables and other ingredients for dinner that night (I was in charge of dinner), then proceeded to the bike shop across the square where it took FOREVER to get 2 bikes for Aunt Jill and Uncle Tim (I borrowed one from the owners of the apartment). Then we popped back into the flat to drop off the food and adjust our layers before heading back out to bike toward the historical center of Berlin. We were staying in the part of the city that was formerly East Berlin. Now the east of the city is a much more artsy and youthful kinda area. As we headed west to the center we passed a bunch of cool buildings and architecture in the Kreuzberg area before we eventually ended up in a park with a cool little café place and some seats outside. We decided to park our bikes and grab lunch. The lunch here was kind of breakfast-y, but it was really good. I had some really thick blueberry pancakes that were awesome. Aunt Jill and Uncle Tim enjoyed their food as well and we ended with a delicious fresh pretzel. While the waiter was friendly and the food was good we were once again treated with rather poor service. It was a constant battle of trying to flag down waiters and get their attention.

After that we headed to the south of the city center to a Modern art museum called the Berlinishe Gallerie. It was a nice museum with some cool installations and photography in addition to more typical painting and sculpture. Additionally it wasn’t too big so I didn’t get tired or bored, as I am liable to do lately. I think that the museum-going over several consecutive months has started to numb me towards them and stole my patience.

After the gallery we cycled around the city some more. We rode around the Jewish Museum which was a neat building with cool architecture, then we passed by Checkpoint Charlie and some important German buildings that I can’t remember the name of. Aunt Jill and Uncle Tim filled me in on some of the history that they had learned on their previous trip and eventually we wound up by the Holocaust Memorial around sunset. We went into the museum beneath it. The museum below continued the column themed architecture of the square above in cool ways and led us through several rooms that gave detail about the rise of Nazi concentration camps and the details of lives individuals and families.

After that we headed home on the bikes, stopping at a little grocery story on the way. Once we got to the apartment we began to get things together for dinner. I was in charge of the meal, but I had a lot of help from Aunt Hill and Uncle Tim. We ended up with a veggie enchilada with tons of spices and vegetables. It was acceptable. After dinner we just settled in for the night and planned the next day.

We begun the next day back on the bikes with aching butts. We first stopped by the DDR/GDR (Deutch/German Democratic Republic) Museum, which detailed the lives of those in East Berlin during the Cold War. They had a wide range of artifacts and information about daily life and the way people were expected to behave. It was interesting to learn about the side that I hadn’t heard as much about. After that museum we biked passed the Reichstag (German Parliament) and into the Tiergarten (a large park).

We biked through the park for a while and explored. After seeing a tall Prussian victory column we found a little lodge restaurant where we had great food, but continued the trend of awful service, or as I should call it, no service. A while after we ordered our food our waiter brought over Aunt Jill and Uncle Tim’s plates. I patiently waited for mine for another 25 minutes before eventually devouring it (without the ketchup I had asked for twice). After that we re-bundled up and headed back in to the park to ride around more. After stopping briefly to climb a tree, we headed out of the park. I honestly can’t remember if we did anything else that day, but we ended up having some German franks (hotdogs) for dinner and going to a bar.

The next day began with a really nice breakfast on the top of the Reichstag.

The meal was really good and had about 1000 components. Afterwards we climbed the dome.

Once we’d finished with the Reichstag we all took out bikes onto the metro and rode to the nearby town of Potsdam. In Potsdam we stopped first at a little café for a bit and then we explored the Sansoucci Palace and Gardens.

Potsdam was full of Palaces and pretty things to look at so we toiled away a few hours there.  At one point we realized that Aunt Jill and I had lost our jackets so poor Uncle Tim had to race up a massive hill on the bike to go get them. That night we attempted to make some German tasting food. We had schnitzel, potatoes and sour kraut, but I’m not sure how authentic it ended up being.

Even though the weather was cold I had plenty of layers so I still hold that bikes are my favorite way to see a city.  We were able to see so much more. Though admittedly the cobblestones weren’t fun on the bikes.  I really like Berlin because it is so rich in important 20^th century history. From the world wars to the Cold War, there was a lot happening here and the evidence is everywhere. Furthermore the division into east and west appears to have created a slight dual culture/vibe in the city that remains today. The buildings are different and as Aunt Jill pointed out, the east is a bit more artsy and charismatic. On the whole Germany was really great. It was very different from other cities I’ve been to and it was nice to get some exposure to a bit more recent history as opposed to the Renaissance that we’ve seen in Florence.