Sombreness, deep reflections... (and DINOSAURS)

Day one Berlin, Sunday the 17th of June

The day dawned a bit fluey for Greg who reported that he had had 'fever dreams' the night before. Between him and his cold and me and my eyes which were almost ok but still not great at the beginning and the end of the day, we were a bit of a pair. Needless to say, we didn't rush out of bed at the crack of dawn.

Almost all of our clothes were with the hostel people being laundered, so it was a bit of an eclectic clothing day also.

However! We were in Berlin and we were going to make the most of it! Breakfast at the hostel was cheap at 2 euro, and with it you got a 'real' coffee from their expresso machine which was awesome. We met an English couple at the breakfast table as we discussed which ticket would be best for the underground. They suggested we don't buy a ticket at all as they had been successfully riding around on the underground for a week without being checked. We smiled and nodded but we both knew that wasn't an option for us – we both rather compulsively have to play by the rules or we get too anxious about being caught! Also their attitude of 'look we visited this country and successfully ripped off their public transport system, aren't we awesome?' left me scratching my head...

(Incidentally, our tickets got checked on the way in that morning).

Then we were off. The underground proved straightforward to navigate, once you fended off people approaching you at the ticket machine trying to sell you their own, presumably used, tickets. Whatcha gotta do to be honest these days???

We alighted in the middle of Potsdamer Platz, a modern square full of tall glassy achitecturally interesting buildings. And, strangely, a large pink pipe that would it's way through the air. Presumably sculpture? We were roughly following a walking tour from the guidebook – which said it would take '3-4 hours, or all day if you went into museums'. (It took us the entire three days!)

We crossed the street were there were pieces of the Berlin wall on display and some information. We spent a bit of time reading the stuff and generaly reflecting on the wall and what it had meant for the Berliners at the time. 

Then we headed south to the Sony Centre, another large glassy modern complex. We were there particularly because they had a Legoland – and we wanted to see if we could find our old flatmate Sarah a replacement lego Indiana Jones keyring (her original one that we gave her when we went to Legoland last Europe trip was lost when her handbag was stolen!). Unfortunately Indiana Jones wasn't there! Disappointed, we carried on North again to see the Brandenburg gate and the Holocaust memorial.

We arrived at the “Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe”. Built in the 2000s it's creation was surrounded with controversy and opposition. From what I read a lot of Berliners still don't know what to make of it, and apparently the Berlin Jews held the view that 'they didn't need this memorial'. As for me, I thought it was actually quite pefect. It's an enormous labyrinth of grey featureless columns. From the street it looks like the columns are only slightly different heights, but once you enter the labyrinth you discover that the ground drops down in many places and actually some of the columns are really tall. Once inside, it's very easy to become disorientated and lost and the undulating ground makes you feel a bit unsteady. It's of a similar theme to the holocaust memorial within the Jewish museum in Berlin, (we later discovered), but I'm not sure which memorial came first. At any rate this is much, much larger and more prominent than the one inside the museum. 

Once we felt we had admired and reflected around the memorial enough, we decided to head down to the subterranean information area. What I thought would be a small room with information about the memorial turned out to be a quite significant museum dedicated to the Jewish holocaust (I specify Jewish because there was also persecution of Roma, Sinti, disabled, mentally ill, and homosexuals, which wasn't really covered in this museum - this was acknowledged). It gave a grim and detailed account of how the persecution began once Hitler came to power and how gradually the Jews had their rights taken away, followed by deportation to ghettoes, then to concentration camps where they either faced enforced labour under miserable conditions or execution.

The museum presented stories of various Jewish families, what their life was like before, what happened to them once the persecution began, and how many of them survived. Most often, only one or two members of a whole family made it through alive, if any at all. It also had excerpts from letters written by Jewish people shortly before they were killed. One of the most heartbreaking was one written by a little girl to her father the night before they were going to be taken away – somehow she already knew what fate awaited her, and was frightened. A man standing next to me stared at it and wept.

There was a 'room of names', where you went in a sat down and in turn a name of someone who died would be projected onto the wall followed by a spoken account of their story. I believe that there were hundreds of names and stories and they were played on rotation. When we went in they gave the name of woman from The Netherlands who initially had a job that would have afforded her some protection from the Nazis. But then she heard about the conditions in the camp where people awaited deportation (to the concentration camps), so she left her job and went to help care for the people there. Because of this, she too was eventually sent to a concentration camp and murdered. She was 27 when she went to help, and 28 when she died. I sat there and asked myself, would I (also 27) be brave enough to do what she had done?

The last room was about the concentration camps. It also showed a map of Europe with areas where camps and mass murders were carried out by the Nazis. There were a lot more places than I had thought. The audioguide provided accounts of what went on. The worst was an account from a Nazi SS agent who wrote to his wife with a rather cheerful account about carrying out the mass executions of woman and children. I felt quite ill. Poor Greg already feeling sick found it pretty hard going as well.

We emerged into the sunlight almost three hours later, with most of the day gone! Felt pretty sombre as we tried to carry on with the walking tour and get back to being cheerful tourists. It's not the kind of thing you can just look at and then 'nek minnit' be all ok about it...

We headed to the Brandenburg Gate. The square had been turned into fan park for the euro soccer tournament (just like everywhere else in Europe). The party atmosphere and the sunshine there did help to lift us out of the fugue we were in. Buskers performed all over and people thronged. There were cheesey guys in uniform with flags standing on boxes saying 'welcome to Berlin' for tourists to have their photo taken with. I don't really get that kind of thing.

Reischstag, where Parliament meets.

We wandered over past the Reischstag towards the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Our appetite had returned and as it was late afternoon we were suddenly quite Hangry. There didn't seem to be many places around to get food as it was all open areas and large buildings. So we decided that the Hbf would be our best bet for some lunch because it was essentially a shopping mall as well as a train station.

 

The main Berlin Hauptbahnhof (train station). Fairly impressive glass structure.

However as we headed onto the bridge to cross over towards the station we noticed a lively riverside scene below us – fold out sunchairs lined the grassy slope towards the water and further back was an open-air bar and restaurant. Music played and the place was packed. We decided that it was a Berlin experience we couldn't miss, especially as we were starving and right there was guaranteed food. So we headed down and found a seat. The waitress spoke english but the menu didn't. I had seen some pizza-type things coming out that looked good so I took a gamble that they were called 'flammkuchen' (in the phrasebook I could only find that 'kuchen' meant 'cake'). I was right! It was good. Greg got a salad in an attempt to get some healthy stuff into him, and it was enormous!!

Greg with a salad that was a challenge even for him!

Me feeling proud with my successfully guessed "flammkuchen"

It was a valiant effort, but the salad was the winner on the day. However the part of the salad that did get eaten may disagree with this assessment of events. 

After lunch we decided to walk to the museum of natural history as it was close, and Greg had never seen dinosaur bones! 'Close' turned out to be slightly optimistic but it wasn't prohibitively far away.

Some interesting graffiti (I think it was graffiti and not planned?) we saw along the way.

The musuem itself was pretty cool, it had a bunch of dinosaur skeletons as well as various other interesting exhibits.

Silly poses with the dinosaurs! Greg was a dinosaur bones virgin!!

 

There were also fossils!!

The 'wet room' was a slimy shock... it turned out to be basically many many dead specimens of fish etc. in glass jars on glass shelves that went up to the ceiling. When Greg and I were hesistating about going in we were basically bullied into it by the museum attendant who was operating the door. 

A bit uncertain about getting any closer to those glass jars... images of what would happen in an earthquake were going through my head.... broken glass, slimy dead things, and slimy dead thing's preserving fluid everywhere...

Impression? Um... pretty disturbing really...

There was also a bunch of models (as well as some taxadermied specimens). The insects and spiders were creepy as the models were super-enlarged.  

Dodo.

Greg liked the giant spiders.

By the time we had finished that, we were done for the day, especially Greg! Luckily an underground stop was right next to the museum, so it wasn't long before we were back at the hostel.

Excitingly, our laundry was finished and we had clean, nice smelling clothing again!

Looking for a cheap and easy meal, we walked up the road to a place that did burgers and fries. The chap was clearly Turkish and it was a cheerful reminder of our days in Turkey to talk with him (apparently the largest immigrant group in Germany are the Turkish).

Then it was back to base for some rest! We watched a movie on the netbook - “Run Fat Boy Run” - which was really funny and something nice and lighthearted after a heavy day...