Today's pictures are on this Flickr set.
On the one hand, the Berlin train station is really empty and pretty quiet at 6:00am. On the other hand, there's not much open. The tourist info booth doesn't open til 8, and the hop on/off bus doesn't pick up at the train station until 10:20, so I have to amuse myself for a few hours. Dunkin Donuts has good donuts, and Starbucks next door has free wifi. Yay free wifi!
My plan for the day is relatively simple: take the bus tour of the city, then do the walk on Unter den Linden from the Brandenburg Gate down to the TV tower at Alexanderplatz, then grab some dinner and head to the apartment. My room in the apartment wasn't ready yet, so I dropped my big suitcase and some of the contents of my backpack into a locker for the day. These lockers are very handy, good thing most train stations in Europe seem to have them. Because I was going to be concentrating most of my sightseeing in the central Berlin area around Unter den Linden, I wanted to see what else the bus ride would show me that I wouldn't get to otherwise. At the TI office I also picked up a Museum Card for 19 euros, which meant that I needed to use it at 3 museums or more to get my money's worth. I had 5 or 6 on my want-to-do list.
One of the bus stops was at the Trodelmarkt Flea Market. I knew I wouldn't find anything of real value, but I was looking more at the kitsch factor. Lots of dealers with everything from vinyl records, pins, old money, furs, silver, photos, postcards, costume jewelry, cameras, books, and brass (lots of door knobs and hinges). I picked up a couple of Apollo-Soyuz pins (which, if they were vintage, would have dated from 1975), and I saw dozens of Moscow 1980 Olympics pins. The bus continued past the Victory Column, KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens, a department store with a gourmet food court that I hope to dine at), Potsdamer Platz and the Sony Center, the Topography of Terror and the section of the Berlin Wall that runs right next to it, the Jewish Museum, Checkpoint Charlie, the Gendarmarkt, and the East Side Wall section, where I hopped off. There's a large segment of the former Wall across from the O2 center, which is now (like everything else associated with WWII and the Cold War) a tourist attraction. You can pose with the wall and buy souvenirs alleged to be pieces of the wall. Getting back on the bus, we passed by the Museum Island complex and the Berlin Dome, which is where I got off again. I bought a combo bus/boat tour ticket so this was the stop to take the boat. For an hour the boat cruised down the river and back up, passing the Reichstag, the Hauptbanhof train station, Parliament, and the museum buildings, plus lots more that are in the brochure that is currently tucked deep in my suitcase. Afterwards, I posed with Engels and Marx and with a "Trabi" (Trabant) limousine. I picked the bus back up to the Reichstag building stop and got off for good.
For security reasons, the Reichstag currently has a lengthy procedure for getting a free ticket, and you have to register online several days early or you don't get in. I didn't register, so I just got to walk around. The building has a funky new dome on it made of glass that you can walk in, symbolizing the transparency of the German government now. Outside is a memorial to those lawmakers in the early 1930s who opposed Hitler and who were killed for it.
Coincidentally, I arrived in Berlin on Unification Day, the day set aside for celebrating the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990. Because of this, they had a huge street party down June 17th Street with a concert at the Brandenburg Gate as the centerpiece.
As I was to discover over the next couple days, Berlin's history is overshadowed by the events of the 20th century, as the capital it was the hub of the post WWI Weimar Republic, the ground zero of the rise of the Nazi party, was about 70% destroyed at the end of WWII, and the symbol of the Cold War with the Berlin Wall. So practically everything I saw was tinged with or overtly associated with this. London had the Blitz and the Battle of Britain; Paris, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen were occupied by the Nazis; but Berlin WAS the enemy. As a Jewish American I found it slightly eerie to see it all, but at the same time I was glad to see that the Germans have embraced their history for better or worse, with museums and sights to make sure that those who weren't around at the time don't forget or neglect their cultural history.
The Reichstag and the nearby Brandenburg Gate had been restored after the WWII damage, but in such a way that the damage was not hidden. You could tell by the deliberately-different colored patches to the stone what was new. Also behind the Brandenburg Gate (relative to Pariser Platz and Unter den Linden) from the perspective of the statue on top, you could see a double-row of cobblestones in the pavement which marks where the Wall used to stand. In some places there's a plaque. This Wall marker is in the ground wherever the Wall was, whether it goes through streets, parks, or where new buildings are. Walking around the Gate - we couldn't walk through it due to the concert going on - into Pariser Platz, I was reminded of the picture showing fences around the area that nobody could get through, as the Gate was the no-man's land.
Outside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews, I stopped to watch someone's Bentley getting towed away. He was in a taxi-only no-parking zone, so they physically lifted the car up and put it on a trailer and hauled it off. I had read about the "ghost platforms" that were a result of the Wall - some of the metro stops ended up in what was East Berlin and so the trains just couldn't stop there for 40 years. They of course were reopened after the Wall came down but they had never been updated like the others. Stopped at the Bebelplatz, the site of the pre-War book burnings, and the memorial to terror victims (which was a re-purposed monument from the 1800s).
I saw lots of street vendors selling authentic replicas of Soviet-era Russian hats and East German insignias, but I didn't buy anything. I ended the day down at Alexanderplatz near the giant TV tower, with a currywurst and a Wittinger beer for dinner. Then I went back to the Hauptbanhof (Hbf) train station to collect my luggage, then caught the metro to my apartment du jour, which was about a 10-minute walk from the train station in a newly-emerging trendy part of town called Kreuzberg that is also home to the largest Turkish community in the world outside of Turkey. Threw my laundry in the washing machine and crashed for the night.
Today's pictures are on this Flickr set.
(Originally posted 10/11/11 at 7:37am, Vienna)
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