One thing you notice about Berlin…is that it looks new and modern. I am well aware of WWII and the nearly total destruction of the city and it was interesting to see some of the few buildings that survive relatively unscathed. The building I was staying in, for instance. Before the war, it was a home for orphaned Jewish deaf children. After Hitler took over, the staff and children were hustled off to Dachau and presumably murdered. Across the street from the Cityhostel where I stayed is a small park that has a commemoration plaque listing the names, and a statue dedicated to those lost souls. The park is one stop of many in Berlin on the Jewish atrocities tour. There was no hiding it, as the Germans tried to do for a while shortly after the war. Hundreds of thousands of them were shocked by the atrocities they were forced by the allies to see first hand. But there were many thousands of average citizens who knew what was going on but chose to turn a blind eye.
It’s funny that most of my life, when I’d run into a German, they would often bring up the Holocaust. Not something I would normally do, but those random strangers I’d met over the years often did. Collective guilt I always thought. The last time it happened was just last year in Mexico when I met a couple of retired Germans traveling around the world in their custom RV. We were talking about my planned visit to Europe, and Germany in particular, and they brought up Hitler and the Holocaust. Apologising for it. I explained to them that ‘we’, meaning most of the educated rest of the world our ages, didn’t hold the current older German generation responsible. It was their fathers and mothers, but even then, we weren’t blaming them. As science had shown that under the right circumstances, any peoples on earth would have probably done the same thing with a charismatic but sociopathic leader like they had had in Hitler.
Anyway, my point is that even though Germany is now a modern, secular, inclusive society, it does have a nasty history…but they aren’t hiding it. Far from it, if you have a curiosity about WWII, or are Jewish, there is plenty of tourist information specifically for you. And plenty of things to see that directly relates to those subjects. I didn’t seek them out, but I’d run into things like that as it seemed there was some historic plaque on nearly every older building. I must have bumped into 4 or 5 Jewish Holocaust tours while wandering around Berlin. Since I’ve read many books and watched numerous documentaries over the years about WWII and the Holocaust, that wasn’t my main interest. Fact is, now that I was here, I couldn’t think of any real compelling reason to come here at all, except to say that I’d been to Berlin. Whoop-tee-doo. Maybe if I was the type to go find a beer garden and spend hours there? Oh, I remember why I went. Because my brother was stationed in Germany when he was in the army and used to go on and on of how cool it was here.
Still, I was determined to make the best of my stay so this day I walked back over to the Alexanderplatz and then around that big building under the TV Tower and found myself a bike rental shop where I rented a bike for 4 hours at 8€. Shortly after my ride began, I found this old, historically important church. Can’t find the name of the church though. It’s in pretty good condition considering that it was build in the 1600’s I think? The grounds it sits on is like a meter lower than the rest of the landscape, attesting to it’s age.
There was a choir and string orchestra up there in the naive while I visited. All they played were hymns though, so I didn’t pay much attention.
After visiting the church, I rode the bike deep into what use to be East Berlin (EB). The section of EB where the hostel is, including Alexanderplatz, is now fairly modern since reunification and all the rebuilding unified Germany has done to spruce it up. I wanted to travel further inside EB just to get a sense of what it use to be like. We kind of just touched on EB while on the bus tour the day before, but one thing that I found interesting where this huge billboard spelled out the fact that all of EB was a controlled price area. This is to ensure that they didn’t have runaway inflation. I was surprised that 20 years on they still were doing that. When I traveled through E. Germany to get to Berlin, I didn’t notice anything that would suggest Russian influence. Things change fast.
I did see many old communist era buildings on my ride that were the typical shabby construction along my route, most of them with a fresh coat of garish paint to spruce them up a bit. But you could see that those buildings were all the same design, all cement, without much charm.
I was hunting for Checkpoint Charlie and got directions from two Germans I passed on the street. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it. And a look at my watch showed me I’d have to get the bike back soon so I missed seeing it in good weather. On the long ride back, I stopped occasionally to snap a shot of interesting sites.
This is inside the old E. Berlin. Lots of construction going on.
And back at Brandenburg Gate. Quite the crowd to work around when you’re on foot pushing a bike. I’m standing fairly close to where the Berlin Wall use to be. Here’s a shot of what the area looked like back then: Occupied Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate…
Took this shot below to remind myself of what the old E. Berlin looked like. These buildings were put up shortly after WWII while this was occupied by the Russians. Nearly the entire city looked this drab at one time. But there were one or two streets I was on this visit where the residents had taken to painting their buildings garish colors. Good on them. Most in the old section of E. Berlin looked like these though. Not a lot of traffic here in old town either.
Another visit to Winged Victory…
Got back to the bike rental place just before my time expired (3:30 PM) and then found the subway nearby. Off I went to the main train station in Berlin, the Hauptbahnhof.
I was planning on taking a train to Amsterdam. It’s a 6 and 1/2 hour trip and costs around 70€. Went ahead and bought my ticket on this visit. I often visited train stations or bus stations in Europe prior to my journey, just so that when the departure date arrived, I’d have some knowledge of how to get there the quickest, where to go when I got there, how to buy a ticket, etc.
And then the skies opened up and we had a downpour of epic proportions. Not really epic, just a rain storm. I was very happy I’d finished my bike tour though and wasn’t out on the street getting soaked, I can tell you that.
One thing. During my spare time, I’d been trying to find a place to stay in Amsterdam and hadn’t had any luck after 2-3 hours searching online over a couple days. And the couple times I’d checked while I was in Prague. All the hostels were booked, which I found strange. So I’d taken up using AirBnB to try to find an apartment to stay at. With AirBnB, I’d book a room that looked nice online, then I would have to wait to hear back from the host on whether or not I could stay there. So far I was not having any luck. Two or three hosts had sent their regrets. But, I was pretty sure I’d find something soon, so I kept booking rooms in Amsterdam, expecting to hear back quickly because they weren’t exactly the most desirable places as they were on the outskirts of town, and, I was choosing rooms where the host had a history of answering quickly. Meanwhile, as I said, I pre-bought my train ticket.
After my little trip to the train station, back to the hostel I went, and as the sun had come out again, I was sitting at the picnic tables outside the hostel having a nice cappuccino while surfing the net when a woman in a headscarf, ala one of the Islamic sects, walked by on this less than crowded side street in a fairly expensive business area. She was pushing a very fancy stroller, I estimated it would cost $100 USD or so because it had some fancy add ons. In the stroller was an 18 month old, dressed very nicely. Then she had a 10 year old son, also dressed nicely, with expensive Nike footwear. She was dressed like middle class or above, easily. So I was surprised when she stopped and asked me for money!! She had a lame story that left out much more then it explained. WTF?
No, I said. Nicely, but firmly. But she just didn’t stop there, instead she got angry that I wouldn’t give her any money and tried verbally bullying me! Fuk off lady. She actually ‘stormed’ off, cussing me out in some foreign language. Hah! Damn, the gall of some people.
Then it clouded up again, and I slipped into the very handy bar the hostel had. Low cost beer, and I did sample a couple regional brews. Yumm. Ended up spending several hours there as it was my last night in Berlin and all. Dinner and several beers later…off to bed.
Come back next time, when I travel to Amsterdam!