Berlin by photos

Andy AbuMoussa (a Parisian who we met in Interlaken) and I were discussing Berlin and it's destructive 20th century, and he made the assertion that before the decimation, "Berlin used to be another Paris." Well, my time in Paris was indescribable to the point that I could only write a blog entry around the photos; my time in Berlin could be described for far too long, so we're going to try to stick to photos with brief descriptions. So, Berlin is going to sorta be "another Paris" in this blog as well.

As another metaphorical gesture, I won't be dividing Berlin into episodes.
----------------------------------------------------
Berlin
----------------------------------------------------

I was told to go to the Sunflower Hostel when I arrived, which was really early in the morning. The Sunflower was nice, but I had had almost no sleep and was in desperate need of a shower, and I couldn't get into a room until the afternoon. It was an inauspicious start. I didn't meet much of anyone to wander the town with there, so it was a solo evening walk that took me along the River Spree at sundown, where I saw the Reichstag from a distance:



and the symbol of Germany, the Brandenburg Gate, at night:



We'll see and hear more about both later.

At the metro station, I was mistaken for a local and asked by a French exchange student how to operate the ticket machine. It turns out her German was much better than mine anyway, but we figured out the ticket machine together and she invited me to join her and some other exchange students to watch a film later that evening.

So I ended up in a little flat, drinking wine with students from all over Europe except Germany, speaking German. Then we watched 2001: A Space Odyssey in English on a laptop screen, all squeezed around a bed:



I don't know how the camera-person managed such a horrendous photo.

Then I met a slightly-crazy American girl at the hostel, and she took me and this Japanese girl (who was going to be living in Berlin, and really just wanted to do her German language class homework and be left alone) to some old squat-bars nearby:



You see, Berlin, especially East Berlin, once had a tremendous amount of squatted buildings populated by young people, oddballs, and artists. Many of them sprouted illegal bars in the buildings as well. A good number still exist, though most now pay nominal rents to clean up the legal complications. The second one we went to, however, is almost certainly *not* legal. Here I am going in the front door, which is also the only way in or out:



This bar served cheap, somewhat-chilled beer in bottles and heaps of second-hand smoke. We're talking *zero* air movement. Grimy, unique, and maternal-cardiac-arrest-inducingly unsafe. A fire here would have been an instant disaster, but everyone was smoking and they had *candles* all over the place.

A less frightening and more famous squat called Tacheles was in the middle of town, and I visited a few times. Here are photos from my first visit, with an amazing walking tour I took. The building used to be the biggest department store in Europe before the back end was blown off in the 40's. This photo is at the top of the main stairwell:



This is behind the building, and this is also right in the center of Berlin, a stones throw from classic European-city splendor:



I did two walking tours through the same company, and they were both excellent and hilarious in their own ways, and they both got me away from the Hostel where I kept getting trapped because I kept looking for someone to talk to there and not finding anyone.

A citadel in the oldest part of Berlin, once it's own fortified city called Spandau. The only people to ever defend it in combat were the French, comically, when the German's reclaimed it from Napoleon's forces.




The Olympic Stadium where Jesse Owens made history, much to Hitler's displeasure. It's been renovated to remove Hitler's box and prepare for the World Cup:




The symbol of Berlin is apparently the bear:



I didn't see it, but I'm told there's a bear-pit in Berlin. Which may remind our regular readers of Bern, the capitol of Switzerland, another German-speaking country. Weird.

A couple of painted sections of the Berlin Wall mark the former location of the Tränenpalast, or Palace of Tears, where families and lovers said goodbye when one-day visitor visas expired and West Berliners were sent home. These visas took years to acquire each time.




Here's "Disneyland Berlin", otherwise known as Checkpoint Charlie. The only thing authentic remaining here is the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, which has been there for decades and records stories of escapes from East Berlin. The rest is all fake, and the fakest of the fake is the uniformed photo-buddy here (in front of a fake checkpoint booth):



According to reports, the pretty young ladies in uniform who will pose for your photo wear a very different uniform at night, and ask that you *not* take photos while they work.

This parking lot is where Hitler's bunker was, and where he poisoned himself and his new wife, shot himself in the head, and had his flunkies burn him into ashes. The tour guide noted the catch-22 faced by the unmarked grave. Not marking it seems to be ignoring their dark history, but marking it could create a shrine for neo-nazis.



The tour guide told us that many people want to dance or urinate on it. While these might be humorous displays, (and I considered both) they seem sort of embarrassingly inadequate, so I refrained.

Of 302 guard towers that once dotted the Berlin Wall, 5 remain standing. Here's one:




A little rain couldn't stop this tour. Here I am with a friendly character who I met in Amsterdam and then bumped into in Berlin. See if you can figure out who's on which side of the Berlin Wall (behind):



This was jokingly advertised as "The best photo opportunity in Berlin."

A Frank Gehry designed bank, right next to the Brandenburg Gate, was required to have a conservative and austere front, but he went ahead and got wacky with the inside:




Here's a bunch of construction in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and alongside it. All the Americans reading this are helping pay for that construction: a new US Embassy on land given to the US by Adolph Hitler in 1941 as a bribe to stay out of the war:



That's only a hint of the story about this absurd project, I'll tell you all about it in person.

A modern skyscraper rises in the background behind the bombed-out remains of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, left in it's post-war condition:



I didn't get the story on why it was left in this condition, but I don't think one is needed.

Potzdamer Platz was the pre-cold-war center of the city, but became part of no-man's land when the wall was up. Among the many new developments and architectural curiosities in the area is Sony Center. The tour-guide pointed at the odd design you can see in the center of this photo and asked us what we thought it was supposed to be:



It being the Sony Center, I looked at it and immediately said, "a speaker". Which impressed the tour guide, I think, because it was reasonable and completely incorrect. From a distance, it's easier to see that it's supposed to be Mt. Fuji, but my only appropriate photo is really blurry.

Another huge structure is "TV Tower" which has nothing to do with TV, or anything else for that matter. The Communist's built it during the cold war as a demonstration of how great it was to be in East Berlin, and it's story is a comedy of errors. Aside from being unable to build the structure without bringing Swedish construction experts (who of course weren't Communist) in, the anti-religion Communists were a little embarrassed about the results of direct sunlight on the tower. Check it out in the distance, have a close look at the round glass part:



If you are thinking the glare looks an awful lot like a cross, then you've notice what West Germans called "The Pope's Revenge". That's just a taste of the TV Tower's comical history.

In the middle of Berlin's 'Central Park', called Tiergarten ("animal garden" or "zoo") lives the Victory Column:



The Victory Column also has some strange history, but I'll babble about it in person.

We saw lots more on the tours, but I can't fit it all.

After 6 days of meeting almost nobody at the beautiful Sunflower Hostel, I called Tobi. Tobi and I had met for 5 minutes in Barcelona, and he had given me his number in Berlin and told me I could crash at his place, which seemed a good idea.

Tobi & his roommate Sören were awesome, welcoming, friendly, and willing to speak German to me despite my stumbling, which helped my German. They were also in the process of moving out of their little flat, which meant deconstructed furniture, boxes, and painting lots of walls. Also, neither of them was really living there, which is a long story.

I stayed there for 3 or 4 nights, which was good in some ways, especially the evening when Tobi took me out to a party with a bunch of Germans and he and I were the last ones to leave the party before falling asleep on the subway and going 3 stops too far.

I have only 2 photos from my time with Tobi and they both suck.

After a few days the isolation, chaos, and difficulty getting into the apartment without a key drove me back to a hostel.

This hostel was a little more sociable:



I honestly had nothing to do with any of that and didn't even talk to anyone at that table.

Immediately upon arriving at the hostel, an Australian girl named Anna talked me into a "nightlife tour" which was a less absurd version of the pub-crawls that I'd been avoiding in every town in Europe. What did I learn? Well, there's an absinthe that *doesn't* taste like anise:




On a particularly lovely day, I crossed the River Spree on my way to a Biergarten in the middle of the Tiergarten:



When I arrived, I sat down with these two good friends in a beautiful setting for a while:




The German Reichstag is a classic building with a twist or two and a short but fascinating history:



The facilities out front were for some event.

The building houses the German Parliament, but the most significant thing to happen there in it's first 50 years or so was when it was burned to the ground, an unsolved mystery which led to Hitler getting a police state declared. Rebuilt before the war, decimated during, and left looking a bit like the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church until reunification, the place now has longer lines than any other tourist attraction in Berlin:



You might well ask: why? Well, the glass dome you saw in the pictures is the coolest thing I've ever seen on the top of a government facility. You can enter it by going up on the roof, which has a great view of Berlin. Here's the Brandenburg Gate and that Gehry bank from the roof:



But it gets better- here's the inside of the dome:



You can see the panels with photos and history of the building around the bottom, and the awesome walkway around the side to get an improving view of the city. And then there's the fountain of mirrors in the middle, which will make more sense after you see this photo, from the top of the walkway down into the building:



The seats below *are* the parliament. You can look right down into it, or you can see it in the mirrors, which not only bring sunlight into the building, but reflect the goings-on inside into the eyes of the viewers above. It's a beautiful structure, and also a tangible metaphor for an open, honest, accountable government.

Which would make an appropriate final image for Berlin, a city which feels like a gigantic tangible metaphor for a century of European history.

But it's not the last image, because I'm going back to Berlin in a couple of weeks, so we'll just leave you with this sunset over the Platz der Republic in front of the Reichstag, taken on my last night. Note the line that has barely shortened and the two fascinating structures in the distance that, despite the length of this entry, I haven't even mentioned.