Germany is under construction (III: Berlin)

I don’t want a bore you, so I’ll try to summarize Berlin in one new topic.

Day one:

I’ll show you the photos soon (more than the ones that are here now) and I’ll explain everything that you want, now I’ll just write a list of the places that we visited with a little explanation (and some funny adventures!).

Brandenburg Tor: ok, it’s big, and it has something green on the top... anything else? I don’t know the story, sorry.

“The Place where Love Parade take place and there is a Golden Woman”: basically it’s a golden woman at the top of a column. You will notice that German people have a fixation with the golden or green sculptures over the famous buildings. Between those monuments there is another one which was build in honour of the Russians soldiers that died more or less over there, with a couple of Panzers next to it.

After it we saw the Spanish Embassy which is one of the buildings with Nazi structure. It survived at the bombings of the WW II, and it was a present of Hitler to Franco (so nice...). The Nordic Embassy (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland) is quite weird, it seems a sauna: everything is made of wood (outside). After it we had lunch at Potsdamerplatz (I was really hungry), and in the afternoon we visited the Saint Nikolai district, the Philarmonic building and the History of Music Museum (only a quick look outside them). We came back at the hostel at nine. So we had been walking and visiting Berlin for more than ten hours. I should be careful with it because I was completely exhausted, I ate my pizza in a few seconds and I slept from 21:00 to 8:00. I really needed it, but in the following days I’ll bring with me some food (sugar, energy) with me.

Day two:

The day after was so much better, because I took care of myself and my eating troubles. Apparently the weather was good at the beginning of the day: apparently. We tried again to go to the Bundestag (ex-Reichstag) but the queue was amazing again, so we decided to go and visit something else. The first thing that we visited was the “Monument to the Holocaust”. It is a big square full of grey rectangular prisms of different sizes. It has a small museum dedicated to how it was built, but we were there too early so we kept on walking. After it we went to the shopping part of Berlin (one of them I guess). It was in Berlin west which is really (I mean really) different from Berlin east. After do not shopping for a while we took the U-something and went to have lunch at Berlin east which is so much cheaper than west. Actually, Berlin east is cheaper than Belgium and maybe cheaper than Spain.

After the lunch we wanted to visit another museum, it’s called “The Terror Topography”. It was supposed to be built at the same place where the SS headquarter was. And it was started to being built more than ten years ago but they have been having funding problems so there’s no museum. Instead of this there is a free outdoor museum. This means a couple of walls full of pictures and explanations (in German). I don’t speak German so I have no idea about the explanations but the pictures were quite clear. I won’t post any of them here because they make me shudder: if someone wants to see them just ask me.

The next one was the Checkpoint Charlie museum. As everybody knows Berlin had a quite big wall from 1961 to 1989. It was divided in two big pieces, the east one it was the Russian part and the west one was the American, British and French part. The wall surrounded the west part with the purpose of not allow people from the Berlin east cross to the west part. There were several Checkpoints but this one is special because the American tanks faced Russian tanks here. You can read (there and in my brand new t-shirt) “you are leaving the American sector”. History apart they have a museum here explaining a bit the story of the wall and the story of several people who crossed from east to west. They used suitcases, hand-made scuba equipment, cars Isseta and other ways to escape. The feeling that you have in this museum is that everybody was the “bad of the movie”. And probably they are right, and I don’t want to start an argument about who was worse than whom. I really hope that everybody who is reading this lines agree with me that in a war there are no good ones. At the end of the exhibition there is a special place for the falling of the communism along Europe. It is known that the end of the wall happened at the same time that the end of the communism, and I guess that because of that they give at it a lot of importance.

Okay, I must confess that it was our museum day. The next turn was for the “Jewish Museum”. The price was the half of the “Checkpoint Charlie Museum” which was pretty seedy. But this one was so much better organized, with security controls. And it was our first funny adventure. They had a magnetic arch (sorry for the straight translation) like in the airports. So we took of our bag-packs and jackets and put them into the x-ray. They used those machines to check if we had something else (my belt for example) and they were a bit surprised with Eric’s bag: they found two knives there! Funny: he didn’t remember that they were there. He has his tent here so they were for the camping stuff, no problem but a bit shocking. And let me talk about the museum. It’s a really strange building. It is divided in three axis: the axis of the continuity, the axis of the exile, and the axis of the holocaust. The first one (and the biggest one) ends on an exhibition which goes along the history and the remarkable Jewish people from the biblical times until now. I learned something interesting. It is said that Jewish are good in barging and there’s the myth than most of them are (or were) moneylender, at least in the medieval and posterior ages. They were coexisting with the Christians (don’t talk about the Inquisition please...) but they weren’t allowed to work in several jobs and because of that they started to trade a lot because they couldn’t built things (not because of the skills), and they became good in that stuff. After it, and because they had money they started to became moneylenders and receive interests. This was the point, because apparently Christians were not allowed to receive interests of money! And I don’t want to become boring, so just say that this exhibition goes from Moses to Einstein (at least). The building has a weird architecture and you are walking and changing directions apparently without change the level and at the end you are at the beginning. The second axis (the axis of the exile) is a short one and it ends in a garden full of rectangular prisms and in the top of them there are olive trees. The last axis, the holocaust one, ends in the “holocaust tower”. I didn’t know what to expect of it. We entered, and they closed the door. It’s a huge, cold, dark and grey tower and it’s completely empty. They shape is quite strange; more or less it’s a triangle. The feeling inside is weird and I suppose that if I would be able to read German and read everything that was before the tower everything would be different.

In the afternoon we visited a couple of German graveyards. They are really nice. I don’t know what are your (people who are reading this lines) graveyards but in Spain, where I come from, we have a lot of “wall graveyards”: people is not buried on the floor, the coffins are putted in several spaces on a wall. I don’t know how to explain it, but for us is a bit weird to see a graveyard with a lot of different gravestones and trees, grass with this melancholic atmosphere. It was nice. And it was our last visit of the day.


Day three:

The first thing that we did was go to a garage to check the car (maybe we shouldn’t, right Eric?). And we went to a really nice park in the middle of Berlin. Sorry, it will be a really nice park in a month, now is too brown without leaves on the trees and the grass is a bit spoiled. But still, it’s a really nice park. After it we went to another one, the “Victoria Park”. It is situated at the highest place in Berlin. This hillock (because it’s small) is called “The Hill of the Cross”, Kreuzberg. It is nice and the district with the same name is more or less nice (considering that it is in Berlin east) but it seem to be dead.

After lunch we had another adventure. I don’t know how the subways or undergrounds work in your respective countries but in Barcelona before jump on the train there is a barrier which is opened with the ticket that you buy before. In Berlin there is no barrier. Apparently you have to buy the ticket (it is not easy and the Spanish instructions don’t help really much) and after buy it, validate it. We didn’t know anything... so we were buying the cheapest tickets and validating only some of them. But at the last day I decided to buy the proper one and validate it properly too. But Eric didn’t. When we were in the train a weird guy (he looked as a gang guy) was showing something and everybody was showing their tickets. When Eric showed his ticket the guy asked him to jump out of the train. So we jumped out, and you know... we are from Spain so it was quite easy to look like stupid tourists. He was supposed to pay a fine of forty euros. But you know... we were tourists and we didn’t know anything, and one of us had the proper ticket... so the guy was really nice and forgive us. We just bought another ticket, and that was our adventure!

After the adventure (it was our last trip by train there) we went to pick the car (and don’t ask about it). And let’s go to Potsdam! I really want to apologize to Eric because I was sleeping when he was trying to drive towards Potsdam and I was supposed to help him... I’m sorry! And Potsdam is really nice. It’s a different town than Berlin, a small town, and there took place something important with the allies. It is a city full of rich people (considering the houses that we saw, the cars and the motorcycles) and it has something that reminds to Holland, actually it has a Dutch district. And it has a couple of small lakes with really nice sights where we were having a nice walk, with nice conversation and some funny pictures. Again I won’t show the most funny picture here... but just ask me about it. And it was the end of our trip.

Eric a bit stressed with the camera and the cell phone next to the lake in Potsdam.

Me watching the really nice lake in Potsdam. At the other side you can see the nice houses.

A Baroque (I don't agree... but they say it) building in Potsdam, and Eric shouting a bit...

Day four:

More than nine hundred kilometres, stop at Aachen to have lunch, and come back to Louvain-la-Neuve. It has been a really nice and interesting trip, maybe a bit tiring but it’s worth trip. And I was really happy to come back to Louvain-la-Neuve. I was missing too much...