SO Berlin was AWESOME! Just like pretty much everywhere else
we have gone! But this was nice to go somewhere and still be in Germany, we haven’t
gotten to explore much of Germany yet and Berlin was a great place to start! In
the next month I am traveling a lot around Germany, I have quite a few one day
trips planned as well! I’m excited!
this is a good historical Map of what Berlin looked like until the Berlin Wall fell!
Berlin though was super awesome; it was a LOT different than
anywhere else we have been on the fact that Berlin is a very NEW city. After
WWII the entire town was pretty much flattened and because they still had turmoil
all the way up until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 not much new construction was
started until after that. So there is a Ton of brand new and modern
architecture that for us “Architects” loved to see!
We took the Train there, and it was a long trip, 7 hours on
the train! Our Hostel was located in the center of the old Jewish community. Once
we arrived we found our hostel, which was AWESOME! It’s a hostel chain and it
was super cheap and the nicest one we have stayed in, this place was nicer than
out apartment in Trier! We were given Key cards to get into our room. These Key
cards also were used to turn on the electricity in the room when we were in
there. Super-efficient!!!! So we had to put our card in a slot and leave it
there to have the ac on and all the lights to work. Our Room was a 6 bunk room
but the first night only 2 guys stayed with us 3 girls and the second and night
only one boy, then the last night it was just us girls. Really nice. Each bunk
had their own personal light and a plug in!
After we checked in and dropped our stuff of we just took
off walking. Kenra wanted to find an Asics shoe store and Audrey wanted to find
a Fritag Bag store so we went off looking through the entire shopping district!
The Television Tower was in this area of Berlin; we looked at it but didn’t go
up in it like you can. It’s the tallest structure in Berlin and there is a
restaurant at the very top.
Our Hostel was located right next to the New synagogue, we
were able to look at it from the outside but we didn’t go it because we have heard
that there isn’t anything to exciting inside. It was really pretty from the
outside! The New Synagogue is 140 years old and is a Jewish worship place. It
was partially damaged in WWII so only the front section has been restored
today.
We walked along Friedrichstrasse which is a very new and
modern shopping and retail area and saw a ton of awesome buildings and fun
stores. We ended the night very interestingly! We ate a little bit at a Mexican
place and then decided to go on a Pub crawl with around 40 other tourists. We
went to 5 different pubs and got to meet a lot of nice people. We met a lot of
people from Australia, England, and even Iowa! It was a neat thing to go on
with the tourist and the guides. We got to bed pretty late that night but it
was a blast.
The next day we got up and decided we would go to the German
History Museum for a while, well we ended up being there for 6 hours and the
place closed down on us before we could even finish. This museum was located beside
Museum Island, where there was a TON of museums located, we only had time to go
to this one but the Pergamon Museum was another they said was REALLY good, so
someday I will go back there.
The German History Museum pretty much started out from the
beginning and went through everything. It talked a lot about Hitler and both
World Wars, then ended on a little bit about the cold war and the Berlin wall.
I guess I was not educated as much on Germany’s part in the wars and none at
all about the Cold war, I knew nothing about the wall except that there was one
and it fell! So this entire weekend I learned A TON about everything Berlin and
Germany Related!!! I absolutely loved this! So the History Museum was awesome
and we spent a lot of time there! I highly recommend it for anyone visiting
Berlin!
After this we walked along Strasse des 17 juni street which
was one of the main roads Hitler built for his Germania idea, the Capital of
the World. And eventually we made it to the Brandenburg Gate. The Famous Gate
that is a huge symbol of Berlin. The most famous landmark that is over 200
years old and until 1989 it symbolized the division of Berlin and Germany, but
today it is a national symbol of Unity. This is the only remaining city Gate in
Berlin and it was severely damaged in WWII but was restored in 1956. During the
time of the wall (1961-1989) the gate was completely off limits to all persons.
I bought 2 really cool postcards with pictures on it of this gate. One is with
a picture of the gate completely demolished and the other is the same image
completely restored!
Ampelmännchen are the little traffic light men that are so
famous in Berlin. Prior to the German reunification in 1990 each side of Berlin
had a different looking man. But these figures were a beloved symbol in Eastern
Germany, so after the war they decided to continue to use these men. All the
tourist gift shops had tons of stuff you could buy that had these men on them.
Another random fact about Berlin is that Prostitution is
legal in the city so on the street that our Hostel was on it was the most
popular place for Prostitutes, so whenever we walked around after dark the ladies
were everywhere!
Walking around the streets of Berlin you could pretty much
see anything happening. We saw a group of Men singing and playing music, they
were REALLY good, we saw a man dressed as a bush, a guy playing the water
glasses (that was awesome), different bicycles you could rent and use, and a
green stick man being controlled by people. All of this was pretty typical
around Berlin and some of them were really cool!
Next we went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Memorial.
This was a memorial dedicated to the 6 million Jews that were brutally murdered
by the Nazis. This was designed by an American architect and has 2711 concrete
slabs laid out in a grid but they are uneven in height. This was really cool to
look at, there was a museum below, but we were too late to go that evening and
never made it back.
Next we strolled to Potsdamer Platz in the south area of
Berlin and looked at all the new and fancy skyscrapers. There is a casino,
Musical theatre, shopping mall, and our favorite the Sony Center piazza. This is
an open area shielded by a large tent like oval roof. At night the tent changes
colors! Pink and blue the night we were there. The atmosphere was great, we
chose an Australian restaurant and decided to set and eat and relax outside
under the tent for a while. It was really cool! I splurged and ordered a
Kangaroo steak, it tasted similar to Beef but just a little different, it was
good tho!!!!
This was also the first place we saw remains of the Berlin
wall. They had a few of the prefabricated concrete slabs that made the wall
setting exactly where the wall had originally been. The really cool thing is in
the entire city, where ever the wall had once been they indicate it in the
material of a line in the sidewalk! So you could follow it everywhere.
The next day we decided to go on a walking guided tour that
Talked about the Third Reich and the Nazi Capital. This was a 4 hour long tour
and was my favorite part of the whole trip. I learned SO much! The guide pretty
much took us and showed us around and then talked about Hitler and his rise to
power and then the 12 years of Nazi Terror. We got to see the WWII battlefield
areas and the areas that were damaged the most or that survived. The main
places we saw were Reichstag, the Former SS and Gestapo headquarters, Goebbel’s
Propaganda Ministry, Site of Hitler’s Chancellery and Bunker, the new
synagogue, and the Kristallnacht.
The first stop was Reichstag. The parliament building which
was origionally built in the late 1880s but was destroyed in a fire in 1933.
The main tourist attraction at the Reichstag is the cupola on top of the roof
where you can walk up and see out over the city. We had planned to do this but
realized too late that you needed to reserve a tour of it. So we didn’t get to
do it. But it looks really cool from the outside!
We next stopped at the Russian Monument dedicated to the
300,000 Russians that were killed in the liberation of Berlin and are buried here.
There are 2 Russian Tanks that are supposed to be the first two that entered
Berlin in the War and they also still have the skeleton remains of the drivers
still inside.
We then walked through the beautiful Tiergarten area and saw
the memorial to the Homosexuals and then made our way to the location of where
Hitler’s Chancellery and bunker were once located. Now all there is is a bunch
of apartment complexes and a parking lot where the bunker used to me. The
Germans have done as much as they can to forget about Hitler and not have many
reminders of who he was and where he lived and worked. But we stood in the
parking lot and the guide told us a lot of information.
We also stopped by a metro stop underground where the guide
showed us all the expensive Red marble on the walls inside the stop that were
the same panels that were taken out of Hitler’s office in the Chancellery.
We then saw 2 of the very few buildings that didn’t get
demolished during the war and what all they were used for and then stopped at
the Topography of Terror where there the Gestopo headquarters used to be and
there remains part of the berlin wall.
That was the end of the tour so we decided to hop on a train
and go out to the East side gallery. The east side gallery is the longest
remains of the Berlin wall; its .81 miles long and is a monument dedicated to
peace and reconciliation in Berlin. After the wall fell they asked many artists
from all over the world to come and paint on the wall in 1990. There were a lot
of cool paintings; my favorite was the section that looked like I might have
doodled it myself!
We then took a train back into the city and went to look at
the Jewish Museum; we didn’t go inside of it since it was so late but we walked
around it and looked at the cool architecture. We had studied this building in
class.
The next stop was Checkpoint Charlie. Today little remains of
the famous crossing, there is a large picture of an American soldier in the
center then the original sign that states “you are leaving the American sector”
still is off to the side.
We had walked SO much on Sunday that we decided to go to a
nice Mexican restaurant to eat and set for a while and call it a night early.
We hadn’t eaten any Mexican the entire time we have been in Europe and man was
it good! I had chicken Fajitas!!!! Yum!
The last morning we were in Berlin we decided to go back to
the German History museum to finish looking where we didn’t get too and then we
walked over and say the beautiful Berlin Cathedral before heading up to the
Train Station.
The Berlin Train station was amazing! The coolest one we had
ever been in and it was huge!!! We had a 8 hour train ride home and it took
forever! But we made it home to Trier at about Midnight Monday! It was a blast,
we learned a ton and with a nice hotel it was a good experience! There is SOO
much to see in Berlin, we were able to see a lot but really we could have spent
another week there and still not have seen all the places!
Our next trip isn’t until June 15th when we are
going to Munich for the weekend. But I am going to take a couple day trips to
Mannheim, Bonn, and Koln in the next few weeks! J
so I will have lots of blogs coming up!
Miss everyone and I love you all!
