We landed in Berlin’s TXL Airport without a hitch after passing through Latvia’s hugely expensive Riga airport. The first sign that we had that life is different in Berlin is the convenient Contact Lens Dispenser, right on the way out of the airport! Neither Hazel nor I had ever seen such a thing so of course we were required to buy some contacts for me right there on the spot. Hopefully they will be usable during snorkel and scuba dives later in the trip!

Contacts!

After some currywurst in the airport, we were refreshed enough to try to find our new hostel: Main Station Hostel. You would think that this hostel would be right next to the main station in Berlin (known as Hauptbanhof) but in fact it is a small distance away from a rather secondary train stop on one of the city lines. Oh well. We found it after about 30 minutes and were pleasantly surprised at the quality of the hostel. The bunk beds were solid – no shaking – and the lockers were more like little closets. But the best part was that our 8-bunk dorm room was divided into 3 sections: a bit by the door with 6 beds, a bathroom, and an intermediate room with a table, some lockers, and only 2 beds! So we were able to have a a semi-private room there. We were both still exhausted; running around Helsinki with friends is a great way to visit, but it does take up a lot of your energy to do so much cool stuff, and we still hadn’t had a chance to do absolutely nothing for a while after Herrang. So we more or less went to bed straight away.

The Gate

The next day we woke up feeling ready to explore, so we took a train to the center of town by the famous Brandenburg Gate. Of course, we hadn’t learned too much about it yet so it was mostly just an impressive monument with a chariot and rider atop it. In fact, this is how much of our wander around Berlin felt that day. We didn’t really look anything up, so we were on our own to invent the back story for a lot of the things we saw.

Lonely Memorial

This monument fortunately had a plaque nearby explaining in English what it is for: it is a memorial to the victims of war and tyrrany. It certainly evokes a feeling of stark lonesomeness, with the sad statues in a spotlight amid nothing but gray concrete. We both found this (and all the other memorials we saw around berlin) to be a very appropriate reminder of what has happened both in Germany’s history and that of other countries around the world.
Fortunately not all our sights in Berlin were memorials. We of course had to stop at the roadside pretzel stand and buy a pretzel!

Pretzel Gangsta

Then we came to a museum called the German History Museum. We both were really quite impressed with this museum, as it quite successfully documents the entire history of Germany from before the start of recorded history all the way up to the present day. With Germany’s history in particular this is a difficult task but it was so expertly organized that we both felt really well educated on the happenings of the area. We saw knights:

Hazel's Next To A Horse

Me And My Armor

And famous nobles:

Pretty Good Likeness!

along with all the German history through both world wars and the cold war. It took us several hours and left us exhausted! But we really can’t recommend this museum enough!

Afterwards we wandered on, around town to see a really big church and the “TV Tower”, an Eiffel Tower competitor put forward by the engineers of the communist East German society. I’ll leave it to you to decide which you prefer!

Church and TV Tower

To top it all off we also spied a little band playing on the corner of a market square in the middle of Berlin. It was really fun!

The Band

We decided the next day to take a tour of Berlin to fill in the gaps – show us what the stuff we’d already seen was, and show us more things we hadn’t yet seen. We took a tour from the same tour company as the one in Edinburgh – and at the same great price: Free! It took a little over 3 hours and showed us tons of Berlin, and many bits we hadn’t seen.

Gate Revisited

We started off again at the Brandenburg Gate, and after a lengthy introduction by our guide, we were off. Some highlights were the memorial to the Jewish people killed in world war II:

Vast Memorial

This memorial has to be seen, felt, and explored to really appreciate. It is a rather large array of concrete rectangular towers, of irregular height, set on irregular ground, that gives the impression of being lost and disoriented. Wandering the monument with others is a great experience, too, since they can be hidden from view most of the time and all of a sudden pop up right in front of you. Yet another great memorial in Berlin.

We then went to the spot where Adolf Hitler was killed. Well we were some 50 meters above the bunker, but in fact there is no memorial there at all! This is the other end of German rememberance of WWII: the evil people who participated in the conflict are given no memorial, no plaque, no nothing. The area Hitler was killed under was turned into a car park for an apartment complex.

Afterwards we walked on to one of the only remaining sections of the Berlin Wall (though I suppose it should be named the Berlin Fence since it’s so small! Never expected that!):

Berlin Wall

We were astounded by the story of how the wall was put up, in one night, by 40,000 Soviet soldiers who surprised the world by segregating the US, UK, and French quarters of the city from East Berlin. We stopped by Checkpoint Charlie as well, now turned into a Disney-esque masquerade with actors holding American flags. This was one of the least effective memorials of German history that we found. But we still had one more good memorial left – one without any pictures, unfortunately. There is an underground room beneath one of the plazas in central Berlin with nothing in it but empty bookshelves. You can look in through a square-meter sized glass window in the ground. This is the memorial to the books burned in WWII. A great sight, one that Hazel and I never would have found if not for the tour.

We loved the tour, and we found Berlin to be a really intriguing city with tons of history just waiting to be explored!