The biggest party in Europe - Day 1

After our week of Christmas fun it was off to Berlin for the biggest New Year's Eve party in Europe (apparently). The adventure began at 5:30 am, and we drove (well Toby drove, the rest of us slept) our little hire car in the dark to Glasgow airport, which was surprisingly busy for such an ungodly hour. It was our first time at Glasgow airport, the security there is quite tight but also very professional, I suppose after their little "incident" last year. Our flight left a bit after 9am and we got into Berlin around lunchtime. Of course, flying EasyJet meant we didn't actually arrive in Berlin but rather Schonefeld airport, a good 40 minutes away by train. Apparently there exists some "airport express" train, but we never figured out where it was and in the end nearly managed to miss the local train anyway. The first thing we noticed about Berlin on the way into the city was the graffiti; it was everywhere, to the point where sometimes it was downright impressive. "How on earth did they get all the way up there?" we'd say. I hope there were no punks around to hear us and think we were condoning their activities.

We got out at a station in the city which was roughly a 30 minute walk to our hotel; Jude and Dave's hostel was a bit further down the road so after stopping at a sandwich shop in the train station for lunch we said our goodbyes. After a week with such a full house, nocturnal guests and Toby having the flu, we were both ready for a good sleep in a decent bed. We found the hotel without too many problems; it was a Novotel on the edge of the Mitte district ("Mitte" means "middle", so you can guess where we were). To get there we walked down Under den Linten and some other major shopping strips, full of beautiful things. The hotel itself wasn't in a particulalrly inspiring area; mainly office buildings and apartments, although it was near the water and had a few shops in the building. Our room was huge, and the bed was massive although the bathroom had us a little confused. Were we in prison?

Our prison-esque shower.

We rested up in our room and then ventured all the way downstairs to the supermarket in the same building, to stock up on dinner and breakfast supplies. Then we rushed back to our room and spent the rest of the night there. Yes, we are lame. But it was so good, and exactly what we needed.

The view from our hotel window.

The next morning after breakfast we headed towards the Brandenburg Gate, where we were meeting Jude and Dave and about 100 other people for a walking tour. The tour had been recommended to us by two different people as a 'must do' in Berlin, and since we don't normally do things like that and didn't really know what we wanted to do in Berlin, and it was free, we figured it was a good idea. When we arrived at the meeting place - 'in front of the Starbucks' - it was so packed of people we started wondering if we'd made a mistake. But it turned out there were lots of tours running from that spot, organised by the same company. There were tours in other languages and also a couple that were going out to the concentration camp. If we'd had more time in Berlin I would have liked to do one of those, but maybe next time. So once all the tours had been split up, we ended up in a group of around 15, led by Maria, a Swedish-Japanese former model who'd ended up in Berlin after falling in love with a German rock star (so she said). She wasn't with the rock star anymore but she really loved Berlin and was very enthusiastic about it. We'd been warned by Ali's friend Kat over Christmas to try and not get the American guy on the tour, so we considered ourselves lucky to have Maria.

The Brandenburg Gate, with all the tourists.

The tour started in the square we were already standing in, Parisier Platz, and then moved out onto the road for a 'History of Berlin in 10 minutes' talk.

The Hotel Adlon, famous not for its $20,000/night Presidential Suite but for the fact that this is where Michael Jackon dangled his baby out the window.

We continued down the road to the new Jewish Memorial, which is basically a collection of concrete blocks in a big square. Maria pointed out that, unlike the rest of Berlin's concrete, the memorial blocks were remarkably graffiti-free: they have been treated with some anti-graffiti chemical to keep them clean. Apparently the company that makes this chemical was also involved in supplying gas to the Nazis during the Holocaust; I guess this is a way for them to make some small amends. Berlin is full of contradictions like that, it is a city that is simultaneously trying to show atonement for past sins while also moving on and creating a wonderful place to live and visit. I think it's a difficult balance to find.

The double brick line showing where the Berlin Wall stood.

Inside the Jewish Memorial

Looking across the Memorial.

After walking through the memorial we walked a little further until we were on a normal residential street surrounded by the Communist apartments. It was then Maria told us we were currently standing on what remained of Hitler's bunker. It has been all filled in and for years there was nothing to mark the spot, but apparently during the 2006 World Cup the locals got so sick of tourists asking them where the bunker was that a sign has been put up over the road. I didn't see anyone in the group taking photos of the corner; it was surprisingly easy to agree that there was no reason to pay attention to that one corner and its stories.

The apartments near Hitler's bunker. Apparently they were built by the Communists to prove to West Berlin how good the Eastern Berliners had it.

We walked past the old air force building (surprisingly left intact during the war; apparently Britain's was also left intact, curiously) and the memorial out the front which was dedicated to the hundreds of East Germans who had been shot or injured (never to be seen again) in that spot one day in the early 1950s, when they were protesting for their human rights. For some reason Berlin has now decided to put the tax office in that building; strange sense of humour, the Germans.

Memorial to the East Berlin protestors.

East Berlin's answer to VW. Sort of.

We walked past some other buildings where you could still see the bullet holes in the wall and then we got to a corner where part of the Berlin Wall was still standing. It is not as huge or menacing as you might imagine but Maria told us how it would have been covered with barbed wire, and in the 'death strip' between the walls (I'd never realised there was actually two walls) there would be booby traps and guard dogs and a watch tour every 100 metres or so. Really, really frightening stuff to think that this was happening just 20 years ago. Near the Wall was the bunker where the Gestapo had undertaken interrogations and executions; it is now a museum called the 'Topography of Terror' which is probably apt.

The Berlin Wall.


The Topography of Terror.

From there we walked down to Checkpoint Charlie, which is not named after some guy called Charlie, but rather was the 3rd checkpoint in Berlin ('charlie' is the 3rd letter of the US army's alphabet). Maria called it Disneyland, and I can see what she meant; it was so packed full of people and souvenir shops and guys dressed in mock guard uniforms that it was hard to pay attention to what was there. One of the funniest things I heard from Maria was that in this intersection, the KGB had their offices in the building on one corner, and the CIA had their offices in the building diagonally opposite. There was a cafe on the ground floor of the CIA building that was a famous place for spies to do their business; the guy who wrote James Bbond got the idea from this cafe. I don't know if the KGB or the CIA realised how funny it was to have their headquarters within tin-can-connected-by-string range, but that's war for you. I'm sure Joseph Heller would have appreciated the irony. Maria had some other great stories about people who managed to get through the checkpoints, before it became impossible to do so. Checkpoint Charlie was our lunch break; we took Maria's advice and got doner kebabs which we ate on the street, trying not to get bowled over by all the other tourists following Maria's advice.

Me & Jude on our lunch break.

Checkpoint Charlie.

Toby, Dave & Jude on the lunch break.

After lunch Maria took us down the big shopping street again, talking about Berlin's Golden 20s age when that one street had hundreds of cabarets, nightclubs and brothels, and the kind of energy that would have been in the city at the time. When the Nazis came to power they got rid of everything except the prostitutes. Go figure. We also went past the famous chocolate shop, who used to make chocolate for the royal family. They had amazing models of Berlin landmarks in the window, and one of the Titanic as well.

Mmmm...100 kilograms of chocolate.

We walked to Gendarmenmarkt, where the French and German cathedrals stand and where there was a big Christmas market set up, then to the famous square where the Nazis burned the books. There is a memorial there too, an underground room with enough bookshelves to hold 20 thousand books - that's how many were burned in that square. Both lecturers and students of Humboldt university which borders the square had helped the soldiers empty the libraries (although they didn't really have much choice about it); the university now has a second hand book sale outside the main building, with all proceeds going to charity. Another small, symbolic gesture.

The square where the book burning took place.

The underground library.

After the square we went to Museum island and visited the war memorial. It's just a single room, with a sculpture in the middle. The ashes of a Holocaust victim and a soldier rest beneath the sculpture; apparently it's quite controversial to have them both there. The sculptor was a local Berlin artist whose name I have forgotten; her son was 16 when World War I broke out and begged her to let him join the army. She eventually gave in and he died fighting for Germany. After that, she and her other son moved elsewhere (Belgium I think); he died in World War II, fighting against Germany.

The War Memorial.

After the War Memorial we walked further up the island to see the Berlin Cathedral, and Maria sat us on the steps of the Alte Museum, overlooking the big park, for the grand finale of her tour - the story of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a very entertaining story, and I saw other tourists stopping to catch a glimpse of Maria pretending to be an incompetent East German bureaucrat, an elated East Berliner, and the other characters in her story. After her grand finale we gave her lots of money, because she'd certainly earned it, and then tried to decide what to do next.

Dave, Jude and the Berlin Dom.

Maria had made the Pergamon Museum, an archeological museum behind the Altes, sound amazing so we decided to line up, even though it was freezing and nearly 4pm. Jude got sick of waiting after a while, since the line wasn't moving, so she and Dave went off to the Jewish Museum while Toby and I stuck it out. Unfortunately we were not rewarded for our patience; about 10 minutes later something started happening at the top of the line and people started leaving. We heard someone say it was closing for 'technical reasons'. That's strange, we thought. We kept our eye on a guy in a red hat, who'd been at the head of the line for a good 20 minutes by that point. We figured that if he wasn't moving, neither were we. But then he did move, so we decided to go to the new German History Museum around the corner instead.

By this time, the fluey feeling I'd had since lunchtime had really kicked in and I was definitely coming down with something. The museum was huge, and really interesting, but I struggled to stay motivated and after an hour or so we had to leave. We decided to go to the cafe and get a lemonade to fortify us for the walk home, but the cafe had really odd rules about what you could order at the bar, and what you had to order from your table. By the time we figured it out the staff were ignoring us, so we left. Toby went off with the map to figure out how to get home while I sat down on the footpath, leaning against the wall of the museum. Lots of people looked at me and I wondered if anyone would give me any money, but alas they didn't. Luckily I'd found 20 euros on the footpath earlier that day during our walk to the Brandenburg Gate, so I wasn't too hard done by.

Less luckily, I had the flu combined with bad stomach pains by the time we got back to the hotel. It was a shame, because we'd walked back a different way and discovered some cute streets full of Christmas lights and restaurants, but I couldn't think of anything except lying down. The stomach pains got worse, to the point where I was in tears and Toby was about to call an ambulance. Thinking back now I think the tears were mostly because I was panicking - I didn't know why I felt so sick, and I didn't know what was going to happen. It didn't feel like food poisoning, or anything remotely resembling anything I've felt before. Luckily they subsided, and I was left with only the flu. Needless to say, I didn't really feel like going out for dinner after that episode, so I ate pringles left over from the night before. Toby went out in search of some takeaway, but being unsuccessful came back and ordered room service, which ended up being a massive meal and probably the best schnitzel we've ever tasted. A slightly dramatic end to an otherwise enjoyable, informative day where we learnt more than I think we ever have in a foreign city.

Next entry: a giraffe made of Lego, half-metre bratwursts, fireworks and a warzone.