Day 63-65: Germany - Berlin

---

Day 63 - June 7 - GERMANY - Berlin
Accommodation: Odyssee Globetrotter Hostel

My first night train in Europe and it was quite comfy, although I’ve heard those Germans are pretty efficient. I had to share a bunk bed with 5 other people, although I got on the train about 11pm and it was pretty quiet and a smooth trip so I actually slept pretty well. We came into the Berlin outer suburbs about 8am and I got my gear ready to go. I found out from my hostel website that I only had to go one more train station after getting off the night train to get to my hostel stop, and then it was only a 10 minute walk along a main road. It was a pretty nice hostel too. I hadn’t planned a lot for my three-day odyssey (sorry, bad pun given my hostel’s name) around Berlin so I was happy to see hundreds of pamphlets on things to do, so I picked up several. One of those was advertising a free tour of the city, which was better than the other two tours offering 8 and 10 Euros each. After downing 3 or 4 of the unlimited coffees I headed off on the train to the Brandenburg Gate where I would be meeting up for my free tour.
Berlin suburban trains are awesome, probably the most spacious and efficient I’d seen across Europe, or the USA and Australia even. Trains were very frequent and always arrived at the time the destination boards said they would, and… you could drink beer on them!! I saw people actually holding and drinking large bottles of German beer on the trains at different times of the day, and not just the night time, even around lunchtime! I love this city.
Unfortunately on the way down the main street to meet up with my tour, Unter Der Linden, my camera decided to stop working, so I couldn’t take any more photos until I got back to the hostel, and right before my tour was to start! Eerily enough my camera died while attempting to take a photo of the Russian Embassy. Freaky!
As I approached the I was a few minutes early and spotted a rather large soccer ball (sorry, football) with stairs heading into it. Well, being just before World Cup time I had to check this out. Inside were computer screens showing information on every World Cup team, previous stats and footage and photos, and a bit of memorabilia too, the most notable to me being a football boot signed by the suave man with the sexy hairstyles, David Beckham. It was pretty good for free entry.
My tour guide was over 6-foot tall from Texas and was very VERY loud, believe it or not, yet I was to find out that he knew so many details about the history and buildings of his adopted city, and I was impressed by that. He took us through the Brandenburg Gate (which had fencing all around it with a stage and huge screen TV ready to show all the World Cup matches on it), pointed us to the Reichstag, showed us where the Berlin Wall used to be, took us to a monument for all the Jews who were imprisoned and/or died during World War II, showed us where Hitler’s bunker was even though there was no actual marker to show where it had been, took us to the Luftwaffe, pointed out a 1950’s East German communist mural which showed the civilians enjoying their communist rights when in reality their feelings were the opposite and eventually lead to a protest by the civilians who were slaughtered by the government, a place where the Gestapo had buried files and even bodies during the war, the famous Checkpoint Charlie where the Russians and Americans had spies operating (and funnily enough our guide took us to US-owned sandwich franchise Schlotzsky's for lunch which was right near the checkpoint), the Humboldt University where Albert Einstein studied and where book burnings took place in World War II (a memorial pile of books had been placed there with names of all the authors who had their books burnt printed on the side, except for Friedrich Nietzsche who our tour guide told us was too controversial to be recognised for the memorial), and then ended it at a museum whose name I can’t remember right now but it had a huge bowl out the front. Still, it was good quality for 4 hours and I was enthralled for most of it, even to the point where I gave the guide a tip for pretty much the same price as if I was to take a different paid tour. At least I knew where my money was going by doing this.
I decided to head off on a mission to find myself a nice big German sausage to sink my teeth into. Eventually I found a place that sold them for 1.50 Euro! Although instead of roasting them in the traditional way they were dropped into the deep fryer. It still tasted good though! After munching down on that and finding a cheap net café, I headed back to the hostel.
Back there I scored a bottle of Schneider Weisse from reception which I had previous discovered and enjoyed in Vienna, and it was pretty magnificent. I only wish I could find it in Australia along with the other German beers sold at Dan Murphy’s. I got chatting to a few people sitting down and on buying my 2nd or 3rd beer my eyes caught a young Canadian girl who was tagging along with an Aussie and a Kiwi. So we got talking and they were heading out on the town so I joined them. We went to the Brandenburg Gate where some sort of pre-World Cup street party was finishing up (damn, too late) so we went in search of a nightclub. We didn’t have too much luck not knowing where to go but we found the Circus Berlin hostel which was having a karaoke night. None of the four of us were impressed with this, but they had hefeweizen beer on tap (i.e. yummy German wheat beer) so that was a big drawcard in us staying. Unfortunately the girl was limiting herself to girly drinks. Fool! You must drink German beer in Germany! It’s the law! So after a few of those we trudged along until we found a place with music pumping and without lining up or getting ID’ed we went inside to find the place packed. It was nothing more than a bar with a room attached to it and by the looks of it the place was only meant for 100 people but it was bursting at the seams! So more beer was on the menu, I had a bit of a boogie down, then we lost the girl for a bit, then she found a local fella, so the three of us guys eventually left her there. The other two seemed to think she would be quite fine by herself, if you know what I mean. By this time it was early morning and we caught the train back to our hostel for a good night’s, or morning’s, sleep. Top night.

Day 64 - June 8 - Berlin
Accommodation: Odyssee Globetrotter Hostel, Berlin

Today my intention was to head back out to the sights I had seen on my tour and take photos of places with my camera which was working again. After I got it wet at Niagara Falls it was never the same. Eventually I swapped the unfinished memory card with an empty memory card and it was fine again. You can’t always trust technology. So after a good sleep-in and no hangover because I was drinking good quality sugar-free German beer, I headed off again.
I walked back to the World Cup ball, the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag, the Jews monument, Checkpoint Charlie etc, then I came to Hitler’s bunker, and to my surprise and disbelief I came across a sign recognising the bunker’s location and giving a layout of his bunker and all the adjoining bunkers as well as the items contained in each one and where Hitler lived. Just yesterday on my tour this sign didn’t exist, so I was one of the first people ever to see it! I had a minor moment of excitement before moving on. I walked past the Humboldt University again and took photos of several large buildings and by this point I was a bit tired so I went back to the hostel for a little while. After a bit of a rest I went out to see if I could find something nice to eat. The tourist map I had said there was a nice vegetarian café and after all the mostly meat-based meals I’d had recently I figured I’d try something I don’t usually get to have. It looked like a fairly close walk to get to from the hostel, but I didn’t know how wrong I was. I still hadn’t grasped the enormous size of Berlin. I walked over the train bridge, past a large section of the Berlin Wall, and past some nice shops and cafes and restaurants along the way to find this place. It was in a really nice area and I was glad I came down here as I felt like I was blending in as a local and not a tourist. The menu looked very tasty but I noticed they had a vegetarian version of a chicken burger. I was curious so I tried it out. It came with organic potato fries and a corn and lettuce salad, and I had a homemade banana non-dairy milkshake on the side. It was actually one of the best and cheapest meals I’d had in some time, and I was really surprised at that. I thought about walking around and joining one of the cafes around the place to have a beer or two but there were mostly food-orientated rather than alcohol-related and I wasn’t really in a drinking mood so I went back to the hostel and relaxed for a bit before going to bed.

Day 65: June 9 - Berlin, night train to Copenhagen
Accommodation: Night train

I was pretty much filling in the gaps today of things I was yet to do and still wanted to do in Berlin. I basically wandered around the streets aimlessly for a while and took random photos of things I thought were interesting. One thing I did aim to do after reading up on other things to do in Berlin was visit the Russian statue built as a triumph over the Nazis. A tourist booklet told me I had to catch a train to some botanic gardens but didn’t tell me exactly where to find it. There were no clear signs of where it was situated, possibly another way of the Germans trying to forget their embarrassment and bury over their WWII defeat, so I walked around the botanic gardens until I came across it almost by accident. I found a large paved area with a huge statue of Josef Stalin standing in a victorious stance with a sword in one hand and his foot crushing the Nazi Swastika. I couldn’t say how tall it was but it was definitely gigantic.
I was trying to get some information on where I could find the largest section of the Berlin Wall still standing, and I was quite surprised to find out it was right near my hostel’s train station. I felt so dumb for missing it. So I caught the train back to Warschauer Station and instead of getting off on the side of the train line where my hostel was, I found myself having to cross to the other side, and it was a mere street away from the train station. I actually didn’t believe it was that close and passed the street then having to double back to find it again. When I finally got to it, the drawings and paintings that had been put up there were amazing to see. Most of them were political, some were just abstract paintings or splashes of random colour, then with some I stared at them for a few seconds and could not figure out what the hell was going on. I guess that’s art for you. If it doesn’t make any sense then some artists feel like they’ve done their job. After a while I came across a hole in the wall, and walking through it I found a small souvenir shop. The guy selling the range of tackiness was offering to stamp my passport with the East German stamp used back in 1989 when the wall was still up. By some stroke of luck I actually had it with me, which I hadn’t been doing much so far on this trip! I actually had it with me because I needed it to make a reservation for my train to Denmark. So anyway, I had to get it stamped, and it’s the only German passport stamp I was able to get because both times I passed through Germany it was by bus or train where I wasn’t required to show my passport seeing I was travelling from one European Union country to another.
So I kept walking and I felt like a drink and noticed a service station across the road. It was a BP and looked pretty much exactly like the BP service stations we have in Australia inside and outside, except this was Germany and next to the soft drinks they were selling beer, something you’d never see in conservative Australia. So I had to take this rare opportunity to grab a bottle or two as I had a bit of walk to go, although no German beer bottles I’ve ever seen use twist tops (they’re more classy than us Aussies when it comes to beer it seems) and it was too far to get a bottle opener from my hostel, so I walked back to the souvenir stand and bought a Deutschland bottle opener specifically to open my beer, and it had a magnet on it so it’s still sitting on my fridge at home right now. True story.
I walked on with my afternoon beer and reached a train station which took me towards the Brandenburg Gate where I knew Germany would be playing a match on the big screen, against someone but I didn’t care who (it was Costa Rica who didn’t qualify for the next round). I finished my beer before I got there as security was patting down people on entry, but bought 2 more on entry. Unfortunately I misunderstood the beers on sale at one point and got some weird fruit-flavoured beer which was too sweet for me to finish i.e. too girly to be a real beer (Google tells me it was Berliner Kindl). So I went back to the real beers and got back into the crowd to watch the game. Two goals to Deutschland in the first half, German flags waving everywhere, cheers going up all the time, and I could see where this was going, so I badly needed to pee after 5 or 6 beers and found a bush behind the crowd then made my way back to the hostel.
I got back to the hostel and there were a whole lot of people in the courtyard watching the end of the Germany game and were then getting ready for the following game (Ecuador and Poland, which I believe Ecuador unexpectedly won), so since there was an outdoor bar there I kicked on and had a few more pints. So by the time I had to leave I was pretty tipsy, but I still made it on time to my night train to Copenhagen. I even bought myself a bottle of beer at one of the train stations for only 80 Euro cents! I didn’t open it though. I wish I could have taken a whole CASE with me, but it wasn’t to be. There was still beer to be had produced by other countries. I ended up passing out in my night train bed in no time.

---