berlin - day 2

I awoke about 7:30, somewhat confused where I was, and why of all things there was a girl in the same room as me. It was that feeling of displacement you get when you awake to find that ceiling you're so subconsciously used to (you rarely remember actually waking up and seeing a ceiling) is different. Then it flowed back, I was in Berlin in a hostel next to an ex-Auschwitz train line with my good friend Maggie asleep in a bed across the room from mine. As you do when everything is fine and sorted in your head, I fell back into sleep.

In a somewhat psychic link me and Maggie both woke up at about 9:00am, feeling in-between refreshed and still a bit knacked. I got changed into my days clobber after a shower in the communal bogs, which was quite nice since it was only me there. Maggie didn't use the shower because, as she described it she didn't want to 'bare all' to the Germans, instead she use of her handy wet wipe pack (essential for cheap moving about, it's like a shower in your pocket). As we packed up to move onto the Circus hostel I decided to nick the towel I had rented the night before, I didn't know if the next place would be renting out forgotten or left towels like the 3 pigs. After all, nobody the night before had checked what room I was staying in and there should be different people on reception, meaning I should be able to get away with it. And I did! The woman on the desk had signed us in the day before. She asked if we found anywhere for that night, to which we told her about the Circus. 'Oh', she said, 'it's not a bad place'. Later on we interpreted that as jealously. What she really meant was, 'yeah, it's better than our hostel'.

Before leaving the 3 Little Pigs we thought we should get some food down us, so we went into the kitchen area. I think at one point the 3 Little Pigs must of been a boarding school, if anything from the number of rooms, the bathrooms, and the massive stage at the end of the 'dining room'. I had once stayed in a boarding school for a French language project for several days (a girls dorm in fact, but that's for my pleasure and not this blog). Anyways after feeding ourselves on tiny squares of bread, salami, plastic cheese and delicious scrambled eggs, we flicked through several maps and some flyers that were dotted about the room. After a consensus we made up a rough plan of the day, which essentially is what you're here to read. And since it ruins a story to tell you everything in the first paragraph, you'll have to read on to see exactly what we did (ha).

First port of call was our new hostel for the night, the Circus in the eastern side of Berlin. So down to Anhalter S-Bahn and a train or two to the east side. Undoubtedly, I got us lost on the way. Instead of going to Rosenthaler Platz I managed to somehow get that confused with Rosa Luxemburg Platz, a station on the completely wrong line. Still, we were in the right vicinity. I suggested we walk, so we could see a bit of the east side's streets. One thing's to be said, the east really is different from the west. From walking through Rosa Luxemburg Platz and eventually (after a few misjudged directions) Rosenthaler Platz there's a real feeling of social and economical collapse. The buildings are run down, some of the ground floors have metal shutters on the windows, the graffiti’s even rifer than in other parts of Berlin and the people look a lot more, well, frightening. Although since I don't have a fantastic knowledge of the typical housing streets of cities it could be the same in any other city in any other country. But from what I saw, it was pretty depressing.

Anyways the circus was finally found, although how you'd miss it since they've painted the facade of the building in bright red and the shape of a circus tent I'm not sure. Maggie managed it though. Entered the....erm, entrance to find a beautifully furnished reception. There was a coffee shop on the left, replete with proper coffee-bean-crushing-machine-thing, leather seats and lots of reflective glass things which made everything look shiny and nice. The reception itself was decorated similar, although the walls were a lot more garish than the coffee shops. We walked past the other lodgers sitting around on leather seats, with their rented laptops or magazines and walked up to the reception desk. We met a woman who was, what I can only explain as very much like my Cologne friend San, and signed ourselves in. Pseudo-san explained the room wouldn't be ready until 2pm that day (it was only 10 or 11am), but they had a locker room downstairs we could plant our stuff in for the time being. Maggie and me decided to take advantage of this very friendly receptionist and enquired about local night clubs. We had brought a random leaflet from a night club that looked pretty good, but we couldn't understand what the word next to dress code meant. Turns out it translated as 'smart casual', which meant me and my tea towel belt trousers wouldn't get in. Also we were told it was a crap place and we shouldn't bother with it. There were three local nightclubs that the hostel was sort of sponsoring which we would get discounts in. But the nightclubs shall be left until later on in this blog.

Maggie wanted to go out of the city for a bit to check out where a certain peace agreement was written (my history's crap). We were told by pseudo-San about two places, Spandau and Potsdam (no relation to the platz). Pseudo-San had a tour leaflet about Spandau for us to look at, which immediately put us off when we read it was twinned with Luton. Luton for fuck's sake! So after gaining this insight into what people in political power will do for a free holiday under the guise of uniting countries, we dumped our stuff in the basement and took a long, long train down to Potsdam on the outskirts of south west Berlin.

On the way into Potsdam we passed some more run down and horrible looking bits of Berlin. I decided on the way that if Spandau was twinned with Luton, Potsdam was twinned with Basra. How wrong I was when we arrived. We exited the S-Bahn into a station-cum-shopping centre, all steel, glass and fake marble flooring. The town itself on first inspection looked pretty nice. Maggie and I couldn't find any leaflets about the place, so we went outside to see if there were any tram maps or what not that may direct us in the right direction towards the centre of Potsdam. Across the road from the station/shopping centre was a couple of tram and bus stops. The outside of the station was clean, albeit damp from the constant rain we had to suffer through since arriving in Berlin. We checked the map on one of the tram platforms, all it told us was where some very nice old buildings were. Although it was all in German, therefore making it a sod to understand.

In the end Maggie suggested we just get on a tram heading north from our position, and to get off if we found anything of interest. I was excited; I had been trying to get Maggie onto a tram since we arrived in Berlin. I can't help but think they're very cool. I whole-heartedly agreed with her suggestion and we hopped on the first tram to head in the right direction, and we sat and cruised along at a nice steady pace. We went through the centre of Potsdam, which looked very quite and lacking in any places to visit, so we journeyed on. We passed through several residential areas, varying in levels on the poverty index. It seemed each building had its own architectural style. All along the roads there would be façades of different decades, styles and geographies. Berlin must be an architect’s dream city; the number of approaches to designing a building's external appearance is immense.

However, Maggie and I certainly aren't architects, so we kept on going along the tram line. After about half an hour of cruising we both decided that if there was nothing to see so far, there wasn't going to be anything at the end of the line, since it more than likely meant suburbs for the small town. So we jumped off at the next stop. We chose somewhere essentially in the middle of nowhere, there was a graffiti stained building behind us and a motorway bridge in front with cars and lorries driving past us constantly. We checked the little time panel attached to the tram stop and saw we would have to wait a good 15 minutes for the next tram. So, we waited.

The return tram arrived and we headed back towards the S-Bahn. I suggested we might as well get off at the town centre, in case there was something we missed. It didn't seem like we missed much apart from a couple of very funky towers that looked like they came straight out of 'Sound of Music'. To me it felt like Potsdam was a shut shop, yet it had never opened in the first place. It was so quiet there, not something you'd find in a place like Brixton or any other suburb of Outer-London. There was a small shopping centre, but it was all of eight shops. After taking some snaps of the buildings in Potsdam central we decided we might as well see what was up in Luton/Spandau. We found a bus stop in the city centre that indicated that one of the buses did go into Spandau, so to have a change from getting on and off bloody trains, we caught the bus instead.

It took a total of 50 minutes to reach Spandau, time I took to napping. The bus was half full so we took a four seater space near the front, sharing it with a local woman. We did the old 'I ignore you, you ignore me', that you do when you have to face a stranger on public transport until she got off 25 minutes into the journey. After that an old woman joined us, the typical mad type of woman you find on buses. She was muttering to herself and needed to point out to Maggie that she was holding an umbrella. Still, we learnt a new German word (although I've already forgotten it). Since it was now hitting early afternoon there were several school kids with us, standing in the middle of the bus, talking loudly and happily. We heard several English words being bandied around, 50 Cent, BBQ, cocaine and even the word bikini that came with actions. We decided they must have been planning one hell of a party.

All along the journey it was pissing it down outside, in fact inside as well. There was a ventilation panel above our seats, and it wasn't all that waterproof. We discovered this whenever the bus braked or went round a sharp corner, as all the water that had been slowly creeping through the cracks would spill out all at once across the bus floor. We actually travelled outside the city itself along the journey. We passed through all the suburban areas of Potsdam town, and then spent 10 or 15 minutes travelling through the green belt (the countryside that separates one town from another).

We finally reached the end of the line, Spandau. Got off with the rest of the passengers, and looked around to see what there was to see. First thing we saw was a C&A, which was novel in itself since they've all disappeared from the UK. In fact, so amazed were we that C&A's still existed we had to pop inside.

(Joke: Why do Essex girls buy their knickers from C&A? So they know which way round to wear them).

I ended buying myself a new jacket since it was nice and cheap and I felt like spending some of my hard earned cash. After C&A we had a brief sojourn through the town to find any points of interest, but half an hour later we couldn't find any. By now it was pushing into late afternoon and we still needed to find the Jewish memorial and Hitler’s final resting place back in the city. So we gave up and went down the very weird escalator into the U-Bahn. The reason that I found the escalator so weird was that somebody had replaced with the moving stairs with a concrete floor, leaving the rubber handles and metal sides in place. So essentially we were walking down a glorified ramp into the station.

We took the S-Bahn back up to LDN Bridge (if you haven't read the previous blog that'll confuse you, so go back and read it now, you lazy sod), and lunched on a slice of pizza at a small deli inside the station. After that we walked down the main street of Berlin, and took a right towards the Brandenburg gate again. On the other side of the Brandenburg gate there seemed to be some construction work going on, although this was a different sort to the U-Bahn they were building right outside the gate. Turns out that providence meant that I had managed to arrive in Berlin on the first day of a weeklong film festival (just like when I was in Busan with Emma the year before). It looked like they were building an outdoor cinema screen, that or this was to be the location of the opening ceremony. But since we were looking for the Jewish memorial this construction work wasn't that important to us.

Further down the road from the Brandenburg, close to the Reichstag there was a wooden cross, circled by barbed wire, with what smelt and looked like a traditional wax candle burning on the front. There was a small plaque slagging off the way the government operated and how certain secrets were buried. The bloke who had erected the cross (the last cross of its kind since the government apparently railroaded the rest of them) was sitting on a bench nearby, talking to anyone who cared to find out what his mission was. In a way this guy was a lot like Brian Haws, the nutter who sits outside parliament day after day in protest of the Iraq war. Although this guy seems to have more purpose, even writing a book about the governments 'infidelities' that’s been banned from having a German translation.

After checking out the macabre cross and sundry we headed down Ebertstrasse, the road that connects the Brandenburg and Reichstag and further down the road, the Jewish memorial. We couldn't find the memorial the day before because for some unexplained reason it wasn't indicated on the first map we got. It's only when we got to the 3 Little Pigs that we found a different map with the memorial marked down in it.

Five or so minutes of purposeful walking led us onto the Memorial, and it was something I really wasn't expecting, even after seeing the pictures my friend had taken of it the year before. The memorial itself has been the centre of controversy and debate since its construction. First off it's a bit of a kick in the teeth to have this monument to the crimes of a nation in the heart of the capital. I suppose it's like having a debase statue to the crimes of Harold Shipman in the middle of a hospital ward. On the other hand the attempt at mass genocide of an entire race isn't something that should be swept under the carpet and ignored. This was a terrible and monumental event that should be taught and never forgotten, unlike the way the English government has successfully managed to ignore the crimes of our nation whence under the control of the 'Empire' (India, the enslavement and transportation of African's to be sold as slaves, we have a dirty past).

Anyway, the memorial itself. It's constructed from a hundred or so concrete pillars of varying height, although all the same width and depth. The outside of the memorial is surrounded by small pillars that increase in height the further you walk in, the central pillars being over twice the height of an average person, so equal to three of me. They're equally spaced out and in regimented rows. Once you're inside the centre of it all there's an oppressive atmosphere. It's ominous, the pillars tower above and the continual rows of grey saps away colour and joy, it's a powerful memorial.

At least I thought it was, the small group of people also at the monument that we're playing peek-a-boo and jumping from one pillar to another thought it was a fun little playground. Complete and utter arseholes.

Maggie and I spent a good 15 minutes there, before moving on to find the final resting place of Hitler. It was a short walk down a side road, and it was one very strange place. Back in the late 90's a construction crew were digging up the ground and found the remnants of a bunker. After checking the size and measurements of the place they cross-referenced it with some old Nazi documents. They had found Hitler’s private hide-away, double in thickness to a standard bunker to protect from the most effective missiles of the era. Although it's still not completely agreed about the exact whereabouts of Hitler’s corpse (since he was burned with his wife), this is the most accurate location. And what's above the site of the final resting place for the western hemispheres most dangerous and psychotic leader? A car park for residential housing. Yep, a car park. All there is to indicate the location of Hitler's bunker is a small poster at the entrance to the car park, with some information about the bunker and Hitler’s last few days. There were suggestions upon its discovery of building something to remind people of this great and terrible man. But there was fear it would become a shrine to neo-Nazis, hence the plot of tarmac instead.

By now it was reaching 5 or 6 PM, so we headed back to Rosenthaler Platz to our hostel, to sign in proper and get some rest. Unfortunately the girl we had gained help from earlier was gone, instead there was another woman at the counter called 'Svea'. We talked to her and got our room card. We thought we could get some help from this helpful girl and asked her if she knew of any hostels with room for the following night. She told us to come back a bit later once she had a search. So we went down to the basement, grabbed our bags and went up to our room. If the 3 Little Pigs was nice, this was even nicer, lush in fact. Yet again two separate singles, a table with a couple of chairs, some amateur photos of the sights in Berlin framed on the walls and a little wardrobe. We dumped our stuff, fell onto the beds and discussed our plans for that night. There was a small plastic covered book attached to the wall with events and locations around the area. There were three different nightclubs in it, one just down the road named ZMF. It looked pretty good, free entry and one free drink with the use of our room card.

Maggie and I made a few notes of the trip in our journals (what you're reading now) and checked out the communal bathrooms. We managed to get lost on the way from room to toilet, since the hostel owners decided to paint everything in bright yellow and red. Also, each corner you went round seemed to end with another corner. Maggie suggested we shouldn't get drunk that night since we would never find our way to the bathroom if we needed to vomit, and the walls would exacerbate things.

After an hour or so we went back down to the reception to see if Svea had found anything. She had! She explained the place to us; it was near Hackescher Markt, 28 euros a night plus 2.5 euros for the bed linen. As she was explaining it to us me and Maggie did a double take.

'Is it called City Stay at all?’ I asked.
'Let me look,' she replied. 'Yes, it is.'

How nicely bizarre that was, we were getting sent back to the hostel that had sent us to the Circus in the first place. We asked Svea to reserve the room us. When she rang them up and booked the room she had to give them a name, so I gave her mine. It was the same woman we had tried to book with the day before, and she sounded quite excited about it on the phone.

Murphy, you're a sod.

So after sorting out our last night in Berlin, we relaxed and went for a snacky sort of dinner in the Circus Café. We relaxed in the trendy surroundings with a beer and a sandwich, noticing for the first time how there was tons and tons of Australians in the hostel, and in Berlin itself. I think we had only seen one other English traveller thus far into the trip.

The Circus appeared to be a popular place to hang out, what with a small resting area by the reception, a coffee bar, and a pub in the cellar. We were given a couple of vouchers that would give us one extra beer if we went for a drink downstairs. As it neared nine we decided to take advantage of it. The bar was cramped but had a jovial atmosphere. It was already filling up, with music thunking out of the speakers and the lights dimmed low for maximum cellar drinking effect. I ordered a couple of German beers from the bar, voucher in hand. I was handed the voucher back, apparently we had sneaked in just before happy hour finished, buy one get one free. Glad I still had my voucher to use later I took our half-pinters back to the high seats me and Maggie had commandeered.

The beer was delicious like most continental beer (not like the pissy lager we drink back in the UK), and blimey is it strong. I was on my second beer and starting to feel it, whereas Maggie was technically still on her first, not managing to finish her drink upstairs. We spent an hour in the pub, getting steadily more wasted on decent beer, waiting for the live entertainment we were told about by Svea. The stage was set-up, by the vocalist was nowhere to be seen. Once I consumed my second beer and Maggie finally finished her first we decided to check out the ZMF night club.

So we grabbed our stuff, and went outside to find the street ZMF should be on. We couldn't find it, and had to go back to the hostel to ask for directions. Turns out it's not on the road, but set back in a rather dingy and 'Saw' style area. We eventually found this strange little place, after walking through the courtyard of another building and down a flight of stairs into a basement.
First thing that struck me was the old rug that was being used as a curtain into the nightclub, slit straight down the middle so you could get through it. We paid a small entry fee because the woman on the counter didn't know about the Circus deal. Although as an apology she gave us a free drink at the bar, which was very nice as her. So far through this trip I’ve noticed that the people in Berlin are a lot more inclined to help you. Take the guy in the pub, I ordered the beers at two minutes before the end of happy hour, even handing over my voucher, yet he didn't try to cheat me. He just handed the voucher back and explained it. In the UK he would have just taken the voucher and not explained anything. I just wished the Berliner's would smile more. Maggie christened the place as 'The City That Never Smiles', although it does belie their actual helpfulness.

The inside of the nightclub was small; it looked more like a converted wine cellar than a night club. It looked to me how the very first night clubs would of looked like, digging themselves into places with little money for funding, but music that people enjoyed. Only in recent years have the glorified and sleek night clubs come along. Anyway, the place was damn near deserted, there was about ten of us total, including the DJ and barman. Still, it was early and me and Maggie weren't too fussed, we had two free drinks to get through after all. We tried out a different beer from the ones earlier, this one being brewed in Berlin itself. It was nice, and high in volume. I was now on my fourth beer; Maggie was just starting her second. Yet despite the disparate amount we were drinking, she was about the same level of trolleyed as me. We sat for a bit on a sofa where one side had collapsed and small talked, waiting for the place to fill up. Another guy did pop in after about ten minutes, carrying with him a PS2 and two DDR mats (those dancing things you see in arcades). he set them up on the dance floor and invited people to do a bit of DDR in the middle of the night club. Very bizarre idea. Still, he got a few people up, one who thought he was pretty swish with his hands in his pockets until fell over.

We watched and laughed and spent time drinking and chatting. But by about twelve we were both completely knackered. So we drank up and headed back to The Circus to get our kipper for the night.

And there ends day two. It's been a long 'un I admit.

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