Berlin - A Quick Tour

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November 10th 2006

Published: January 3rd 2007

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Hanz

Brandenburger Tor

The Brandenburg Gate

Nick managed to wake us up at 2.30am. We slowly stirred out of bed, put some clothes on and jumped into the waiting taxi outside.
We drove out to Stansted Airport to catch our 6.25am flight to Berlin.

We arrived in Berlin at about 9am and got through customs without any bother. We caught a U-bahn (train) to Warschauer Straße and checked into the Sunflower Hostel, which will be our home for the next few days.

With the boys as our tour guides, we accidentally got off the trains a stop or two too early at ‘Berlin-Ostbahnhof’, and found ourselves wandering the back streets of Berlin. We found a lovely church, Michaelkirchplatz, with big formal park-like grounds surrounded by large autumn trees that carpeted the grass below with its leaves. It was really quite stunning.
We happened to arrive at the church right on midday to hear the large bell tower’s spectacular ring.

We carried on to found a nice little group of shops and café’s and some morning tea before jumping back on the U-Bahn towards Alexanderplatz. With the use of my trusty Lonely Plant guide, we navigated our way to the ‘World Time Clock’, which would

We Have Landed!

Helen, Hannah & Beth at Berlin Airport

have been fascinating to see, had it actually be ON.

Nick saw a sign for a sightseeing tour bus and next thing we know we are running across a four lane main carriageway and purchasing tickets for the bus.
We were all rather tired by this point. Helen and Beth couldn’t even muster the energy to get off the bus to look at anything with the others, and so instead we watched Berlin go by from the top seat of the bus with funny little headphones that only worked half the time, telling us random and rather useless facts about rather non-descript buildings (there are over 100 offices in this building did you know??…) and took note of the places we want to come back and visit tomorrow.

Once we had done one complete route, falling asleep only a couple of times, we headed back to the hostel for a much needed nap for an hour.
About three and a half hours later we finally made it out of bed, and walked down to the near by restaurant and bar area looking for somewhere to eat.

We decided on a place called ‘Euphoria’ where Helen and Beth

Michaelkirchplatz

and the yummiest Strawberry crepes! After dinner/dessert we walked along to a bar and for a cocktail. We saw the ladies we meet on the sightseeing bus earlier today in the same bar! Apparently it was one of their 40th birthdays and they invited us to join their party tomorrow night.

We headed back to the hostel to meet Grant who had just arrived in Berlin (as he was working today) and went to bed.

We got up early on Saturday. Helen, Beth, Matt and I went to ‘Hackescher Markt’ on the S-Bahn, with the expectation of doing the Berlin Bike Tour. The others went to a concentration camp, and we made plans to meet at ‘Check Point Charlie’ later on.

After a bit of hunting (and asking) we found the rep for the bike tour, who told us to come back at that spot at 11am. To fill in the next 1.5 hours, we headed over to the ‘Berliner Dom’ and got some photos.

It was a stunning neo-Renaissance building, built in 1904, on the edge the River Spree. We walked over an old bridge and through a small avenue of trees to the

Michaelkirchplatz Park

Hannah, Beth, Nick, Jackie, helen

front of the building where a large formal garden ‘Lustgarten’ provided a great foreground and presence of grandeur to the large building.
Adjacent to the Berliner Dom, and sharing the Lustgarten as a forecourt, was the ‘Altes Museum’. A neoclassical building, built in 1829.

We walked back to the market area from which we started, and Helen did a quick burst of shopping in the adjacent shops to purchase a jumper to combat the cold weather. By this point it had started to drizzle, and we took shelter in a near by coffee shop to have some lunch before our 5hour bike ride.

Before we knew it, it was 11am and time to head over to meet our tour guide for the bike tour. We made an executive decision as we walked out into the now-becoming-steady rain, that we would cancel the bike ride, and instead see the main sights we wanted to see via the trains and the route 100 bus - which, by the way, apparently takes us around all the main sights anyway (thanks to Lonely Planet) but if only we had read that before we paid to go on the sightseeing bus yesterday!

The Berlin Wall

Or rather, whats left of it...

We went to see the Brandenburger Tor (the Brandenburg Gate), once the boundary between east and west Berlin. It was built in 1791 by Karl Gotthard Langhans, and is crowned by the ‘Quadriga’, a winged Goddess of Victory in a four house Chariot, stolen once upon a time by Napoleon and sat on top of the Arc De Triomphe in Paris.

We walked up through the gate and then on to the Reichstag, which is Germany’s Parliament building. The lines to get inside were rather long, and none of us particularly felt like standing there in the rain for a good half hour. So instead we caught the local route ‘100’ bus to the ‘Siegessäule’ monument, ‘the statue of Victory’ which was built in the 19th Century to commemorate three major wars that Germany and the Prussian Military were involved in.

We walked all the way to the top of the 300+ stairs to be exposed to winds so cold they go straight through you, a bit of rain, and a lovely but somewhat limited view over Berlin. I’m sure the experience would be quite different on a sunny day.
Nevertheless, you got panoramic views extending over the

The Girls hit Berlin

Hannah, Helen, Beth at Geronimo

large Teirgartens that stretch all the way from the Brandenburger Tor to the Zoologischer Garten station, which was lined by the tall city buildings in the distance.

We didn’t stay long as it was rather cold. We jumped on the bus and headed towards the bombed church, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche’.

The Church was built in 1895 and bombed during the war, leaving only part of the entrance, including most of the bell tower still standing. The remains of the building has amazing mosaic ceilings and walls. You can still see the raw crumbling edges of the church, exactly how it was after the bombs. It was all very fascinating.

Right next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche they have built a new Church, which from the outside doesn’t look like much. However, once you step inside, you realise that the ugly grey squares on the outside are in fact bright blue stained glass windows which on mass, are simply stunning.

We made our way to the next stop, the ‘Holocaust-Mahnmal’ (Holocaust Memorial)n which covers a whole city block. The memorial consists of hundreds of vertical concrete columns all set out in rows at varying heights, on an

Berliner Dom

undulating surface.

We walked all though between the columns, it wasn’t long before the columns towered above you. As you turned a corner you found yourself all alone in the middle of a concrete jungle.

One of the side streets that edge the memorial was called ‘Hannah Arendt Straße’, so I had a have a photo!
After a good look around, over and through the memorial we walked down Under den Linden towards Bebelplatz, the Book Burning Square, which is the site of the Nazis’ first book-burning on 10th May 1933.
The square is surrounded by large stone museums and Cathedrals, each stunning in its own right. Time was ticking by, so we jumped on the U-Bahn to Kochstraße to meet the others at Check Point Charlie.

We had a look around the Check Point Charlie museum, which to be honest, wasn’t very well laid out. We had Grant as our very own guide who explained how the whole Berlin wall / East vs West Berlin thing worked.

They had some very interesting photos, and artefacts, but after an hour or two of reading all the various ways people tried to escaped, my brain was pretty

Reichstag

Germany’s Parliament building

much at capacity, and we decide to leave.

Nick really wanted to watch the NZ vs France rugby game that was in Lyon, so we all headed over to Alexanderplatz in the belief that there was a sport bar there. However, after a lot of search we finally gave up, realising we had already missed most of the game, and found a cocktail bar instead.

The bar was quite cool, and we decided to brave their outside seating area, that was like a giant sandpit, equipment with flat screen TV, our own stereo system, and thankfully patio heaters!

We had a couple of half priced cocktails, then the others returned back to the hostel, while Helen, Beth, Grant and I headed over to ‘Ostkeuz’ Station. We somehow got on a train that by passes the station that we wanted, so had to get off at the next stop and hope for better luck on the return journey!
We managed to get to Ostkeuz successfully, and meet the ladies from our bus tour yesterday at a bar called ‘Geronimo’.
We had a drink and a bit of a chat with them for a while then headed back to

Brandenburger Tor

Hannah with Statue guy...

our hostel around 2.30am.

Grant woke up at 7.20 am on Sunday and somehow managed to wake the rest of us up just in time to get ready and catch our plane!
I did have an alarm set for 6.30am, but didn’t remember about the time difference until the early hours of the morning and so changed it by 1 hour to compensate - but 1 hour the wrong way!

We quickly got up, packed up our stuff and jumped on the train towards the airport, stopping for a croissant on the way. We had to swap trains, and get on to a bus to get to the next stop…more delays.

We managed get to the airport and checked in on time and before we knew it we were on our way back to London.

We caught the Stansted ‘Express’ back in to London, which is not very ‘express’ at all.

I dropped my stuff off at home then headed down through Hyde Park to Buckingham Palace and saw the new NZ memorial that had been unveiled by the NZ Prime Minister, Helen Clarke while we were in Berlin.
I got a birthday present form