Berlin

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Travelling from Helsinki to Berlin we took our only internal plane flight into one of Berlin's three airports (Tegel). We understand that this airport is soon to close and all international flights will be consolidated in the airport to the south of the city.

The first thing that struck Ross in particular about Berlin is how expansive their public transport system is. They have U-Bahns, S-Bahns, trams and buses that intersect each other all over the place. It is certainlynot just a radial network like Melbourne. One thing that impressed Ross is that there is a complete ring S-Bahn line which goes the whole way around the city. It turned out our hostel was on this line.

Given we knew a bit of the history of Berlin being broken up into two cities (East Berlin and West Berlin) we were looking for any differences and in particular any evidence of the wall. We were staying in the east side. All the we could really say is that there were perhaps more slummy apartment buildings in East Berlin however there was plenty of new development as well.

It didn't take us long to find evidence of the wall as we found the longest remaining 1.3km section adjacent to a river. It is known as the Eastside Gallery but it really just looked as though it was covered in graffiti dating from the last few years rather than anything pre 1989. Later we went to the former location of Checkpoint Charlie where there is a museum which goes into the historyof the wall.

Berlin is a very large city with many grand boulevards in the western side. We managed to find our way to the Brandenberg Gate and to the Reichstag building where Germany's parliament is located. The queue to go into the glass dome on top of the Reichstag building was way too long for us so we just took our photo and moved on. The new Hauptbahnhof is very impressive. It is a curved glass building (similar to many others in Germany) but includes 5 levels with platforms on the top and bottom levels and shops on the 3 levels in between. At one stage we thought it even had its own water feature with water falling overthe glass roof but it turned out just to be a huge storm which we didn't know about when we ate lunch inside.

On our second full day in Berlin we toured the Olympic stadium that Hitler built for the 1936 Olympics and was restored for the 2006 World Cup (soccer). It was very impressive. Later Kerrie decided that we should go to the site of the former concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. This place was huge and you could easily spend a whole day there reading all the interpretive signs. Initially it was used to house Hitler's political opponents to "protect" them. Early propaganda was that people would regain their freedom through hard work and discipline, however after the war broke out conditions got considerably worse and not only were people treated more cruelly and tortured, but people began being taken there to be murdered, particularly Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. The numbers of people who were housed there and died there were staggering. Some of the more gruesome things we saw and read about were how people were gassed to death and how people were shot and had their bodies burnt in large numbers.

After the war finished the site continued to be used for holding prisoners, but this time it was the Soviet's holding people from the former Nazi regime. Whilst the Soviets' were not actively murdering prisoners, people were still dying due to the appalling conditions. Hopefully places like this don't still exist today and "war prisoners" such as David Hicks are treated considerably better.

On a happier note, we found current day Berlin to be a friendly place with lots of things to do and see and very easy to get around.

An interesting observation about Berlin was that there seemed to be a cigarette vending machine outside every second property, whether it be a pub, a newsagent or an apartment building. It kind of explains the high smoking rate we have found in Germany. Germany has a long way to go until it catches up to Melbourne in this regard.

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