A Disappointing Day

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On waking up at 9am, the first thing I did was look out of the window: was it still raining? No! It actually looked quite sunny with a touch of blue sky coming through, so I pulled some summery clothes out of my backpack and at about 9:45am, we were ready to see the sights of Berlin.

Our first point of interest was the Tiergarten, so we walked around the Berlin Zoo and around the outskirts of the park, before moving up towards the Victory Column. The area we were walking through to get there was a very business-y district with lots of offices and car dealerships and not a whole lot of interest. It also didn't take me long to figure out that it wasn't quite as lovely day as I had hoped. Dark clouds were gathering and it was actually quite cool, but luckily, we were doing more than enough trekking around to keep me from getting chilly! The Victory Column is in the centre of a huge roundabout on Strasse des 17. Juni, and in order to get to it, you have to walk through some dingy, quite unnerving subway tunnels (bearing in mind, after the previous night, we were expecting charvs to jump out on us at every turn!)...so when we finally actually reached the column, we decided that we might as well climb up to the top in order to make the scary subway walk that much less pointless! 😉 At the bottom was a very small, very uninteresting museum (so uninteresting that I honestly can't remember what it contained, at all) and then we walked up to the first level to begin the trek of around 250-300 steps to the top-one of the least fun memories I have of the whole holiday! 😉 When we eventually made it up, we found a very small, very cramped area packed with people, which actually really freaked me out. I rarely get claustrophobic, but I didn't like it there from the second we arrived. So we had one brief walk around to see the view from every direction, I let John take a few photos and then I had to insist that we went back down. The walk down the staircase was almost as scary as being up there though-a very high, very steep spiral staircase (and spiral staircases ALWAYS freak me out, no matter the size!) and me with legs still shaking from the near-anxiety attack I'd had at the top of the column. The Victory Column to my eyes is not particularly attractive either, so I concluded that the whole trip there was just a very bad idea all round!

From there, we continued on down Strasse des 17. Juni, me with legs still shaking and a very odd sensation of pins and needles in my knees-I have no idea what was happening there! The walk was very, very long, but it was worth it when we got close to the end and reached the Soviet Memorial. It's me, it's Soviets...obviously I was going to like that! We spent a little bit of time there posing for various pictures and then headed a little further down to the Reichstag Building. It honestly seemed that every tourist in Europe was there at that point on that day-the queue to get up into the dome was the longest I have ever seen, and had we joined it, we would have literally been there for the rest of the day. I wasn't all that fussed, because I just wanted to see the Reichstag and I was happy...and that was lucky because there was no chance in hell we were going to stand around in that line! There was a little cafe there, which we were going to eat at, but didn't for some reason (I just asked John is he could remember, and he just said I was doing my thing where I'm like "Well, I am hungry, but I was really looking for somewhere with bluer windows..."...which is very possibly true!), and so with nothing much else to see, we headed onwards to the Brandenberg Gate.

Now, when I said that every tourist in Europe was at the Reichstag, I may have been exaggerating slightly. However, every tourist that wasn't at the Reichstag was at the Brandenberg Gate. It was very, very busy. We were really impressed at the sight though, especially John, and stood there for a while just marvelling at the fact that we were there. I don't think that feeling of incredulity when you see famous sights like that ever goes away, no matter how many you see, and it really is an awesome feeling. We moved on from Pariser Platz and started heading towards the Holocaust Memorial site, on the way passing by a group of British students outside the British embassy and getting a few cheers from them aimed at John's NUFC shirt...the first time we had come across Newcastle fans on the whole holiday! It was about time. We were in quite jolly moods by this point, though the Holocaust Memorial obviously changed that quickly. It is a very odd, very distorting place and in my opinion, it gives off the exact feeling you should be having when thinking about something as disturbing and horrific as the Holocaust. We didn't stay too long, but I think it's a really effective and fitting monument. Moving on, we headed back up to the Unter den Linden, which I had been really looking forward to walking down, but sadly there was a huge amount of roadworks and building going on down the centre, which made it completely impossible to really appreciate and enjoy the place and any kind of atmosphere it might have had. We stopped at Babelplatz and grabbed a hot dog for lunch and then walked to the Berliner Dom, which was a very impressive building, but again sadly not my favourite type of architecture or design. After walking around for about three hours at this point, we were starting to gain an impression of Berlin as a very large city with some impressive sights in the midst of a whole lot of nothing. Maybe we were just starting to tire after a busy ten days of travelling, but there was just nothing about the place that was taking hold of us and making us fall for it (and it's rare for that to happen to me in a place filled with so much history). We continued on though, had a bit of a rest next to the Neptun Fountain in the Nikolaiviertal area before walking to Checkpoint Charlie. It was again a bit of a trek, back in the direction of the Brandenberg Gate and down Friedrichstrasse (which was actually a very nice street, with some good shopping to be had!), and we found on arrival there that all the tourists had followed us because it was completely packed. We couldn't really get anywhere near the museum, and we were starting to tire a bit of all the crowds and walking, so we decided to move on quickly to Potsdamer Platz. On the way there, we received a few texts letting us know that Newcastle had signed Danny Guthrie, which was a bit of a surprise, so we stopped for a while at a bus stop to reply to all of those lol, before heading on.

It was only about 2:30 by this point, but we were already getting quite tired of Berlin, which was a shame. I'm still not entirely sure why, but we just couldn't get a grasp on it. So we had a look around the Arkaden shopping centre and then went over to the big cinema at Sony Centre and got tickets for Get Smart, which was fun enough. When it was finished, we realised Mamma Mia! was starting an hour later, and despite the fact we'd spent the whole summer bemoaning how crap it looked, we suddenly felt this great urge to see it (at least, I did. John was not so desperate!)...so we ran over to Arkaden and had a quick tea at a chinese place (crispy chicken...mmmm!) before going back to the cinema again! I had some really annoying people next to me who clearly didn't want to be there and kept slagging off everything about the film, which was rather irritating, but I still actually quite enjoyed it despite the complete insanity of it all! When it was over, it was about 7pm, and as we had a very early start for the train the next morning, we just decided to get the U-Bahn back to the hotel and have an early night. We very possibly had two prostitutes sitting opposite us on the train, which made that journey rather more interesting than it might have been otherwise lol, but it was very, very crowded, and we were glad just to get off there and back in the hotel room.

So, that was our time in Berlin...not the most inspiring or exciting place I've ever been to, if I'm honest, and quite a disappointment all things told. I don't think it's the sort of place you can see or even begin to appreciate in just a day, so despite our feelings towards it, we are going to go back and spend more time there because a city with so much history really deserves another chance. It just seemed ugly, unfriendly and still in need of revitalisation after the years of war and division, but hopefully another visit will change my opinion.

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