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Published: August 12th 2014
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Our train is nearing Prague now as we look back on a fantastic few days in Berlin.
We stayed at the East Seven hostel, which was pretty brilliant. They had everything a backpacker might ever want, from Spotify to straighteners. Our room was clean, bright and spacious, and felt like the height of luxury after our time at the more spartan Hans Brinker. This did have the unintended effect of us getting out of bed to go sightseeing later, as lying in was so comfortable. We met quite a few fellow travellers there, some friendly people in our room, who we chatted to every night, but whose names we never caught, and an Australian couple who were 7 months into a year-long trip. The kitchen was a massive bonus of the hostel, it was brilliantly equipped and had a clever free food system, where past visitors could leave anything they weren't taking with them for general consumption. We cooked for all but our first night, taking advantage of the cheap LIDL down the road to prepare some tasty cheap and healthy food, meaning the Haagen Dazs ice cream cones we bought to treat ourselves cost more than two
dinners. Our first night was slightly more expensive but still healthy, tasty and excellent value. Having arrived after the supermarkets had closed, we ventured out in search of a restaurant that was still open. We stumbled upon a tiny pizzeria very near to our hostel, and upon the recommendation of their other patrons, and after looking at their prices, we decided that a half pizza for €10 would be enough for the both of us. The 'half' pizza that was brought out to us was twice the size of a regular pizza and baked on a delicious and healthy flatbread with some good quality ham and pineapple laid out on top. Marvellous.
On our first day, learning from our experience in Amsterdam, we opted to go on the free tour of Berlin. Our guide, Theo, picked us up from the hostel around midday, and after collecting other people from various hostels, we started the tour proper from Museumsinsel, AKA, Museum Island. Theo was well schooled in Berlin's history and proceeded to give us an interesting and engaging GCSE history refresher course. The tour lasted a few hours and we saw lots of the big sights in Berlin;
with Theo's informative commentary throughout, we started at the magnificent Berliner Dom Cathedral, and walked past museums, the Humboldt University, the thought-provoking Neue Wache memorial - commemorating the victims of war and terror, Checkpoint Charlie, the Topography of Terror, and the site of Hitler's bunker, among others. We enjoyed the story of the spectacular French church, built to welcome French migrants to rapidly depopulating East Germany, which was so good that they built another further along the street for the Germans! As we arrived at the Holocaust Memorial, the heavens opened, we fell a bit behind the group putting on our waterproofs and when we emerged at the meeting point, the group was nowhere to be seen! Fortunately that was almost the last stop on the tour, so we decided to make our way back to the hostel from there, discovering Chelsea's previously hidden map reading skills. Needless to say, Theo did not receive his tip... He gave an excellent tour, but we literally could not find him!
The next day we tried to pack in as much as possible... after a lie in. We set off around 10.30 for Museum Island, choosing to visit the DDR
museum, which focused on what life was like in East Germany after the war, with Soviet control and Communism. The museum had a highly interactive, hands-on approach, with many opening drawers, whole replica living areas and prison cells to explore, you could even sit in a Trabant, the 2-stroke engine car that was symbolic of East Germany. The way that children were indoctrinated from a young age was particularly striking, maths lessons used only military examples, and balls for throwing were replaced with wooden grenades. From there we walked a couple of kilometres to the photo-ops that were the magnificent Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag building. We then spent a couple of hours exploring the Tiergarten, discovering many beautiful statues, including the composers monument, for Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart. The main monument in the Tiergarten was the Berlin Victory Column, standing 67 metres tall and topped with a gilded statue, which seemed to be something of a theme with German monuments. As we left the Tiergarten we stopped at the memorial to the Soviet troops who had died taking Berlin, it was conspicuous by the amount of litter around it, in stark contrast to the well-kept rest of the park.
At this point I suggested that we follow the path of the Berlin Wall, the length of most of which is marked out by a cobblestone line, from the Brandenburger Tor, to the East Side Gallery. After already having walked a long way, Chelsea was not entirely impressed with this idea, but was persuaded with the aforementioned, exorbitantly expensive, Haagen Dazs ice cream cones. We arrived almost immediately at the Topography of Terror, which we had only passed by on our walking tour. The utter desolation that was inflicted upon Poland, and in particular, Warsaw, both during and after the war, were shocking and horrifying to learn about. We continued onwards, still following the markings of where the wall used to be, as we left the beaten path, these markings disappeared intermittently, but between our map and the helpful yellow areas painted onto the road, we were able to follow the walls route faithfully. As the pain in our feet had travelled all the way up our legs, and Chelsea insisted that her tendons were about to snap, we finally reached our destination. We were rewarded for our trek, with the murals along the wall, which ranged from the beautiful
to the bizarre, and we're invariably covered in graffiti. We were both exhausted and decided to indulge ourselves with public transport to return to the hostel. This proved somewhat more challenging than we had expected, as we first got on a tram headed in the wrong direction (my fault) and then walked all the way back to the first stop, not realising that we had gone past the S-Bahn station we had been looking for. When we eventually got to the station we met a couple of Swedish guys, who just so happened to live in Malmo, where Chelsea had lived for 2 years. Our journey home was without further incident, and we arrived back at our hostel at 9.30 having been out for 11 hours, and we later calculated that we had walked over 20km that day!
People we met at the hostel, had mentioned that there was a concentration camp, that could be visited nearby, so after Chelsea did some research we set off on a complicated journey to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which involved a tram, a train and two busses. When we arrived, we discovered that the guided tour, which we had been
aiming for, and had missed by half an hour, did not run on Monday's anyway, so we stumped up €3 each for the audio tour and set off. The camp had been built shortly before the war, although not designed as a death camp, at its peak, it murdered 10,000 Soviet P.O.W.'s in 10 weeks. After the war, it was turned into a Soviet 'special camp' used to imprison dissidents. It was an eye-opening and deeply shocking experience; when we discovered that some of the prisoners were forced to test military boots, by walking 40km each day over rocky terrain, carrying heavy packs, with no consideration given to their foot size when allocating the boots, it put our 20km walk the previous day into perspective.
The train journey back was made eventful by the angry German ticket inspector who was not impressed at Chelsea's feet on the seat in front, or at the fact that our reduced price tickets, which we thought included students, were actually intended only for "kinder, kinder, KINDER", we apologised profusely and she laughed with scorn as she threw our tickets back in my face, leaving us somewhat bewildered, but able to continue
our journey back. It was the only time that we had bought any sort of ticket for German public transport, and the only time we had been challenged to produce a ticket, the rest of our journeys were completed free of charge, due to a combination of a lack of understanding of the system, and a lack of coins!
We had a wonderful time in Berlin, and wished we could have stayed a few days longer, if only to have visited some of the museums on offer, whose collections looked quite spectacular.
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