blog d'europe: berlin

berlin! a city that seems to be steeped in history, yet at the same time a real new-age metropolis. i think it's this mix of the past, present & future that made me fall in love with berlin from the moment i got there...

unbelievably, i managed to get another week off work - so after an early flight out of paris (and a nice sleep at the airport..) i found myself in the middle of berlin, meeting up with jana, nils & adrian - some german friends from bonn/cologne. haven't seen jana since we met up in england four months ago, so i was so happy to be able to spend this week with everyone.
the icing on top of the cake was that meg & hat would be in berlin at the same time. double win!

we checked out the magnificent brandenburg gate, probably the first thing that comes to people's minds when you say "berlin". it's in pariser platz, along with one of europe's most expensive hotels where just a bottle of coke costs 18€. it's also the hotel where michael jackson infamously dangled his baby from the second-floor window in 2002. nice.

we wandered through the concrete maze of the memorial to the murdered jews of europe - where 2,711 huge, grey concrete blocks lie in a haphazard grid. some of the blocks are up to 5m high, so it can be quite a surreal feeling to be walking between them. underground, below the blocks, is the memorial/museum. it was a very grim museum that unearthed letters, poems & final words written by concentration camp prisoners, as well as outlining the number of deaths in each of the german-occupied countries during world war II. i never realised their power reached so far across europe. gave me shivers.

meg & i did a walking tour a couple of days later. best decision of our lives - we got a crash course in german history. i can now say (finally) that i know what prussia is/was. we walked past checkpoint charlie, the reichstag & visited the führerbunker (the site of hitler's bunker), where he lived underground for four months before killing himself. one of the most interesting places we walked through was bebelplatz, the big public square famous for being the location of the nazi book burnings in 1933 - where around 20,000 books were turned to ash. there's a plaque set into the cobblestones that reads "dort wo man bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am ende auch menschen", which translates more or less into: "where they burn books, they ultimately burn people". bebelplatz is also home to the humboldt university, where albert einstein was a professor of physics before he fled germany because of his jew status.

sat & watched the sun set over the berlinerdom - the huge & decadent 15th century cathedral, before walking through museum island. we found a shop that sold nothing but ampelmann things. the ampelmann are the famous red & green men on the pedestrian crossing lights. he is much loved in berlin & in my stomach (they had ampelmann lollies). when crossing over the spree river, meg & i (for reasons still unknown) decided to buy a fur hat which we bartered down from 50€ to something like 30€. "it'll be cold when we're travelling in october!!".........the man who sold it to us then gave us free badges, which we later found out had the communist symbol on them...hmmm.

spent our nights chatting over a beer or five in berlin's beer gardens, devouring tasty burgers in kreuzberg & kicking back in cool garden café's. favourite place was called 'kjosk', a huge space filled with little tables, & a hodge-bodge of different chairs all set around them. bird-cage lanterns hung from tree limbs, and tables were lit with oil lamps. you could buy drinks from a bus-turned-bar in a corner of the garden, and huge graffiti works covered the walls looking down on the open space. it was here that i was introduced to "wein schorle"- literally white wine mixed with mineral water. strange, but oh so tasty.

berlin.. ich liebe dich,

S.