The Chronicles of Travelling Steve

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Back in Berlin

Another quick weekend trip up to Berlin. This time it was just the two of us and we were determined to get a wider overview of the Berlin we'd only just glimpsed the last time we were there. We had caught the train up on Friday night and were staying at the same hotel in Friedrichshain as last time with the incredible buffet breakfasts. You could take on a whole city on just the goodness contained in the huge array of yums that they laid out for us every morning. We had a reasonably early breakkie as we wanted to get to the Reichstag when it first opened to try and avoid the queues that are usually stretched out the front of tourists trying to get inside to see the heart of the German nation. Sadly we got the timing a little wrong and had to line up with the rest of the rabble for about 45min before being shuffled in.

Volke - the People

The Reichstag has been at the centre of events in Germany for a long time as a very powerful symbol of rule. It was the fire in the Reichstag that helped kick the National Socialist party into power in 1933. The Russian Army raising a flag on top of the Reichstag signified the end of the European theatre of war in WWII. The building was severely damaged in the fighting and has been slowly rebuilt and now has a very cool dome of glass designed by Sir Norman Foster. The dome concentrates the sunlight and funnels it down into a heat pump down in the building which supplies some of the electricity needs for running parliament.

There's a double helix ramp inside that you can walk all the way to the top

We then wandered around the main shopping street in town trying to find some new shoes for me (all I brought to Europe were Blunnies and a pair of sandals) to no avail. We found some really cool shoes by El Naturalista in a store on Friedrichstraße but they didn't quite come in my size (that would be "huge and skinny") so we tracked down their Berlin head office and made our way there, only to find that they didn't make them that big at all. Bummed out a little by our failed shopping endeavours we turned to the next best thing which is food. We'd heard about a cool café in Kreuzberg called Gri Gri that sounded like they had amazing food so we caught the U-Bahn down towards Kreuzberg to try and find it. It turns out that they were doing track work on that section of track so we ended up walking quite a bit further than we expected to along the canals which was actually a pretty cool and interesting thing to do anyway. So thanks Deutsche Bahn for fixing up the track that weekend! Gri Gri was as good as we'd heard and we had a lovely lunch watching the passing parade, which included the strange sight of a white van disgorging it's contents at about 2pm of 4 dudes who were obviously in a band and had slept there next to the canal all night. It must have been a hell of a night and their morning(afternoon) ritual was pretty funny for all the people in the café who were observing.

Some random art on the way through Kreuzberg

From the café we headed back through Kreuzberg on Oranienstraße which turned out to be a real find. The street was packed with really cool shops full of amazing things and every now and again we'd hit a pocket of restaurants from all corners of the globe. We'll definitely be back there for a closer visit in the future. Eventually we found ourselves at the Jewish Museum which was our destination for the afternoon. It was designed by Daniel Libeskind and follows a very unusual floor plan which can be seen on their website. We lost ourselves in the museum for hours and were eventually kicked out at closing time. It was a very very cool building, evoked some pretty strong emotions at times, especially in the Void that holds "Shalechet" (Fallen Leaves). If you were to see any two things relating to the Holocaust in Berlin it would be this museum and the Jewish Memorial Park that we saw on our previous visit.

Fallen Leaves

Pretty worn out by the incredible amount of walking that we'd done we headed back to Friedrichshain for some very delicious Thai food to finish off the evening. The next day after another enormous breakfast we checked out of the hotel and found our way to Alexanderplatz where we were due to start a bike tour of Potsdam with Fat Tire Tours.

Waiting with our Fat Tire cruisers for the train to Potsdam

Potsdam is the palace region just outside Berlin that is often compared to Versailles near Paris. It certainly compares well in terms of sheer opulence but I think Potsdam has the edge when it comes to being bike friendly. Our tour guide Marielle was excellent and it was a nice contrast to the walking tour that we'd done before. We visited the New Palace (which looked pretty old to our colonial eyes), saw Sans Souci (no worries mate) and were generally very grateful for the excellent access and bike paths in and around the parks of Potsdam. Friedrich the Great was a pretty progressive leader and the fact that he built places like the palaces of Potsdam is a pretty nice legacy to leave behind.

A brief chalk history of Germany

The historical highlight for me was the visit to Ceclienhof Palace at the end of the tour. This palace was built in the style of an English hunting lodge and it was where the famous Potsdam Conference was held and the Potsdam Agreement was hammered out between the 3 major powers at the end of WWII to split up the spoils(France was not invited but received the meeting minutes!) . This led to the 4 zones in Germany and eventually to the Berlin Wall being built on 13 August 1961. Stalin had the edge in the negotiations having been present at the previous 3 summits between the UK, USA and Russia when they agreed to become allies. Truman was pretty new to it all and Churchill actually lost the job as Prime Minister of England while this conference was on, so Clement Attlee ended up as the English delegate. It was amazing to see the building just as it was when these leaders of the world were discussing how to carve up Germany. The design of each countries rooms was done to try and make them feel at ease and so there were some interesting touches like pictures of bulldogs and so forth. There's no better place than Europe to get a feeling for history and I feel pretty lucky to have spent so much time here visiting places where such major events took place.

Cecilienhof Palace - venue for the Potsdam Conference

We covered more ground than I expected to and had a very nice lunch at a microbrewery by a lake (excellent hefeweissenbier) and before we knew it we were back on the train to Berlin and from there straight back on the train to Leipzig. Another fantastic weekend away full of adventures, food and history. No new shoes and my feet were pretty unhappy about the pounding they'd received with all that walking on Saturday but it was well worth it.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home