I woke later than planned, the ride from the Dutch coast really took it out of me and I welcomed the lie in.  I was so excited! I’m in Berlin!! Well, several miles south of Berlin but it’s Berlin all the same. I showered, dressed and packed my gear away before heading out to catch a bus the railway station.
The concierge told me that I’d have to wait 9 minutes for the next bus, that it would pull up outside the hotel lobby and would leave 1 minute later. Precisely 9 minutes later the bus arrived, pulled up outside and 1 minute later we were on our way… so this is how timetables work!!
The bus delivered me to Schönefeld Airport train station and after a brief orientation exercise and several wrong turns I found the ticket office. I asked the woman behind the glass if she spoke English and she said only a little and we proceeded to have a full on conversation in English, sometimes I thought her English was better than mine. My return ticket to the center of Berlin was something like €5, for that price I wasn’t sure if I had the right ticket, it seemed far too low but she assured me and off I went.
While riding the train I kept wondering if I was travelling through East or West Berlin. I hadn’t checked before leaving but judging but the buildings alone I decided that I must be travelling through the former East Berlin. The buildings were either ancient and uncared for looked like they were built in the 60’s or 70’s and had been allowed to decay. I was fascinated by what I was seeing, my nose was pressed firmly to the window as the elevated train line gave me a bird’s-eye view of this amazing city.
I alighted at Hauptbahnhof station right in the heart of Berlin and close to the German parliament, the Richstag. As I walked to the Richstag I noticed the space around me. This was a major European city, an ancient city and I would have expected centuries of buildings would be crammed into the city centre but no, there was space and lots of it. To see the Richstag was an amazing moment, I had seen it a million times on documentaries and films over the years and my overriding vision was a building in ruins surrounded by piles of debris. What I saw today was barely recognisable, the building was completely restored with a new glass dome and looked magnificent. I stood in front of it, examining every detail, imaging what once surrounded this iconic building, what once occupied these vast empty spaces, what death and destruction happened around me, perhaps right on the very spot I was standing on. It sent shivers up my spine to think about it.
Next to the Richstag was the Brandenburg gate. This was another awe-inspiring moment. I stood staring for a while, it was hard to believe I was actually standing beneath the Brandenburg gates. After the war these gates were one of thousands of structures that intersected with the Berlin Wall, I was standing on the West side of the gates and as I walked under and the through the gates I passed into the once Communist controlled East Berlin.
At first East Berlin didn’t seem all that different to the West but as I walked deeper into the East I started to notice some interesting things. There were car parks in the most unusual places… street corners and mid terrace where you imagine a building should have stood. There were fenced off plots of land for no apparent reason, again I put it down to demolished buildings that were never rebuilt. And then the soviet style buildings began to appear and the one that stood out was the Fernsehturm, German for “television tower”. The tower was built between 1965 and 1969 by the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and is the tallest structure in Germany standing at 368 meters high. Considering its proximity to the Wall I’m sure that the tower was used for a lot more that TV transmissions.
I walked a lot around East Berlin, I felt a great sense history, so much had happened on these streets. Every corner I turned had something new and interesting to see. After a few hours I started to make my way back to the Brandenburg gate and my transport home for the night.
On the way I came across Check Point Charlie, the famous US crossing point into the West and close to that was the site of the Gestapo headquarters but all that remained were the foundations upon which an exhibition hall was built that told the heartbreaking stories of life under the Nazi regime. Running along the edge of the foundations was one of the last remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall.
It was really interesting to see the wall standing where is was built all those years ago. The chisel marks were clearly visible where Berliners had hacked pieces off the wall when the GDR regime fell. Where the wall had been removed there was a metal band embedded into the road tracing the exact route of the wall. As I walked on I noticed the route of the wall passed through buildings, dividing once close communities. It must have been distressing to wake one morning to find that you couldn’t walk across the street, your street to visit your friends and relatives and that your future had been sealed.
I continued westward and came across the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This is a dramatic memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and consists of a 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae”, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field.
The stelae are 2.38 m (7 ft 10 in) long, 0.95 m (3 ft 1 in) wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.8 m (8 in to 15 ft 9 in). The stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.
It was getting late and time I made tracks for my hotel and dinner. The train ride was my first chance to sit and only then did I realise how tired I was, I had walked non stop since I arrived this morning. Back at the airport hotel I made for the bar to eat and plan my ride to Kraków tomorrow.