Berlin, Germany

Having eaten a final delicious Prague cake from the tourist-targeting bakery on the corner, Mel and I hopped on a bus to Berlin. It was a four-hour journey through a magnificent landscape. At one point, I was forced to climb out into the magnificent landscape to fetch my passport from beneath the bus, as we were boarded by border authorities, but that’s enough said about that.

Despite having learned all about S-Bahns not even a month back in Munich, we had an outrageously frustrating time figuring out how to get to the hostel. Or, at least, I was frustrated. Mel just stood there all superior, following me back and forth from the bus station to the train station and knowing exactly what to do. Which is what we eventually did, having doubled back to the train station for the second time.

Never give me a map. Never, never!

Our difficulties seemed set to continue when we stepped out at Alexanderplatz and became momentarily convinced that the graffiti-covered crack den across the street was our hostel. It wasn’t. It was just a graffiti-covered crack den across the street. And our actual hostel was pretty cushy, as it turned out.

We stepped out into the cold grey city street and hiked up to the Brandenburg Gate, the tourist symbol of Berlin and something important to do with history etc. It was all lit up in the darkness, and there were people dressed up as Darth Vader and US soldiers waving flags in front of it: cool.

Funny story about the Brandenburg Gate: the statue at the top signifies Victory, and was stolen by a covetous Napoleon when he stomped through Prussia. Following Napoleon’s defeat, some fairly triumphant Prussians returned Victory to her rightful place atop the Gate, and named the square beneath ‘Pariser Platz’. So now Victory is staring down on the vanquished Paris, a nice little nose-thumbing to the French.

We walked through the Gate and found ourselves at the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, a huge space filled with rising and falling blocks of granite. As you walk further into the Memorial, the granite blocks rise over your head and distort surrounding sounds, completely sucking away all evidence of the nearby traffic. It was striking. It was particularly shiver-inducing at night, and the people playing a rather inappropriate game of hide and seek didn’t much help my nerves.

We then paid a visit to the Memorial Museum beneath the blocks. The Memorial Museum provided a brief overview of the major Holocaust atrocities, but its focus was on anecdotal evidence from those directly affected. There were some truly nightmarish stories.

Next we visited the Topography of Terror, a museum about the Gestapo within the ex-Gestapo headquarters. (Mel and I almost mistakenly broke into a German Parliament building along the way, but that’s another story.) There were lots of photos, headlines and Nazi report extracts: fascinating! And we got to see a stretch of the Berlin wall outside the museum.

After the obligatory schnitzel and bratwurst dinner, we headed home and rested up for the next day’s adventures. The next day’s adventures started with a buffet breakfast, which I largely mention so as to credit my mother for our upbringing: yes, we did a Mum and took rolls for lunch. Shh.

We started the day with a three and a half hour tour of Berlin. Unlike our Prague guide, this chick knew what she was on about. Among other sights, we visited Checkpoint Charlie, the American checkpoint along the Berlin Wall, through which people used to smuggle themselves sewed inside car seats. We also got to see the site of Hitler’s infamous suicide bunker, upon which now lies a rather ordinary car park.

After the tour, we made our way to the East Side Strip, the longest remaining section of the Berlin wall. There was some fantastic artwork, and a really scungy atmosphere. And that was the closest we got to ‘alternative Berlin’ the whole time we were there, but I think Mel was secretly relieved to relocate to the city centre with its cleanliness and dampened threat of assault.

Our next stop was the Jewish Museum. The building was the best part, really. It was insanely creepy, deliberately constructed to evoke feelings of unease in its visitors, all sloping walls and empty ‘void’ spaces. There was a section of staircase that ended at a blank wall. The Holocaust Tower was particularly affecting: there was nothing inside the unheated space but darkness with a narrow strip of natural light at the top.

Most confronting of all was a gallery dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. The first room contained ten televisions with ten dissonant voices, each singing a different song over the top of the others. The second was a room full of cartoonish faces shaped out of metal, all grimacing, some big and some small, that made harsh clanking noises when you walked on top of them.

After that, we sought out a church left in ruins by the Allies and were wholeheartedly unimpressed. Dinner was more impressive: mmm, currywurst. We then took a quick look at the Reichstag before heading home.

After the old breakfast buffet routine next morning, we walked across half of Berlin, mostly within the Tiergarten and mostly in the general direction of the Victory Column at its centre. It took ages, but we finally got to the column and stared up at it for a bit before walking back to the Brandenburg Gate.

And so ended our adventures in Berlin, city of bears.