Berlin, a city reborn
Klaus JonesSeptember 21st, 2009 at 10:36 am
Our return to Germany began with a rather long travel day from Portugal, 13 hours of intermittent movement interspersed with hours and hours of waiting around in an airport. Surprisingly, we dealt with it quite well, barely noticing the wait. Is it a bad thing that you can get used to sitting around waiting for stuff to happen for 6 hours?
A rather amusing fact (given the vaunted German efficiency) about Berlin’s public transport. The S-bahn, the trains connecting the suburbs to the city itself, was running with only about one fifth of it’s trains. The reason why? The trains – all of them – had somehow managed to miss annual servicing. 6 years running.
A spate of brake and wheel failures prompted drastic actions, and roughly 80% of the trains were out of service. This made getting to our apartment pretty bloody hard, especially at 2am.
Anyways, travel difficulties aside, Berlin is probably our favourite city to date. It may have been the mix of being back in a fairly western culture, or that we met up with a mate from Australia now living in Germany – sup Crispy – but we had an absolute blast here.
From seeing some random concert with Steve’s cousin to doing the walking tour through the city proper (highly, highly recommend it – New Europe Walking Tours), everything just seemed…great. We saw all the classic sights, the Brandenberg Tor, the wall, the site of Hitler’s bunker, East side gallery, all the major landmarks.
As much of what we saw was laden with WW2 history, it was natural for Sachsenhausen to rear it’s ugly head, and we did put aside a day to visit that particular concentration camp. It has truly mind opening stories and facts about the entire period, and while not really enjoyable as such, it too was worth the visit.
If we hadn’t been museumed out by the first 10 weeks of our trip, they probably would have held some interest as well. As it stands, we gave them a miss in favour of hitting up the nightlife with some locals (Aussies, but now living here).
Sleeping off a 6am finish the night before, we spent a quiet Sunday relaxing by catching a movie in one of Berlin’s many English cinemas.
Our 4 days in Berlin were, while overshadowed by shitty shitty German weather – first sub 20 degree day we’ve had yet – a lot of fun, and I personally can’t wait to go back.