Berlin, Berlin, Berlin

I do love Berlin. I maybe wouldn’t love it quite as much if it weren’t home of Andrea The Fabulous, who speaks German and enthusiastically takes us to all the best bits, but still.

(The two circles under the bridge have flourescent lights in them, in the shape of Rock Paper Scissors hands. The bridge seperates East and West Berlin, and when it gets dark the two sides Rock Paper Scissors all night long).

I’m big on walking tours in Europe, but Jenny and I had successfully missed most of the ones we wanted to take, including one in Dublin because I led us in exactly the wrong direction. Jenny kept missing the Edinburgh one as well, I think because of sleep.

In Berlin we managed to get to the starting place for the Red Berlin tour in time, and were shown Cold War era bits of the city, like former Stasi interrogation centres that are now government offices…

and a section of the “Death Strip” that’s been preserved:

The Death Strip was a open section between the two bits of The Wall – if you managed to get over the wall you had to contend with armed guards and land mines and barbed wire before you got to the other side.

The East Side Gallery, a section of the wall that was perserved and covered in art, is being redone by the original artists for the 20th anniversary of the wall falling. I got to see it a year ago on my first trip, but much of it was white washed over when we got there this time.

We spent much time taking pictures of Guinness in Ireland (it’s pretty, admit it), but felt German beer deserved the same treatment. We sat at a floating pub on a river, watching an amusing duck for at least part of one sunny afternoon.

I do love that city.

and now for something completely different

Things have changed a wee bit since my last post.

I no longer live in England. I no longer work at a bed and breakfast, or at the hotel down the road.

I’m in Edinburgh! And going to get a job and live here for a spell. But that is for another post. This post is commemorate the past week, which was the first ever Andrea and Aasa Are Together In Europe extravaganza.

I went to Berlin for a week, and it was marvelous.

Andrea knows every kick ass corner of her city, and took me to a different area almost every day, when she wasn’t working. These pics are of some derelict buildings that were taken over by artists, and are now completely covered in graffitti art and instalations.

Also, (obviously) we saw the wall.

Berlin is full of shops with handmade funky-as-hell goods, cafes and bars and food of every kind. It’s also very, very flat, which I appreciated after the hilly likes of Lisbon.

I also visited, for the first time, a Nazi concentration camp:  Sachsenhausen, just outside the city.

I’m sure there aren’t words to describe a concentration camp, so I won’t try to find them. I do think, though, that anyone who travels should visit at least one, at least once, sometime in their lives.

 

My generation forgets, I think, how recent the Holocaust is in the scheme of history. You’re reminded, walking through those modern buildings, with motifs on the floor and tiles on the walls that look like any old hospital you might have been in, that smell like any old farm house you might walk into, that those atrocities aren’t so far away.

 

To lighten the tone, I’ll leave you with this: Andrea works at a hostel in Berlin, and they have a very specific policy in the bar:

Everywhere I go, it seems, people love to hate Bryan Adams.