Hey everyone, this is Alex! I know you’ll all miss Rach’s voice but we decided that I should write the post for Berlin. Fair warning, I feel like I will ramble a bit more so this post is longer than our previous posts. We’ve had some trouble uploading pictures through Wix so we decided to share photos through Google Photos albums now (applying backwards to Copenhagen and Amsterdam as well). We already use Google Photos to back up pictures so this is easier for us and it also has some more features than Wix. Check out the links on the Photos page.
We took a six hour train ride from Amsterdam to Berlin. We didn’t need to reserve seats on the train since we have Eurail passes and this meant we could get kicked out of our seats as more people board the train (luckily it only happened once). We arrived to Berlin Central Station and it was massive! One of those structures that the Germans are proud of, “a feat of German engineering” they say. It’s always a struggle with our heavy backpacks, but we got help to find where to board the public transportation and headed to the hostel. Travel days are always stressful and checking in to the hostel we find that their system messed up our reservation and only one bed was booked for the first night…just the news we want to hear. They solve the issue by throwing a mattress in the middle of our room that Rach ended up sleeping on for the first night. But they compensated us with two beers, first night free (for both beds) and free breakfast. Hey we like free stuff so it turned out to be fine.
Picking a place to eat is always fun for us, I’m gluten free and Rach is uh, particular with what she eats. Our crutch, Yelp, has been a little harder to use here in Europe. Restaurants don’t seem to show up as much and it’s probably because we search in English and the restaurants are a mix of a foreign language and English. Anyways we find a decent looking place and it turns out to be on a lively street with lots of cafes and food shops. We stumble upon a kebab grill and we see a picture of a half chicken plate with rice and a salad (perfect for us, think El Pollo Loco with a Turkish influence). While in line discussing what we’re going to order the guy behind us pokes his head in between us and says in English “What are you guys ordering?”. We don’t answer for a second and he smiles and says something like “Sorry, you guys sounded American and it’s kind of refreshing”. So we end up talking to him and learn he’s here with his buddy on travel for an electronics conference. They’re late 20’s or early 30’s and both live in San Francisco. I’m thinking psh, damn NorCal’ers but after sharing dinner with them they turn out to be pretty cool guys. We end up joining them at a beer garden and they’re nice enough to buy the first two rounds (they’ll get reimbursed anyways). Then we follow them to a ping pong bar (yup I guess they have them in Berlin too) close to our hostel and we buy the next round of beers. Rach and I don’t drink like we do back in our college days anymore so we’re now in a pretty good state. We decide to head back around midnight and say bye to our random American friends. All things considered, it was a good travel day. Lessons learned: always say yes to free beer and be open to random encounters (also buy beer at liquor stores, it was less than $2 for a big beer).
After the first night and morning at a hostel you get a decent feel for what it will be like for the duration of your stay. Our bunkmates all turned out to be younger guys (British and Irish) and we have good back and forth on our travel experiences (already better than Copenhagen). Pros: cheap, cool people, clean bathrooms, ballin’ showers (waterfall shower head), delicious breakfast buffet. Cons: men’s toilets were always clogged, Wi-Fi was terrible. This is common knowledge but worth pointing out for me, good earplugs are a must at any hostel room you stay in.
On our second day we bought tickets for a historical bike tour around Berlin, Rach had done a tour with this company, Fat Bike Tours, five years ago with her family. While we’re on our way Rach makes the comment “it would be so funny if the same tour guide was still here, but he’s definitely not”. Low and behold we get there, they introduce the guides and the same guy is there! His name’s Alex, but Rach assures me, “don’t worry you’re way hotter”. We think, we have to get in his group because Rach also remembers him being a good guide. So we kind of line ourselves up with him and get assigned to his group. We let him and our group know Rach did this tour with him five years ago and she’s back for more! Pretty funny coincidence. On the bike tours we’ve been on they always ask that one person always ride at the very end of the group so that the guide just has to look for him/her and will know that everyone is accounted for. I’ve also learned that at the end of the tour this person, “the ass man” as they said in Amsterdam, gets something free. So always volunteer for this! When the guide asked for a volunteer I played it cool to not seem too eager, then reluctantly said “Ok I’ll do it”. Rach: “well played Lin”. I ended up getting a piece of concrete from the Berlin wall and a free drink! Who knows it could be any piece of random concrete but I’ll take it.
The bike tour was better than Amsterdam, we learned more. They said that Berlin has the largest Turkish community outside of Turkey (20% of the population of Berlin), the third largest gay community and the fastest growing Jewish community. So it’s a pretty diverse city. We hit a lot of the historical sites on the tour: Berlin Cathedral, Humboldt University, Reichstag, Tiergarten, Victory Column, Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, part of the Berlin Wall, to name the more famous ones. When you think of Europe you usually think of old. Old architecture, old streets, just old. Berlin is different in that most of the buildings have been rebuilt twice. Once after the destruction from bombing during WWII and then again after the Berlin Wall came down. So it’s a new city in many ways and it’s amazing to think about the few landmarks that actually survived the war: Brandenburg Gate, Victory Column, others that I can’t remember. It’s said that the Victory Column only survived because Allied pilots used it as a reference point to find everything else that they bombed in the war. Our guide pointed out that you can actually see where bullets hit buildings from fighting because they’re patched in a different color from the rest of the building (I seemed to be the only person in our group to find this interesting!). I noticed the patches on one some the churches and also the Brandenburg Gate columns (I was always on the lookout). How crazy! I think I enjoyed this so much because you learn about WWII in school and you watch Hollywood movies about Americans in WWII but I always felt detached from the history. With Pearl Harbor as the exception, the war never really hit American soil, at least not on the same scale as Europe. But being in Berlin, standing in places where the fighting actually took place, thinking about all the soldiers on the ground where I was standing was very fascinating for me.
So that was my bit about the war (I don’t think Rach was as interested in the war and the fighting aspect as I was). Our bike tour also went to many of the historical sites of the Cold War. We didn’t know much about the wall and the Communist era of East Berlin and East Germany so it was interesting to learn about. We learned that the first form of the wall was built almost overnight. In 48 hours the Soviets had built a barbed-wire fence around East Berlin. Imagine you wake up one morning to find that you’re city is surrounded by a wall and you can’t leave. Scary! As Americans we can sometimes take our freedoms for granted. For Rach and I, the concept of living in a place where you’re not allowed to leave is so foreign that it’s hard to imagine. Also, what’s the point? What do you gain by locking your citizens in? Again, I suppose growing up so far from Communism it’s hard to imagine. The tour never told the story of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the wall so that’s some reading for us to do. The bike tour ended with some beers at a beer garden and then us getting rained on (luckily at the end).
We spent our second full day exploring some of the free museums about the Nazis and the Holocaust. Heavy stuff and these museums had a lot of information. A lot of text to read and too much for Rach and I to read in the time we had at the museums. We got some taste of the Central European weather this day, it would randomly start pouring for fifteen minutes and then the sun would come out. There’s no place like Southern California!
Our last full day we spent with a trip to what used to be the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, now the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum. We were lucky to get really nice weather for the day but it was sort of strange to have such a beautiful day and be in a place where so much horror took place. This camp was a labor camp and it’s primary focus was labor output to serve the Nazis war effort. However, many people were murdered here and our guide cited that it’s estimated that half of the prisoners that passed through it did not survive through the end of the war. During the tour we were often daunted by the sheer size of the camp. The main triangular area for roll call was huge. To think that this was just one of some twenty seven or so camps is scary. Visiting the camp left us with a lot of different thoughts and emotions that are hard to put down in a blog post. We learned that it’s estimated that eleven million people were killed as a result of the Holocaust. Six million being Jews. When you think of the Holocaust, you think of Jewish persecution (with good reason). However we realized the Nazis didn’t hate just one type of person, they hated anybody that disagreed with them. Unfortunately the topic of racism, prejudice and persecution is still very relevant today. Our tour guide was very passionate and he made a point at the end that it’s important for all of us to have a open dialogue about the hate and atrocities that we still see in our society today.
Something we didn’t experience in Berlin was their famous club nightlife. Supposedly Berlin has these techno clubs that are open for like 72 hours straight or something. But we made the conscious decision to skip the two hour wait, the ten euro cover charge, the overly loud thumping, and the sweaty people to enjoy Berlin’s history. While Rach and I enjoy drinking, there’s more to traveling than just alcohol! We learned so much and it invoked a lot of thought in us.
Unfortunately our time in Berlin ended on a somber note. Tuesday morning we got the news that Rach’s parents had to put their family dog, Kona, down. If you’ve ever had a dog, then you know how hard losing one is so send some warm thoughts to Rach and her family. In the back of her mind Rach knew that this might come during our trip, but it doesn’t make the reality any easier. We were lucky that we had our hostel room to ourselves at the time. I know that might sound like a weird thing to say right now, but when you’re in a hostel you have no privacy. Luckily the three Irish boys checked out of the hostel early and our London mate was only in the room for a minute so we were able to have some privacy while Rach got the news and we could mourn.
This post is dedicated to Kona and the happy life she lived as a Solomon. Rest in peace.
On to Prague!