Pania Finds Her Way Around Berlin

Monday 16 August

When we all woke up it was raining and it didn’t look good for a day out, but by 10am the rain had cleared so I got whisked into the backpack and they set off to walk to the bus stop. It was only about a 10 minute walk and they got there in plenty of time. The bus went back along the motorway to the little village called Wasser where they had first arrived yesterday. This was on the train line right into Berlin. They bought what they thought was the right ticket for whole journey, from the bus driver, which later in the day turned out not to be.

Once in town they got out at Friedrichstrasser and walked in the direction of Unter Den Linden which is the historic part of what used to be East Berlin. Not far along they were approached by a girl selling tickets for a2hour tourist bus and decided it would be a good idea to get an idea of where everything was in the city. The commentary was in German and English. The man spoke really fast in both languages and never drew breath in between, so they had to listen really carefully. Using the map they were able to work out where things were and where best to go over the next few days. Being Monday most of the museums and galleries were closed.

After the bus trip they walked down to the Brandenburg gate and found the information centre. There they bought a 3 day Berlin Welcome card which they will start using tomorrow for all their transport around the city. It comes with an excellent guide book, maps and discounts so they will have time to study it and look carefully at what order to do things in.

The Brandenburg Gate is the quintessential symbol of Berlin. It was restored in 2002. It stood in East Berlin before the fall of the wall. It is now a very happening place leading onto a big square full of entertainers and tourists. From there they took me over to play in what has become a children’s playground. It is really a memorial for the Jews killed by the Nazis in 1933 -45. Known as Holocaust-Denkmal, it covers 19sq metres and is a series of large concrete slabs set a various heights symbolizing the millions of murdered Jews. The ground is not even and curves up and down and you can walk all through it like a maze. Kids were playing in it everywhere, and of course the big boys were leaping from stone to stone, which you are supposed not to do, but it was harmless fun. The stones were set too far apart for me to leap across and not being able to fly I had to just play hide and seek around the corners.

A walk towards Postdamer Platz followed, and there was also an exhibition in the street with old sections of the wall mounted. In the Roaring twenties it had been one of Europe’s busiest plaza and the centre of Berlin’s nightlife. During the war it was almost destroyed completely during the final battle for Berlin. It became a vast open space in the shadow of the wall, where Eastern tourists , standing on high observations towers could peek over the wall. Since the wall came down, it has been developed into a busy business and leisure hub. The Sony Centre is a huge domed glass and steel structure which houses eight cinemas, many restaurants, and Sony’s Europe headquarters. Most of the movies were advertised as original version showing in English.

By the wall exhibition was a young man dressed as a border card for the old Checkpoint Charlie. For €2.50 Mary got her passport stamped with all the possible seven stamps you could have got if you had been travelling through the wall between 1961 and 1989. There are information boards in German and English everywhere in the streets documenting the history of the wall and reunification. There are still fragments of the wall for sale in all the tourist shops in various forms as well.

It was getting late so it was time to make the journey back to camp. Unfortunately the ticket machine didn’t really have good English instructions, so they ended up having to queue to see a real person to buy a ticket. They produced the one way ticket they had bought in the morning and asked for reverse of this only to find that the one for the morning was only for about 6 bus stops in the suburbs, so it cost a bit more to get back on the train. The three day card they will start using tomorrow is excellent value but has a time limit so they have not put it in machine to validate it yet.