An Interloper Joins the Tour

Thursday August 19th
The little kiwis had all had a day in Berlin so they decided to stay back and keep me company on the canal bank today. What a fuss when Mary turned up with a “new friend”. They were not sure that there was room on the back seat for another traveller. But they have got used to the idea and have welcomed Ber Lin into the family. There are bears everywhere in Berlin and Mary had been planning to buy one for days to join all the others on the couch in the passage at home.

Having read all the tourist guides carefully, today we wanted to pick up on the remaining few things we wanted to see on our last day in Berlin. One of these was the 1930s Art Deco Department store. We went in and it was more like an early shopping mall with individual shops but it had real class and was certainly an excellent example of Art Deco. It had sweeping marble staircases with wrought iron and beautiful black and white marble tiles.

We walked on down to Gendarmenmarkt, reputedly Europe’s’ most attractive square with the lovely concert hall, (Konzerthaus), which we were able to view through a glass door but not actually go into. It is the home of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. On either side stand the twin churches of the German and French cathedrals both now used as museums.
We carried on down to Checkpoint Charlie. In the street on large boards, is the whole story of the building of the wall and it traces the Cold War era. It is exceptionally well laid out and displayed and there were people everywhere just standing and reading it. There is a replica booth in the street with actors in uniforms as well. It took us nearly an hour to read all the boards that cover both sides of nearly a block. We decided there was no need to pay money to go into the actual museum as the public display was so extensive. Instead I bought a book and DVD about the wall.

From there we walked on to the Topographie of Terrors which is also a free exhibition in the street but it was all closed off. It looks as if it is brand new and not officially opened as yet. You could see it but you couldn’t get up close to read the writing and look at the photos. It is right alongside the only remaining sections of the wall left in the city. In 1943 the Nazi institutions were based here. After the war they were razed, except for the cellars where the prisoners were tortured. These are still visable from the street.

While looking for lunch we found ourselves back by the memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe. So we grabbed a quick bite off a street seller and went to the information Centre which had been closed on Monday. Underneath the actual field of 2,711 concrete stelae is an extensive exhibition surveying the Nazi’s extermination policy between 1933 and 1945. We bought the audio tour; general admission was free. There are several rooms. The room of dimensions has actual written personal accounts by Jewish people. The room of families was the most interesting. It traces the fates of fifteen Jewish families in different parts of Europe. In the room of names they are constantly playing a tape of names and short biographies of some of the Jews. The room of sites documents the geographic spread of the genocide.

There were large numbers of people visiting this site but it was the one of the quietest places we have been in. It was also one of the best presented exhibitions we have seen. One of the most impressive things about Berlin and the Germans is how they have presented their history in such an unbiased way and tell it as it really was. It has taken a remarkably short time to get the city looking vibrant and tourist friendly. There must be more museums and memorials here than anywhere else in Europe. There is so much around the streets on boards and all in English and German. Even in four days we know we will have missed some of it.

On the way home we took a photo of a huge house right next to the camp. It has enormous grounds all gated and with an electronic keypad at the gate. On the porch in full view of the road is a mannequin of a policeman about to draw his gun. Two dog barks constantly and run at the fence when anyone comes near. There never seems to be actual people around. However over the road is a derelict house that has become a ruin and this is their outlook. We photographed them both, because it just goes to show that you can be as grand as you like but you can’t choose your neighbours!

Patariki Has a Wet Day in Berlin

Wednesday August 18th

Woke up to rain today and not too warm at all. Luckily I have my zip up rugby ball to climb into on days like this. We caught the bus and train into town and headed for the DDR museum which was an interactive museum about everyday life under a socialist dictatorship. It really showed how life had been for the people living in East Berlin and East Germany for 40 years. There were drawers to pull out and cupboards to open and everything was in English as well as German. Because it was raining it was crowded with people. I got my photo taken on a Trabbi which was the only choice of car most of the East Germans had and they sometimes had to wait up to 10 years to get one.

After lunch, Mary and Alan visited the Berliner Dom, (Berlin Cathedral). This is the largest and most lavish church in the city and was reopened in 1993 after 40 years restoration to fix the war damage. Although there has been a church on this site since 1747, this one was originally finished in 1905 after many years of planning and decision making over what style of church they would build.
After this they ended up going on a long walk to look at the only part of the city that is left to give an idea of how it would have looked in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a picturesque scene on the River Spree promenade and although it took a bit of finding it did look good with the bridges and boats tied up alongside.

They had decided to visit an outlying museum on the way home and it all seemed easy from where they were. When they got off the train they walked into the area of Schoneburg and found the street that the book said the Jugend Museum was located in. After walking in one direction for about 5 minutes they realised the numbers were getting bigger, so they retraced their steps in the other direction. Very few buildings had any sort of number. After about 10 minutes walking they picked up some numbers and found they were going up in ones not twos. So they decided to check the other side of the road, which was several lanes of traffic across, only to discover that they number up one side of the street and loop around and down the other. So they ended up walking right back beyond the other the side of where they had started out. So they now had to walk all the way back in the direction they had come from. This would have been fine had it not started to rain really heavily. By the time they reached the Jugend museum they were soaked.

They were able to get into the dry and hang up their jackets and umbrellas and put their backpacks into a locker before starting to look at the exhibits. The main exhibit was called Berlin Half and Half. It traced the story of Berlin from the time the wall went up until it fell. They were provided with a translation of all the main panels in English and it was really worth making the effort to get to as it was beautifully presented and easy to follow. When they had finished looking at that one they were offered translations of the exhibitions on the floor above and in the basement. The one on the floor above was fascinating. They had a created a series of rooms and inside each they told the story of a real person living in the district is Schonburg who was an immigrant from another culture. It was called Global Village. The last one was the enchanted rooms. Primarily for children it contained a series of themed booths containing things from the past exhibited in a bright lively way. There was a huge hands on area and lots of dressing up clothes. If it wasn’t behind glass it could be touched.

The whole museum was an educational centre for children to learn of their own history but wonderful for adults as well. They were pleased they didn’t give up trying to find it which would have been easy to do.
It was quite a walk back to the station but it had a Lidl store so they were able to stock up on food. Negotiating which way to go on the circle line was interesting, but they got on the train going in the right direction and finally got the pink line back to the bus stop.

Ka Pai Visits a Nuclear Bunker

Tuesday 17th August

Today was the first day of the three day Berlin Card so they made sure they were on the bus before 10am along with lots of other campers. The bus to the station nearly filled up completely at the camp stop. Once on the train they worked out the changes needed to get to The Berlin Story Exhibition. They had decided that this would be a good place to start as it would give the history and the whole overview of Berlin. The multimedia presentation was in the form of a tour across the 800 years of the city’s history. It was a very full and extensive exhibition with all the information and video in English as well as German.

Included in the ticket was a guided tour to an original Cold War fallout shelter. Early in the 1970s a huge shopping complex had been built on the Kurferstendamn Boulevard. The Western Berlin Government had paid the owner to convert the bottom floor of the car park underneath, into one of several nuclear shelters under the city. There was room for 4000 people in this particular bunker. Inside were beds made of similar materials to a mini trampoline. There were airlock doors and a decontamination shower in the first compartment. There were limited toilet, kitchen, and medical facilities. Apparently you would have been able to live down there for two weeks after a nuclear explosion, but then you would have had to come out, as they were only able to store enough food for two weeks. It is unlikely the people would have survived once returning to the surface. There were not enough places for everyone in the city and it would have been on a first come first in basis. There were no lists or privileges. Apparently there had been a sign in the street, but they kept getting stolen. Part of the bunker has now been turned into a function centre. It would have cost a lot of money to build and maintain, but apparently the government felt that it needed to do something during the time of nuclear threat.

The tour took place part way through their visit in the main museum, so they needed to get their tickets recharged to go and finish looking at it. It turned out to be a three hour visit. They were quite hungry by the time they got out, so grabbed a quick bite to eat.
After lunch they went to visit the Emperor Wilhelm memorial church. The church was destroyed during severe bombing by the British in 1943. The ruins of the tower were left standing as a memorial. Inside is a cross is a cross of nails from the roof beams of Coventry Cathedral in England. It was bombed by the Germans in 1940. Mary and Alan have seen the cross of nails at Coventry and also the chapel of reconciliation there.
The new church that has been built on the site looks plain on the outside, but is breathtaking inside. Built between 1957-63, it is octagonal shape and the walls are completely made of reinforced concrete set with small blue glass squares to form a dense grid. Although the main colour in the glass is blue there are other colours introduced in patches. The glass has also been chipped on the exterior in places to create more light diffusion. There is minimum decoration in the church, it is all about the glass. Apparently when Egon Eierman came up with his plans for the new church it was so radical he had difficulty convincing people to accept his idea.

Being in the area, they took a short walk to look at KaDeWe. Kaufthaus des Westerns, (The west’s department store) is Europe’s largest department store where you can buy everything. The main attraction is the gourmet’s paradise with the largest collection of foodstuffs from around the world. It is very like Harrods, but probably not as expensive.

An afternoon tea break and free wifi at Hagen Daas finished the day. The trip back on the train was a real crush. People are allowed to take their bikes into designated carriages, and they are huge bikes. When they get to the station everyone has to move and shuffle about to let them off. It was ages before they could get a seat to sit down. It was quite a wait for the connecting bus which again filled up almost completely with people going back to the camp.

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.

I Get My Photo Taken!

Sunday August 15th
Today we got up early enough to visit a nunnery in Wienhausen not far from where we were staying. The Tom Tom took us there but when we arrived it was closed. We are not sure if we were too early or it didn’t open on a Sunday. We decided not to wait around to see if it would open later. Mary thought that being Sunday there might not be so many trucks on the road, and she was right. There were trucks parked up everywhere in all the laybys with curtains drawn; the truckies were obviously sleeping or waiting to start out later in the day. It was bliss driving on a truck free road. They were heading for Berlin.

Travelling through the villages towards the motorway she got a bit over confident and I got my photo taken with a lovely red flash. I wonder if Mo will have a letter waiting for her when she gets back. It is most annoying as she never drives me at much more than 50 mph, but the villages all have little short bits of 70kph. Alan usually monitors the Tom Tom which tells you what speed you should be doing and what speed you are doing, but on this occasion he was admiring a lovely field of sunflowers! They were heading for the outskirts of Berlin and had programmed in a little village which showed a campsite nearby. Once they were off the motorway they asked the Tom Tom to find Campingplatz and the one they were hoping for came up. They had to get back onto the motorway as they had come off one too soon, but it was all very easy to find.
The office was closed so they just found a park and waited.

A Korean man came and asked them about finding a campsite nearer to Berlin and they told him, this is it. He thought one hour to travel in was a lot. The web address is actually called www.city-camping-berlin.de so it is unlikely there is anything as well positioned as this. They assured him that he wouldn’t want to be any closer in. There is a bus that takes you to the train which will be very easy. There is a bit of a walk to the bus.

The young woman in reception spoke really good English and was able to explain where to go and which line took you into town. She had been to Auckland when she was working on the QE2.

This campsite has a Hotel attached and it has WiFi! It is only €1 an hour, so Mary spent an hour getting all the blog posted and up to date. There was a nice bar to sit in and have a drink at the same time.

I am parked on the banks of a canal (Teltowkanal). Here I can watch the barges carrying freight and the pleasure craft drifting by. I could be here a few days as they have booked for four nights to start with and may stay longer if they really like Berlin.
There was a big thunderstorm last night and quite a bit of rain. They had the good sense to put my awning on a lean so that it doesn’t fill up with water.

Today it is Alan’s birthday and it is the 8th time he has spent his birthday outside of NZ. They were going to eat out, but on checking the menu at the outdoor restaurant, they decided that Chez Hemi would be able to serve better food and they would have a better meal in Berlin later in the week. With all the diaries up to date, all the video transferred, photos named and everything saved to external hard drives they were able to have a night off and watch a movie off the entertainment drive; singing in the Rain, what a classic and so ahead of its time.

Patariki Visits Celle

Saturday August 14th

Today was an easy drive a few kilometres to a place called Celle. The traffic was light on the road being Saturday. It was so pleasant driving along without so many trucks and only a few cars. We arrived in the little town of Celle. It was lovely and well worth staying for a while. A lot of the parking had height restrictions but we finally found a really suitable little park where you were able to stay for 2 hours. So they left me under the leafy trees and took Patariki for a walk.

Our first stop was the Lutheran church Satdtkirche Sankt Marine. It was originally consecrated in 1308. It has art work dating from 1495. Most striking were the paintings along the gallery showing scenes from the new testament that could be read as a pictorial bible, Often these stories are in stain class windows, but in this church they were a continuous frieze, like pages of a comic book . The whole church is richly decorated with stone carvings. While they were there, three guided tour groups arrived.
They then went and visited the Ducal Palace which is now a museum. It was built in 1292 and has links with George 1 of Great Britain as he was descended from the royal family that resided there. There were beautiful wooden parquet floors in the royal apartments and you had to put slippers over your shoes. These were impossible to walk in so you had to skate around the rooms. It would have kept the floors polished.

The 2hour parking had run out so they found their way back to Hemi and made lunch before paying for another 2 hours and setting out on the town walk. There are over 500 lovingly restored half timbered listed houses in the compact town centre. They are nearly all pretty little shops and the whole town has a lovely atmosphere. The shops were gorgeous with beautiful things in them. Mary bought two pairs of shoes! I had my photos taken by the talking lamps which was a modern art installation.

They then went into the Information Centre to ask about camp sites and were given directions to Silbersee. It is on a lake that you are able to swim on at your own risk. It is a nice place where you can park where you like under the trees.

Pania Spends a Day in Hanover

Friday August 13th

Today it was an earlier start than usual and I was bundled into the backpack and we all set out just after 9am. Mary and Alan walked in the direction that they had been told to go and followed another couple of walkers to the bus stop. When they got there they asked them for help and fortunately one of them spoke really good English. She was married to a Pakistani and English was their common means of communication. She explained how to buy a 24 hour ticket for 2 people that would cover all transport for the day. When the bus arrived she said she would do the talking for them and so it was all very easy. She also told them where to get off and catch the tram right into the centre of town. It was a lucky break as they had no idea how or what tickets to buy.
On the way to town Mary saw lots of ads for a circus with “All you need is laugh” written on them. She wondered if the Germans really think that was what the Beatles were saying, or perhaps they were being really clever. (Laugh is all you need.) There is English creeping into advertising everywhere, and it is noticeable in the shops. Today Mary saw a big sign in English in a shop, Back to School.

The Germans, (well the ones in Hanover) don’t seem to be in love with technology like the English and French. They are not walking down the streets with their mobile phones to same extent. But probably 50% of them are smoking. Cigarettes are really cheap and you can buy them from vending machines in the street. There are cigarette butts everywhere and places to stub them out on every rubbish tin.

The tram ride eventually went into an underground system but it was easy to get off at the right station and follow the labyrinth under the ground to emerge in the correct part of town. There was a town walk marked on the map and there was a red line to follow on the pavement so it was all very easy.

On the way around they went to the Information Centre to inquire about Wifi hot spots. They said McDonalds and World Coffee had them but they hadn’t been working lately. So they tried McDonalds, but you had to register with T mobile and have a German address and Phone number so that was no good, Next stop World coffee. The network came up but you had to ask for a user name and password at the counter and they had none. So no Wifi in Hanover.

They continued the walk and saw interesting places, but Mary was still hankering for an internet connection so they went back to the info centre and asked again and told about an internet cafe. They finally tracked it down, but it was an old fashioned one with no wifi and horrible keyboards with all the characters in the wrong places. Hopeless for blog publishing, but got emails to key family members to let them know where they were and that they were okay.

Having seen all they wanted to see in the city area they caught the tram back half way to look at The Royal Gardens of Herrenhausen. This was the summer residence of the Royal House of Hanover, but it was destroyed in WW2; a reconstruction is planned in the near future. The “Great Garden” is almost unchanged since it was laid out between 1696 and 1714. It is laid out in the English landscape style and is huge. A fascinating modern addition is the interior of the Grotto which is a walk in a work of art . The Grotto was actually built in the garden in 1675. Between 2001 and 2003 it was given a new interior by artist Niki de Saint Phalle. The rooms contain mosaics of coloured glass and mirrors and pebbles and many painted figures on the theme of “The Life of Man and Woman”. It was quite spectacular and I got my photo taken in there. The ticket included entrance to another garden across the road as well that included quite a few glass houses.

Weary legs caused the travellers to make their way back to the tram stop and head for the camp, as after the bus ride there was still over a 1km walk ahead. A quick bite to eat and then off to bed to read The Guardian they had managed to find at a newspaper stall in town.