First, the city is enormous. After previously traveling in smaller cities, my perspective on how far apart sites were was clearly a bit off. I started my morning off with a jog over to the East Side Gallery, which turned out to be a looooong jog. The East Side Gallery is the longest stretch remaining of the Berlin wall. In 2009, the German government invited back some of the original artists to "freshen up" their original artwork, so the wall feels a little too polished and a bit inaccurate, but the artwork is still wonderful and powerful.
I barely had enough time to hurry over to the walking tour I wanted to take. The tour was fantastic, particularly the Australian guide who had moved to the city 18 months ago after falling in love with Berlin (which is easy to understand). The tour included the Brandenburg Gate, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Checkpoint Charlie, the site of Hitler's massive book burning, some other important Third Reich sites, and many others. The tour was 3.5 hours, and afterward, I barely had enough time to squeeze in two museums. First, I spent way longer than planned at the Typography of Terror museum, which focuses on the leaders and inner-workings of the Gestapo and the SS. The museum was fascinating (although many of the images were very disturbing), and I thought the final portion of the museum discussing the repairing of German society after the atrocities and dealing with the population that had been connected to (but not leading) these organizations was particularly provoking.
My second trip was to the Jewish Heritage Museum, which is really half museum, half art instillation. The design of the building is so cool (for lack of a better word), and the museum is very interactive and modern. I was surprised that 95% of the focus was on German history (both before and during the Holocaust) as opposed to an overall European focus, but perhaps there is some reason behind this choice. Anyway, I was lucky that the museum was open late on Mondays, because by the time I left it was 9.30pm.
I'd been in Germany for four nights, and I hadn't yet had a traditional German dinner, so I decided to fix this. I'd been alternating between two Berlin specialties: currywurst, which is German sausage in tomato sauce with ample amounts of curry, and Turkish schwarma, which are pita-like sandwiches with carved, spiced meat and other fillings. Berlin has a large Turkish population, and Germans love Turkish food. Turkish fast food places are available on almost every street corner, and they are cheap and fantastic. As much as I was enjoying these two Berlin favorites, I felt like my trip wouldn't be complete until I had something that involved sauerkraut. So I made a trip to a restaurant recommended by the hostel for traditional Northern German food, and had crackled pork with lots of sauerkraut, which was wonderful and much better than the sauerkraut served back home, which is much more bitter.
After the long day, I was feeling pretty spent, but I didn't want to pass on one more opportunity to enjoy the East Berlin nightlife. Only a couple of doors down from my apartment was a well-known club called Kaffee Bar, which was a popular student bar in the 70s until the East German government shut the place down. The bar was reopened in 1999, with the interior unchanged from the day it was shut down (a sign even lists the menu and prices from the year it was closed). The place has lots of bad wallpaper and wood paneling. When I walked in at midnight, the place was nearly empty. Based on conversations I had in the hostel with younger guests, East Berlin bars don't even start to get going until after 1am, with the real action occurring about 3am. While I had no desire to verify this information, I did find that by 1am the bar crowd was slowly growing. I started chatting with a group of Spanish tourists in a mix of limited English (theirs) and terrible Spanish (mine), but by 1:30am I found the multi-lingual conversation was becoming more effort than I really had left in me. I headed back to my hostel, where I found my 6-bed dorm-room completely empty (the rest, I assume, were either testing or contributing to the 3am hypothesis). In some future post I'll talk about living it the hostels, where I'm at just about the maximum age before being a weirdo.
But this post is getting long, so another time. A little more time in Berlin tomorrow, then off to Budapest!
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