Ich bin ein Berliner...

We had to meet at the train station at 6:30-ish to catch our train to Berlin. Despite being sleepy, I was somewhat amused by the reluctance of everyone to ride on a train for 7 hours, simply because 7 hours here gets us from the very southwest corner of Germany to Berlin in the northeast. 7 hours back home gets me to Laredo... from the middle of Texas. I wasn't worried about it, but as the trip progressed, many seemed to be getting cabin-fever.
The scenery was really interesting to see. It was my first really extensive exploration of Germany, so all I'd seen before was the Rhein Valley, which is all hills, castles, and vineyards, and the Black Forest which, coincidentally, is all forest. As we moved eastward, though, things began to flatten out, but it was all mostly farmland. We were in nicer cabins - the kind that seat six people within an enclosed area. In my cabin, though, there were only five of us. Which means strange and increasingly-younger German men kept coming in to sit with us. I felt bad for all of them, just because they had to deal with us becoming increasingly slap-happy.
Eventually, though, we got to Berlin. It's amazing what kind of things will turn me into a giddy, 5-year-old girl. Being in Berlin is one of them. Even as we stood outside the train station looking at more German billboards, I had an inevitable grin on my face.
It was a strange trip initially, though, because we were split up for the first time. There are 60 IES students, and we all have to take a class entitled PO350 - Integrative EU Seminar or something along those lines. There are 4 sections, and we'd been told that on our trips we would travel in two groups. PO350s A and B were one group, in which the students tend to gear towards the political science area, and PO350s C and D were the other group who tend towards economics. I am, of course, in B, because economics is not quite up my alley. So AB and CD stayed in different hotels, had different tours, went to different lectures, etc.

Alexanderplatz

Our hotel was in former East Berlin (that inevitable grin I wrote about? Yeah... it got bigger). I am not yet an expert on Berliner architecture or the city layout or anything, but walking down the street to my hotel, I couldn't help but think that East Berlin was somehow exactly how I had envisioned. Things just looked a little run-down, and it struck me as exactly how East Berlin should look and should feel.

TV Tower

Ampelmännchen

We dropped our stuff off in our rooms, then went down to take a city tour. Of course, we only really made a point to stop and talk about the big sites - the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the World Clock in Potsdamer Platz and we went to Alexanderplatz. It was amazing. For me, anyway. Shanthi told me at one point that she didn't really like Berlin too much (Shanthi, I've concluded, has her own comfort zone which she is reluctant to leave, and Berlin, as a big city that, in many areas that aren't tourist-y can seem a bit shabby, doesn't quite fit), and asked me why I did. It was somewhat harder than I would have expected to explain to her exactly what I loved about Berlin. A lot of it is just that I read spy novels. I love the Cold War, and I'm intrigued by the identity-crisis the division of Germany has caused, and so many of the characters I have loved, hated, respected, and pitied have been in this very city I was walking around in. So much of how I have developed until now is wrapped up in this city I have, until now, never been to before. Imagine trying to explain to someone who only sees the peeling white-washed walls and cracked sidewalks that every corner of this degenerate city has some spectre haunting it, and I've been waiting my whole life to experience each and every one.

Holocaust Memorial, dome

We ended up around Potsdamer Platz, which has a huge display on the Berlin Wall, but only shows pieces exhibiting the western side (there was no way in the East anyone could get close enough to graffiti without getting shot):

the wall

Our tour guide left us with some advice about what to eat. She recommended restaurants for people, then said "Well, if anyone is interested in having a truly Berlinisch meal, they should try currywurst. I know where you can get the best currywurst in the city, and it's on my way back home, so anyone who wants to come is welcome to follow." I said yes (surprised?) along with Meghan and, surprisingly, Warren and Anthony (neither of whom we know very well).

currywurst

So the four of us set off with this tour guide, who took us on the subway and on a bus that passed a section of the wall that is still erected, to Konnopke's Imbiß, which, we learned upon getting lost later, is way way up northeast. She also taught us how to order, because there isn't really a menu. Currywurst itself is a kind of sausage with a particular sauce on it (kind of like a spicy ketchup... anyone had Rudy's spicy bbq sauce?) and, in typical European fashion, you can get mayo on your fries. Menü weiss (literally white menu/meal) is the currywurst, fries with mayo. Menü rot is currywurst with fries and the currywurst sauce all over. I got Menü weiss, which you can see below. It was the best wurst I've ever had.

Konnopke's

eating currywurst

Apparently the lady who now owns it (who is definitely at least 60) inherited it from her father, who founded it over 70 years ago. So this business has survived the Second World War and the Cold War, supposedly without ever changing its menu or its taste. It's infamous among people who actually know Berlin. The Imbiß is, quite literally, a little kiosk in the middle of a really complex intersection underneath the line for the street cars. So it's loud, gritty, graffiti-covered, and utterly amazing.

The four of us ate (standing up, no places to sit were anywhere around), then decided to explore a bit. So we just walked. We went into thrift stores, retail stores, grocery stores, book stores, everything. We talked about Berlin, and school, and music and graffiti. It was a lot of fun. The boys, of course, wanted some alcohol so we stopped into a store and I had to help them translate a bit (Warren was confused by the concept of Kräutlikör... or cabbage liquor?) so he bought it. We made our way back to the hotel eventually, and hung out in their room where the two of them quite literally talked about what they were wearing to our meetings the next day while drinking Kräutlikör (which is like a slightly better version of Jägermeister, which I hate). Warren definitely has Grateful Dead ties. Good times.

The next day was a meetings day. I wish I had more pictures (I have to steal them from all my friends' cameras). First we went to the Reichstag (where Aymi and Katie were actually greeted by Angela Merkel as she walked by), which is a very very German looking building. But it's kind of cool. It was actually destroyed (fire, among other things) and then the area became East Berlin, and the DDR government never fixed it up, so it just sat for years. Now it's the main government building. Right when you walk in, you see these walls covered in notes in the Cyrillic alphabet, which seemed a little random. The guy who met us there explained that when the Russian soldiers finally overtook Berlin in WWII, the building was in pretty bad shape, so they all picked up stones from the ground and wrote notes in charcoal. Some of them were understandable (someone's name and a year) and a couple had different names but the words surrounding the names were identical, so I'm assuming it was something along the lines of "so-and-so was here." Either way, the German government found these notes when renovating the building and decided to keep them there as a reminder of the German past, so they only washed off the offensive ones.

We were shown to the SPD conference room (the SPD is the social-democratic party, or the centre-left party, generally a little bit further left than our democratic party) and an SPD representative just did a question/answer session with us. It was pretty cool, he cut through all the waffle that politicians always give, and said exactly what he thought about everything. Very refreshing.

SPD

inside the Social Democrats room in Reichstag

we invaded her picture

inside the dome

dome

We then got to go up on the roof of the Reichstag (which one normally needs to wait in line for a few hours to do). This big glass dome was built on top to signify a new era in German history. The idea of it is that people can walk around on the roof around this dome, and there's a really complex series of mirrors in it right over the main meeting room in the building. It is all supposed to signify a transparency of government - that no matter what, the people walking around above are visible and can see what is going on.

inside the dome

We then went to the German Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Defense (on different days, technically). The Foreign Ministry guy was basically just a paper-pusher (no offense to him, of course... I may end up one) but he really just followed the Foreign Ministry line and didn't answer anything straight. Which is probably his job. It was frustrating. The guys at the Ministry of Defense, though, were really cool.

Checkpoint Charlie

subway stop for Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie

Then we went wandering around Berlin. I had to stop by in a Vodafone office because my phone locked me out and I needed to change my number. I handled the entire conversation in German, which was pretty good considering it involved both colloquial speech and technical jargon, but as I left the guy told me, in German "Don't ever forget your pin again!" Like I'm that stupid. I just spoke to you in German because your English was worse! Grrr....

Brandenburg Gate

That night we went to Potsdamer Platz, then just walked. At about midnight we decided to get cocktails, b/c we passed a cocktail bar that looked pretty cool. No one was in it, so we just chilled and talked to the bartender a bit, who was only a little older than us. At one point he came over and said "I'm going to change the music. Any requests?" So we asked what he was going to change it to, and he said "Well,

cocktails

I was thinking..." and said the name of some group none of us knew. So he said "it's electronic tango. It's really good." So he put on electronic tango for us. It was a lot of fun, but we had to make our way back to our hotel without public transportation at 2:30 in the morning....

where the wall used to be

I love Berlin!!

"it is like a leetle oskar..."

written by

lost_red_balloon on September 21, 2008 from Berlin, Germany

from the travel blog: The European Union

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