Berlin

15/7

Sleep by the lake interrupted by intoxicated youths driving into the lakeside carpark, yahooing, 1 bunch set to barping their horn to wake us up and then got up the courage to knock on our door and run away - we really are the same the world over!

Separate runs along an easy track around the waters edge.

Breakfast slowly by lake with families playing in the gale and skaters gliding past.

 1 ½ hour drive to Berlin on through flatter and industrialized terrain. Like all big cities, there’s a long grungy introduction through the outskirts.  Its population  is 3.5 million and growing with immigration.

Found close packed eastern European CV site, holding some 30-40 vans like sardines with single temporary-type toilet and shower. 

The kids are a bit disappointed (no playground, no cycling/skating paths) but we’re only a few kms by bike from the enormous city we’d like to explore. At least Ed is clean, cozy and familiar. Jeff emptied the poo just in time and topped us up with water.  Kel strangely loves watching this job.  Even though I quite enjoyed changing the kids nappies, this ain’t the same - thanks Jeff!  Sandwiches for lunch whilst we wait for the rain to clear and then, on cue, the beautiful European summer sky clears to blue and off we go on the bikes along great paths to the centre. Our cycle takes us through a 19^{th century} cemetery where bits on the wall eerily stand in thick grass.

Berlin is known to permanently look like a construction site.  Cranes, roadworks, scaffolding and grunge & graffiti is everywhere.  Closer in to the Mitte, at times this gives way to a quite pleasing River Spree curving around past & through really interesting modern concrete & glass shapes/buildings and admixed massive old stone remnants of the period of decadence in the 1800s.

Topping the list of grand stone giants is the Reichstag, crowned with an added modern glass cupola and enormous bold flags. 

Reichstag

Close by is the quite magnificent old city welcoming Paris Platz, entered into through the beautifully restored Brandenburg Gate.  We pull up just in time to be delightfully entertained by an extra-ordinary group of hip-hop dancers called Topp Doggz who all dance professionally and do this on the side for fun (and euros) - WOW!

Brandenburg Hip Hop

An engaging mix of old & new, austerity & softness, shocking & party keeps us exploring.  A ‘bierbike’ bounces by packed with singing, beer swilling tourists as we come up alongside the Holocaust Memorial where 2711 concrete stelae stand on a central grid.

Bierbike

Holocaust Memorial

A subterranean museum housed in an ex-bunker, like so many other “attractions” of its kind, only allows kids aged >14 entry.

Back on the bikes, we weave in and out of old Eastern & Western Germany marked by information panels and sections of the Wall.  Large pockets of on-the-bread-line densely packed parallel immigrant societies and gypsies often rest up against these barriers.  Scores of austere ex-communist residential blocks crowd the skyline in other areas.  The only colour are massive water/sewerage/electricity cable (?) steel pipes painted pink, purple or blue standing some 2-3 m high above ground.?.  

Small playgrounds poked in between throng with Turkish & Lebanese children.  Through the edges of the city, we trace the exWall to the longest remaining section, lay on the grass in no man’s land where in the past, if found, one would be shot if not already blown up by a mine.

no man's land

Back in search of a toilet and a curry-wurst for dinner, we end up in Alexander Platz on the old East side where we stop for a while in the sun on a beach deck chair(?) & watch all sorts of life go by.

Home & showered, we crawl into Ed’s comfy cocoon whilst the campground screams on and sirens wail past on the busy street outside.

16/7

How pathetic but feeling bloody exhausted.  No runs.  We’re up ...the standplatz and the city hasn’t been down.

Strong coffee before a distracted school as massive white whale campers try to squeeze out past even bigger campers hurrying to jam in and others block the skinny drive way vulturing a potential exiter’s spot.

Brushing it aside, together with the fatigue of remaining open curious pages & educational opportunists as well as the juggle of keeping Kel especially going in a city so madly historically confronting has Jeff & I drag ourselves to the bike seats this morning.

Nonetheless, saddled, our moods lift as we follow a rough plan of things we’d like to see starting with a lovely ride alongside the Spree through broad boulevards & parklands.  Here, on the ’right’ side of the Wall is plenty of evidence of what folk referred to as “Athens on the Spree” that has been spiced up with outrageously crazy new architectural shapes as well.  They like glass cupolas on top of old buildings and needle-like impossible glass angular towers.

First, we visit the unmissable typically European ‘my-Golden-Lady-Victory-column-is-bigger-than-yours’ affectionately called, “Golden Lizzie.”  She is very, very beautiful.  The surrounding sprawl of gardens however are the show piece.  We stop for the obligatory playground dash.

Golden Lizzie (and horizontal Bogong)

Bismark and conquests 

Next stop is the “Ku’dam” (Kaiser Willhelm Gedachtniskirche & Kurfurstendamm) monstrous gothic cathedral that was heavily bombed by the Allies in WW2 leaving just one half spire standing.  Initially we walked straight past it because, like 50% of Berlin, it is covered in scaffolding as temporary sheeting whilst it undergoes extensive semi-renovation.  

old bombed church inside

The plan is to leave it in ‘designer ruins’ to mark a dark period of destruction in Berlin.  Jeff is intrigued by the church’s glorification of the Kaiser and Royal family - unification of church and state - disturbing.  Warmed however by the alcove that pays homage to the Cathedral in Coventry that was bombed by the Germans and their liturgy of reconciliation and forgiveness, adopted in turn by this German target of Allied bombing - that is sweet!

This is an enormous and demanding city requiring an urgent coffee & hot chocolate stop.

East meets West

Third, is an excellent open air largely photographic as well as a very full housed museum mapping the rise of the Third Reich, Hitler’s Germany and the subsequent Cold War.  Here, some startling detail & propaganda exposure of the anti-semitic, anti-homosexuals, anti-undesirables and anything un-Nazish, anti-democratic horror story is told.

Nazi HQ - what the Allies left standing

Called the Topographie de Terrors, the architecture is fittingly very austere, very grey, and very concrete.  The chosen site is the home of the old SS Headquarters alongside which was built a great slab of The Wall. 

Slow feet, heavy hearts, tired eyes, overwhelmed senses…..and we can only skim given the distraction and prohibition to viewing that comes with being in TeamConnberry.  There are endless memorials and museums to Berlin’s ugly past. We didn’t even touch on the Stasi story.  The skies open and cloud over.

Ahh, it’s only water….back on the tour following the Ex-Wall’s simple now flattened foundations  as it endlessly, incredulously marches on through road and pavement  in a once strangely desperate hermetic attempt to wall in the East (or out the west).  One can still obviously distinguish East vs West despite the passing of 20 years. Last stop is a small white weatherboard Checkpoint Charlie, the only break in the Wall.

We’re all exhausted and ready for a feed...and more importantly, a break.  We’ve hunted down a Turkish restaurant where we kick back and thoroughly enjoy ourselves.  No wash-up tonight!  Coming out onto the street, I’m surprised the signs are in German.  It feels like Lebanese/Turkish Melbourne!

The rain stops in time for our ride back across this massive angular, heavily policed, grand, ugly city, across the Cold War’s Ground Zero, across the centre of Nazi rule, across a continuously rehabilitating construction zone to our dingy old Eastern style standtplatz that unconsciously never really allows separation from the town’s previous destitution.

On the way to the shower, Wil’s car obsession allows him to spot a familiar Mercedes van with Quebec plates.  No way!  It’s Simone and Jacque who we met in Bern, Switzerland from who gave us ALL the Lonely Planets.

We share a whiskey in Ed, chat on about Jacque’s father’s involvement driving tanks in WW2 Italy and tell stories of our travels….

Despite this being a fascinating town with a history too shocking (over and over again), the Conns are ready to leave tomorrow - most people say you need a week in Berlin but we are a little jaded with museums, grand buildings and negative history.