Before I get started, I'd like to thank Kate H for allowing us to borrow her apartment (which happened to be in an awesome neighborhood fairly close to everything) the entire 10/11 days we were there. Couldn't have done it without you, Kate! Thank you so much!
Let's get back to the food. Wow. I'm sure some of you have heard of döner kebab right? It's all over the place in Germany, and it's super delicious. It's a giant hunk of meat (usually lamb or chicken) roasting on a stick, and through out the day they shave it off fresh and stuff it into a warm thin roll or pita-like bread with usually a yogurt sauce and tons of veggies. It's really good! Just to put it into perspective, I'm gonna tell you about when I first had it in Cologne. My friend from class, Honey, and I went to lunch one day to study together before our final exam. We found a döner place on campus. We got a chicken döner with fries and a drink for 6 euro. Pretty average price, I thought, and it was also very good. Skye and I arrived in Berlin around 10am, so in the early afternoon we walked around the neighborhood and stopped to get döner. They were HUGE. The guy said the total, "vier euro" (4 euro). I thought, no, there is no way, I am bad at hearing numbers correctly, there is no way he said 4 since we got 2 of them. So I asked Skye once we left how much it was. "4 euro" he said. WHAT? 4 euros for 2 giant döner??? WOW! awesome. It was also extremely good. The best döner place in Berlin is a stand called Moustafa's, and their prices were a little higher, but you got what you paid for....3 euro. Still....wow! We also got really big 5 euro pizzas and had a nice dinner one evening for average 8-10 euro a plate. I would never want to leave Berlin! How can the food be SO cheap, and SO good? And how can Cologne be so much more expensive? Oh AND you could get a whole roasted chicken for 3.30 euro, and they were SO yummy and juicy! Came right off the bone! Skye spent most of his summer in Berlin, so you can imagine his shock when he moved to Cologne where you really can't find food that cheap. I did notice, though, that groceries themselves cost about the same.
I always struggled with history classes in high school, well, with the one American History class they made us take. I had a horrible teacher whose goal was, instead of teaching us, to flirt with all the popular young high school girls. Until I got lucky enough to have an awesome teacher at MATC this past year, I found history very, very hard to get into. This all sounds horrible coming from a wife of a history grad student, whose friends are also all history grad students! However, they have taught (and continue to teach) me that history can be fascinating. Especially when you're seeing it in person with your own eyes, and have a brilliant, well educated personal tour guide and history expert at your side everywhere you go! Fortunately, Skye still loves me despite that I'm always asking him history questions that I should know the answer to. We'll blame my high school!
Basically Berlin was one 11-day chunk of history lessons for me, but it was rather interesting and....I don't know that "fun" is the right word, nor is "entertaining", and "educational", though it was, sounds too boring. It was very interesting and eye-opening (there we go). We made our way though Berlin each day seeing something new and historical.
Day one was Christmas Eve, and we spent it with Julia and Chris, who invited us to celebrate with them. If you haven't read that blog, go back and do it! Awesome German Christmas! Day two was Christmas day. Everything was dead and shut down in the city, of course, so we spend most of the day in our jammies (which, Skye never does, so that was rare) watching Christmas movies, drinking coffee, and skyping with our families. It was a very chill, relaxing Christmas. Germans celebrate Christmas for 3 solid days, the 24th, the 25th, and the 26th. Sooo day 3 was also Christmas day! However, a few more things were open and we ventured out into the different neighborhoods of Berlin which each have their own vibe and feel to them. Later we had Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) with Julia and Chris. Have I mentioned this before? Kaffee and Kuchen is very German. There are beautiful cake shops with huge varieties of fancy cakes and desserts, and going in the afternoon (usually on a Sunday) with friends is something the Germans do regularly. I plan to bring this back to the states, because it's an absolutely wonderful thing to do on a Sunday afternoon (or any afternoon, really)!
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| Skye and our 5 euro pizzas! |
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| In the states, we have public tennis courts, Berlin has soccer courts! |
Day 4- December 27th: Jewish Museum and Moustafa's
As I mentioned earlier, Moustafa's is the best place in Berlin for döner. We met up with another fulbright recipient, Martin (who does his research in Berlin) at Moustafa's for lunch. The line there is always long, and the food is always good! Afterward the three of us went to the Jewish Museum. Berlin's current Jewish Museum is quite new. Construction began in 1992, was completed in 1999, filled, and opened to the public in 2001. It was very impressive. The building is designed in the shape of a big zig-zag, and inside windows are narrow and random, and floors and walls are angled and slanted. The idea is to make you feel lost and confused to remind us that that's how the Jew's often felt. They also had a few empty spaces throughout the museum to serve as memory voids; quiet, empty, dark and cold spaces. One room in particular was very narrow and tall, triangular almost. It was completely dark other than a narrow slit of light coming through the top of the narrowest space. Very intense. This is Europe's largest Jewish Museum.
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| Skye and his döner at Moustafa's |
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| model of aerial view of the Jewish Museum |
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| architecture (angles and criss-crosses, everything looks the same, makes you feel lost) |
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| more architecture |
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| This was called "The Garden of Exile". The ground goes up at an angle, each pillar is the same size and in perfect rows. Again, to give you the feeling of confusion and darkness. |
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| Garden of Exile from the edge. The trees grew out of the top of each pillar. |
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| This memory void was probably the most intense for me. It's an exhibit in which the audience interacts to help create the final product. There are 10,000 faces, representing the Jews. People were supposed to walk across the faces to a dark corner and back. This sound created a horrible clanking sound like chains. I did NOT want to walk on the faces, but I did anyways. I stepped very carefully and softly, once on them I had to get off immediately. It just made my heart hurt. |
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| A bit of comic relief...Friends! |
Day 5- December 28th: Gedenkstätte-Berlin Hohenschönehausen
The Hohenschönhausen (pronounced 'ho-en-shown-how-zen') was first a Soviet camp and transfer point used by the Soviet Secret Police during WWII. It sat unused from 1947 to 1951, then in 1951 it was turned into a prison by the Stasi (the East German police). Everyone knew who the Stasi were, but they were "secret" police, they didn't wore uniforms, so a person would never know if they were around or not. If you talked about escaping the GDR, attempted to escape, or anything close to it, you'd be arrested and taken here. The prison used many forms of torture, at one point violence was banned (though, they didn't follow those rules too closely) and they switched to more psychological torture such as sleep deprivation, water cells, isolation, and threats toward friends and family. Sometimes they forbid you from lying down unless the lights were off, which, of course, were controlled by them. But then they'd leave the lights on for 23 hours straight. If inmates were caught lying down by guards who often checked on them, they were punished. The basement contained "submarine" cells which were underground and were completely black with the exception of a small grated window. Usually the inmate was down there alone. There was also hospital wing which was also used by other prisons. It had exam rooms, registration rooms, offices, etc.
As we learned later on our tour, our tour guide had been an inmate there. Woah! That changed the vibe of everything! A first hand account! He had been arrested in 1987 for attempting to escape to West Germany. Residents who lived near the Berlin Wall were offered payment for calling the Stasi and reporting if they saw anyone trying to escape. This is how Mario, our guide, was caught. He spent 3 months in prison in which none of his friends and family knew where was or if he was ok. Later he was released and given permission to be in West Berlin, however, in order to keep him quiet, the Stasi threatened his family. Once in West Berlin, he began noticing the same men around him all the time, following him and listening to his conversations.
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| cells |
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| This wire is strung along every wall in every building, it's an alarm. Still working too! Our guide tugged it so we could hear it, it's really loud and scary. |
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| OBGYN room. Terrifying. |
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| This is a registration room in the clinic. I like the peeling wall paper, because it's all original. It's good, and necessary to restore things in order to maintain them. But I like that it hasn't been done here yet. Makes it more eerie and real. |
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| x-ray room in the hospital |
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| Processing room, pictures ("mug shots") and measurements were taken here, as well as records of every feature, scar, tatoo, etc. In the 70s, people were left strapped to the chair for hours and exposed to radioactivity. Many inmates died of cancer a few years later. |
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| Here is our tour guide, Mario. This was made and put up in the processing room. Awesome he was OUR guide! We were in the right place at the right time! If I remember correctly, he was 18 when he was arrested. |
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| This was an outdoor "physical exercise" area. To take the picture, I was standing all the way against the 4th wall, just to give you an idea of how small it was. Guards would walk around up top carrying machine guns. They'd leave you out there for at least 30 minutes and make you walk or run the entire time, no matter the weather. In it's earlier days, people were forced to stay out there for hours, days or maybe weeks at a time, with no sense of how long it had been or would be until they got to go back inside. |
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| This is looking insde a shared cell, that wooden box is the bed that everyone had to share. Usually there was one bucket or one toilet in the room, no sink or anything. |
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| Here is a picture of the inside of a submarine cell. Could you imagine being locked in there for months and months? freaky. |
Day 6- December 29th: Topography of Terror and downtown Berlin
Topography of Terror is a museum built on the site where the Gestapo and SS headquarters used to be from 1933 to 1945. The building was destroyed by bombs during WWII. In 1987 they discovered the cellar ruins of the Nazi building right beside part of the Berlin wall. They excavated the ruins of the basement where political prisoners had been tortured and executed. It's now an outdoor section of the Museum. Inside the brand new museum (opened in 2010) are hundreds of pictures and documents from the Nazi era including interesting pictures of Nazi's and civilians (including many Jews) interacting. There was a section that showed pictures of the Nazi's auctioning off the possessions of the people taken away to concentration camps, mishandling their furniture and tossing things out the windows.
After the Topography of Terror we walked around downtown Berlin a little. We saw the Berlin skyscrapers around Potsdamer Platz, which still happened to have a Christmas market, as did the Sony Center which we of course checked out. Potsdamer platz is interesting because it has always been a main attraction for industry. People traded and did business there hundred of years ago and it has continued that trend becoming one of Europe's heaviest traffic intersections with many thriving businesses. Some have even been there since at least the19th century, like Cafe Josty's, which was founded in 1812, and had been on Potsdamerplatz since 1880. During the cold war, after the wall was built, Potsdamer Platz sat empty and slow in ruins. However, after reunification, redevelopment projects took place and it's back to maintaining it's reputation as a busy happening area of Berlin, just more modern looking and more history written all over it.
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| Nazi Basement Cellar ruins at Topography of Terror |
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| Berlin wall above cellar ruins |
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| pieces of the ruins found during excavation |
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| Part of Downtown Berlin |
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| walking around downtown/Potsdamer Platz |
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| I know it's hard to ignore the man holding the giant brat, but this picture is actually just of the car. That car is called a Trabant, it was the East German car, they all looked exactly the same, like this. If you were lucky, or had been on the list for long enough, you would be given one. People used to joke that if they had a baby and put their baby's name on the list, maybe by the time they were 20, they would receive one. You still see them pretty often in Berlin, and occasionally in the rest of Germany. |
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| This is inside the Sony Center, it's what's leftover from Hotel Esplanade (a famous hotel in Potsdamer Platz) which was bombed to the ground as well. This section of it is called the Kaisersaal because when it was a working hotel, the Kaiser held a gentleman's evening there. The hotel was originally built in 1908, and had become a well known hotel housing celebrities, important meetings, dances, and as I said before the Kaiser's gentleman's evening. This chunk was moved 75 meters in one big piece! Gotta love that German engineering! There is one more section that survived which was also restored, the breakfast hall, which is now in Cafe Josty's. |
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| If you look closely though the reflection on the glass, you can see this is one of the s-bahn signs for Potsdamer platz before it was bombed. |
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| No, this picture is not of people or of cars. Look at the ground. See the line going from the sidewalk all the way across the street? It's where the Berlin Wall had divided the famous Potsdamer Platz. |
Day 7- December 30th: Terry and Heather arrive in Berlin! Checkpoint Charlie and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche
Heather and Terry arrived in the afternoon from the States. Terry is doing his research in France for the semester, and they wanted to see a bit of Germany before they headed off to Paris. We were very excited to see them as it had been and few months and we used to see them regularly in Madison.
Once we got them settled in their hotel, we rushed them off to some Berlin tourist sites (this helps with jet lag of course! You have to stay up until normal sleeping hours). First we stopped at Checkpoint Charlie. I don't have to explain to anyone what this is, right? Just in case, it divides what was the American and Soviet sectors of Berlin during the cold war.
After that we headed to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church). This is an old church, built in the 1890s that was....yep, you guessed it.....bombed to death. Ok, luckily, not to death this time. It was damaged very badly though. Instead of restoring it to it's original design, they left it damaged, and preserved it just as it was---damaged. A new church was built right next to it, and the foyer of the old one has been turned into a memorial hall. Unfortunately, the whole church was covered in a box-like thingie, so we couldn't see it from the outside. I was unsure as to if it was just a winter thing or a maintenance thing. However, I would recommend googling it to see pictures of the outside, it's pretty awesome.
Once we got them settled in their hotel, we rushed them off to some Berlin tourist sites (this helps with jet lag of course! You have to stay up until normal sleeping hours). First we stopped at Checkpoint Charlie. I don't have to explain to anyone what this is, right? Just in case, it divides what was the American and Soviet sectors of Berlin during the cold war.
After that we headed to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church). This is an old church, built in the 1890s that was....yep, you guessed it.....bombed to death. Ok, luckily, not to death this time. It was damaged very badly though. Instead of restoring it to it's original design, they left it damaged, and preserved it just as it was---damaged. A new church was built right next to it, and the foyer of the old one has been turned into a memorial hall. Unfortunately, the whole church was covered in a box-like thingie, so we couldn't see it from the outside. I was unsure as to if it was just a winter thing or a maintenance thing. However, I would recommend googling it to see pictures of the outside, it's pretty awesome.
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| Checkpoint Charlie |
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| American soldier...a wee bit more handsome than the Soviet soldier :) |
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| Entering American Sector |
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| Soviet Soldier |
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| Leaving American sector |
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| model of Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche before bombing |
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| model after bombing (including newly built church) |
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| cracked ceilngs |
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| Close up of cracked ceiling |
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damaged walls and windows Day 8- New Year's Eve: East Side Gallery and Soviet Museum On New Year's Eve we checked out the East Side Gallery which is a 1.3 km long chunk of the Berlin wall that has 105 painting from artists around the world. The paintings were done after the reunification of Germany and represent freedom and a better future for people everywhere. They were really cool! I guess, if you want to take forever and have 105 pictures of each painting, you could get a shot of all of them. But I didn't really want to do that, so I just chose a few of my favorites. After we saw them all, we walked back on the other side of the wall, which is just full of graffiti, but it's the "no man's land" between the 2 walls, so if a person did try to escape, they'd have to run across this empty area and climb another wall without getting shot. Scary. After the gallery, we went to Moustafa's, again. I know what you're thinking...what?......we had to make Terry and Heather try one! We also met up with some other Madisonians, Soos and Jeff, and one of their friends, Patrick, who is also researching in Berlin. Curry 36 is a famous currywurst place in Berlin, and it's right by Moustafa's so a few people got that as well. I'm not a fan of curry and I'm not always fan of wurst, so....I stuck with a döner. We hadn't seen Jeff and Soos since sometime in May, so it was good to visit with them again! After that we went to the Sowjetisches Ehrenmal (Soviet Memorial). It was MASSIVE! It's an enormous statue of a Soviet Soldier slicing a swastika that you climb a bunch of steep stairs to look closely at. However, it's not JUST the giant statute it's a couple miles of absolutely perfectly aligned landscaping and other small statues or memorials. It was crazy! Skye said it was huge, but it was bigger than I could have imagined!  Bridge on the way to East Side Gallery  East Side Gallery  Paintings  Paintings  Paintings  Paintings (this was one of my favorites)  This was the "no man's land" between the walls. On the right you can see the back of the East Side Gallery, and somewhere to the left of the sidewalk is where the other wall stood.  Madisonians!!! Heather, Terry, me, Skye, Soos, Jeff! Fun!     Soviet Memorial  Soviet Soldier slicing swastika Day 9- New Year's Day: Berlin Mitte On New Year's day we had a nice easy day. We slept in late, went to brunch with Terry and Heather and headed to Mitte in Berlin, which is basically the huge touristy area. We started with the Brandenburg Gate, which is where the crazy New Year's party was (with all the drunk freaks aiming fireworks at people), then moved on to the Bundestag (German Parliament building), both very cool. Next we went through the Holocaust memorial. It was HUGE! It was slightly similar to the Garden of Exile at the Jewish Museum in that they used perfectly lined solid cement blocks/pillars, but it way bigger and more varied. The idea was for you to feel lost and confused, and everywhere you turned looked the same. And though every block was lined up perfectly, the ground was wavy so the blocks were uneven at the tops. Everything was the same and consistent, yet it was also very disorderly and intimidating--at least, that's how I felt. You can walk all the way through it and the blocks eventually are high above your head, and you really can't see anything but the sky. After that we made our way to the Berliner Dom. The Berliner Dom is actually a protestant church, but it's extravagant like a catholic church. It was amazing! We wrapped up our tourism for the day and headed home where we made dinner together and watched a movie. Perfect start to a new year!  Terry's fancy Turkish coffee at brunch, with Turkish delight!  Brandenburger Tor (gate)            Day 10-January 2: Mauerpark and Schloss Charlottenburg Mauerpark is just a big park area of history, pictures, and information about the wall. You walk through a big narrow strip of grass that runs along where the wall was. There are different stations with pictures and descriptions, some even had recordings of interviews you could listen to, or even videos, such as the church coming down. In this area they destroyed an apartment building, which uprooted many people, and a church because they were in the way of where the wall was to be built. Schloss Charlottenburg is a castle, or rather, more of a palace, built in the 17th and 18th century designed similarly to Versailles. Unfortunately it was closed the day we went, so we only got to see the outside. The gardens themselves are a huge attraction (as are the gardens at Versailles), so I'll return in the summer to see the inside and the gardens when it's warm and green out. Also a downer, it was cold and pouring rain all day, so by the time we got home we were soaked and starved! Luckily, as I mentioned before, food was cheap, and good, and everywhere! We loaded up on comfort food, which this time was roasted chicken and fries. Then Heather and I decided we deserved German chocolate bars for having put up with the drizzle all day.          Remains of the apartment foundation that was also destroyed for the wall to be built  Part of the Berlin Wall as it looked in it's original state  Schloss Charlottenburg  Statue in front of Schloss Charlottenburg Day 11- January 3rd: Last Day in Berlin- Philharmonic lunch concert before the airport Earlier in the week, Chris had told us about a free concert by a few of Berlin's Philharmonic members and inexpensive lunch at Berlin's Philharmonie building. It reminded me of a winter version of concert on the square in Madison! The lunch was very good, and the musicians were amazing! It was a brass quartet and the concert was about an hour long. The place was packed! People were in the chairs set up, but also on the floors, on the stairs, and on balconies! It was awesome! Chris even got to come with us since he had the week off. Unfortunately Julia was stuck working. Being generous as usual, Chris drove us home, helped us load our luggage and drove us all to the airport. We had a fantastic time in Berlin seeing all the sites, spending some time with Julia, Chris, Kate and all the others, and celebrating some holidays German style!  Berlin Philharmonie Building, built in the 60s after the first one has been bombed (shocker!)   If you're still reading this, then you have finally reached the end and have made it through my longest blog yet, and your work shall be commended! Thanks for reading! *many of the facts in this blog were learned along the way, but some are also from wikipedia. |
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