One Last Weekend Adventure--Berlin!

Okay, so even though I am back in the States now, I still want to finish telling about my last couple days at Cambridge and my last trip away from Cambridge. I’m writing all this down mostly for my own good, so feel free to skip any of it.  : )

After the Harry Potter studio tour we had one week left of the program, but some of us were already done with classes because we only had module three classes and not module two classes. As a result, Taylor, Nicole, and I decided to go to Berlin for a few days while everyone else studied for their finals.

We took a flight out of Gatwick airport in London early Sunday morning to Berlin. Once we got there, we had a difficult time figuring out how to get to central Berlin by train since absolutely everything was in German and German only. At least when we were travelling in Amsterdam and Brussels, everything was usually in Dutch and English, and sometimes even French. In Germany though, everything was just in German, and none of us knew any German at all. It was definitely a new experience to be in a country where we didn’t know the language at all or have English alongside the native language. We watched some other people buy their tickets and then managed to figure it out. : )

The first place we went was this square called the Gendarmenmarkt. The Gendarmenmarkt has two cathedrals: the French Cathedral (built by Huguenots) and the German Cathedral. The two cathedrals looked almost identical, and I’m not really sure why. We went inside the German Cathedral, and it had this really cool spiral staircase that went all the way to the top. The cathedral is a museum about German history, and so we wandered through it for a while, but none of it was in English. It was all just in German. So we figured out that it was talking a lot about German parliament, but we got bored of not being able to read anything, so we left and walked around the square a bit more before getting lunch.

I'm pretty sure this is the side of the German Cathedral.

And I'm pretty sure that this one is the French Cathedral.

Inside the German Cathedral, looking up to the top of the tower.

The Konzerthaus between the two cathedrals. It's a concert hall.

After lunch, we headed over to the Brandenburg Gate. Unfortunately there was some political rally going on, I think about the whole disaster in the Middle East, but it was all in German, so we couldn’t really figure out what they were saying. There were lots of protesters and lots of policemen, but we still managed to get over to the Brandenburg Gate. 

Ooh look! Me in front of the Brandenburg Gate!

Closer up shot of the Brandenburg Gate.

Me in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Again.

After wandering through the Brandenburg Gate, we decided to walk down the really long road that leads from the Brandenburg Gate to the Victory Column. Surrounding this whole area, though, is a huge park called Tiergarten that apparently used to be hunting grounds for the king. There are lots of memorials and statues spread out throughout the park, and so we wandered around for a while. It was really cool to have such a cool park that is basically a forest right in the middle of a huge city. We saw the Soviet War Memorial, which was built in 1945 by the Allies to commemorate the Soviet soldiers that died during the Battle of Berlin. We also saw the Bismarck Memorial to Otto von Bismarck, who was the first Chancellor of the German Empire.

The Brandenburg Gate, from partway down the really, really long road between it and the Victory Column.

Soviet War Memorial!

The Bismarck Memorial, complete with Atlas holding the world, Siegfried forging a sword, Germania stepping on a panther, and a sibyl reading a book.

We finally made it all the way down the road to the Victory Column, which sits in the center of a massive round-a-bout (they really seem to like these things in Europe). It has four segments, and the bottom three are decorated with cannons from the Danish-Prussian War, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War. The top one was for WWI, but I guess they didn’t use real cannons in that one, so the cannons on the top tier are actually fake. The whole column is topped with a big golden winged statue of Victoria. You can climb to the top if you want, but we opted not to. : )

The Victory Column.

Now I'm in the picture.

The winged Victoria statue at the top

After we walked around the Victory Column, we headed over to our hostel. It was actually right next to the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, or the Berlin Central Station. This train station was huge! It was basically a mall that trains went through, and it even looked really cool with all the glass walls. It was so cool that our hostel was right next to this train station; plus, we could see the Reichstag from our window! I couldn’t believe that the hostel was as cheap as it was since it was in such a great location! : )

Berlin Hauptbahnhof. This place was like a mall that just happened to have trains going through it. And our hostel was just barely to the left of this train station : )

The view outside of our hostel. If you look to the right, that shiny dome thing that the sunlight is reflecting off of is the Reichstag.

Oh, so this is random, but we kept running into these little mini-beach things with sand and lawn chairs everywhere. I didn't really get it, but we saw quite a few of them.

The next day we decided to start out with another Hop-on Hop-off bus tour because, as we had previously decided, they are great. Driving around Berlin I realized that the city had a different feel to it than most of the other major European cities I had visited—Berlin was way more modern. All the buildings were pretty new skyscrapers, and I finally realized that this was because Berlin was pretty much bombed into oblivion during World War II. In lots of the museums we went to, we saw pictures of Berlin in 1945, and the place was unrecognizable. It was just a bunch of rubble.

We got off the bus at Breitscheidplatz, a huge public square that used to mark the center of West Berlin. It is a huge shopping center now, with tons of fancy stores and stuff. We stopped to use the bathroom at a really cool three-story McDonald’s that had a movie theater-style room that you could sit in while you ate. : )

In the Breitscheidplatz is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, or the Gedӓchtniskirche. This church was built in the late 1800s in the Romanesque Revival style, but it was mostly obliterated in the bombing raids during World War II. Only part of the spire and part of the entrance hall remains, but what is left has now been converted to a museum. There is actually this weird modern-looking belfry that has been built next to the church, but of course it was covered in scaffolding. The bottom part of the church was covered in scaffolding too. See, I don’t understand why the belfry has to be covered in scaffolding. It is barely 50 years old!

The remains of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and the thing off to the left is supposed to be the modern-looking belfry. I couldn't really tell you if it is modern-looking, since it's covered in scaffolding and whatnot.

Ooh look, more scaffolding. And a tiny bit of church sticking out.

A cool view of the church through the trees. Just ignore the construction going on in the middle of the road.

Inside the church we saw a beautiful mosaic on the roof, and they had a little exhibit showing what the church and the block used to look like before World War II. There were pictures taken in 1945 of Berlin, and the amount of damage to the city was unbelievable. The city was basically just a huge pile of ruins. I can’t believe that all of that only happened about 70 years ago! I feel like construction projects always take forever, but Berlin has managed to be completely rebuilt since the end of the war. It is pretty amazing.

The cool mosaic on the ceiling.

This is what the church used to look like before it got bombed in WWII.

So I had to take a picture of this picture because it showed how damaged the city was. The thing in the center is supposed to be the church, and it along with everything surrounding it just looks like piles of rubble.

Ooh, the pretty mosaic!

After checking out the church we had lunch with one of Taylor’s friends from Canada that lives in Berlin now. We went to this really good Thai restaurant, so that was lots of fun.

After lunch we headed over to see Checkpoint Charlie, which is one of the most famous crossing points between East Berlin and West Berlin back when the Berlin Wall was still up. It got its name because it was called “Checkpoint C,” but then according to the NATO phonetic alphabet, you say “Charlie” to clarify that you mean “C.”

The cool sign. I'm not sure, but I'm assuming it is in English, Russian, and German.

I found it mildly hilarious that the entrance to the old American sector now has a McDonald's in the background.

We also went and saw Topography of Terror, which is a museum that sits on the site where the headquarters of the Gestapo and SS (which stands for Schutzstaffel—I didn’t know that before) used to be. The walls of the basements are still there, so you can kind of see where the rooms of the buildings were. We saw where the house of the “Inspectorate of Concentration Camps” used to be as well as buildings used for various departments of the Gestapo.

Where the old Gestapo and SS headquarters used to be, with some of the Berlin Wall behind it.

Ooh. Bricks. Awesome.

Inside the museum was a lot of information about the various groups that the Nazis targeted and all the crimes that the Third Reich committed, even before WWII was in full swing. I didn’t really know much about what Germany did to Poland in the war, but I definitely learned a lot about it here. The Nazis would basically just sweep through Poland, stopping at towns and rounding up all the Jews, and then they just shot them and buried them all in massive ditches. It was completely horrific. I don’t get how people just let this happen for so long. The Nazis also seemed particularly fond of forcing women who committed “crimes” to shave their heads in public. These “crimes” would be something like marrying a Jewish person. Aside from targeting Jewish people, the Nazis also didn’t like the mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, ethnic Poles, Romani people, and anyone who didn’t agree with their political ideology. They apparently kept many of their political prisoners in cells in the basements of the Gestapo and SS headquarters.

Outside the Topography of Terror is also a portion of the Berlin Wall that is still standing, so that was definitely cool to see. Notice the rounded metal pipe things placed on the top to make it harder for people to get over the wall. I guess it was to make it harder to grab onto the top and pull yourself over? Something like that.

Me in front of part of the remains of the Berlin Wall.

We then got back on the bus and went around the other half of the Berlin tour that we hadn’t seen. It was super annoying because as we were waiting by Checkpoint Charlie for the bus, some bird flew over and pooped on my head! There were dozens of people standing on the sidewalk waiting for the bus, but of course I was the only one that got bird poop all in my hair. Lame.

Since the whole wall isn't still up, they have a little line of cobblestones that shows where it used to be.

We got off at the Brandenburg Gate and headed one block over to see the Holocaust Memorial. This memorial is pretty cool, but kind of weird. It’s just a huge area covered with 2,711 concrete slabs called stelae, and these slabs are all the same length and width but vary in height. The ground is also uneven, so you can walk between the stelae and have them be way above you, or you can wander to the edge and sit down on some of them. They have signs that tell you not to jump from concrete slab to concrete slab, but of course people were doing that anyway. Apparently there is not really any symbolism to the memorial, which has evidently bothered some people over the years. I thought that the blocks were supposed to be, like, sarcophagi or something, but no. They don’t mean anything. We tried to go down into museum that is located below the memorial, but for some reason it was closed that day.

The big block things that are apparently called "stelae"

The stelae are actually lined up in rows with little walkways down between them.

They get pretty tall once you're down in the center of the whole thing.

Finally! I picture of the memorial without any kids climbing on the blocks.

We headed over to the Reichstag building and walked around the outside. You need a scheduled tour to go inside and up to the dome, but the lines to sign up for those were ridiculous. The Reichstag is where the German parliament meets. It’s basically a cool building. I don’t know much else about it. Oh, it was heavily damaged during WWII, like everything else in Berlin. I do know that. Also, there were these people dressed all in white doing some weird kind of meditation/yoga thing. They were basically doing some weird pose like the one on The Karate Kid movie posters. Kind of weird.

The Reichstag! Where German parliament meets.

Me in front of the Reichstag.

Pretty.

Okay, so this is a picture of Taylor, but you can see the people dressed in white doing weird kung-fu moves. I just had to include a picture of that.

The next day we went back to the Holocaust Memorial so that we could check out the museum part. The museum was very interesting, and part of it followed six different families throughout the war. It was really sad, because they would show family photos and then point out the ones that died during the war along with where and how they died, and then they would point out the ones that survived. Half or more of all the families in the exhibit died during WWII. This kind of Holocaust museum is interesting because, like the Anne Frank house, it follows specific people throughout the course of the war. It makes it so much more personal, and I feel like it touches the visitors more than just general information or statistics can.

We got some lunch (crepes and schnitzel!) before heading over to Museum Island. Museum Island is so named because it is a small island in the Spree River in central Berlin that is home to five museums as well as the beautiful Berlin Cathedral. We first decided to go to the Alte Nationalgalerie, because I was super excited to see some of the paintings inside, particularly some by Caspar David Friedrich. The gallery had artwork from the Classicism, Romanticism, French impressionism, Realism, Idealism, and Modernism movements in art, so it was great to be able to see such a wide variety of pieces.

So this is completely random, but we saw several of these things as we were walking around. They sit in a circle and they each have pedals, so everyone helps propel the thing forward.

Ooh, and here is a beautiful sculpture. At least, I think it's beautiful. I can't really tell, because it's covered in SCAFFOLDING. Like, completely covered.

Crossing over to Museum Island! You can see the tip of the Berlin Cathedral.

In front of the Alte Nationalgalerie

We went inside and got our tickets, and I was super disappointed by the fact that two of the paintings that I had come specifically to see had been temporarily removed for restoration purposes! Seriously?! You can’t just take down two of your most famous paintings during the height of tourist season! Ugh. I was pretty unhappy by this fact, but the gallery still had some fantastic paintings. There were lots of eery paintings of biblical events and mythological people, but I particularly enjoyed the fantasy-like paintings of epic castles and cathedrals painted against a spectacular landscape. A guy named Karl Freidrich Schinkel seemed to like painting these. I wish I could hang some of these up in my apartment.

The accursed sign. Why must you remove this paintings for restoration?! I get that they need to be maintained, but it's the height of tourist season! We came halfway around the world, people. Gah.

I think this one is called Atelierwand (Studio Wall) by Adolph Menzel. Those are two arms and a hand hanging on a wall with mysterious lighting.

This is Tilla Durieux as Circe, by Franz von Stuck. Kinda creepy looking.

This is Samson Blinded and is by Lovis Corinth. Also kind of creepy.

Aha! Now we are moving away from creepy and toward epic awesomeness! This painting's name is still a teensy bit creepy though. It is called The Isle of the Dead, by Arnold Bocklin. But hey, at least the island looks pretty cool.

Now THIS is an epic painting! If I could hang this in my future library/office, I totally would. It looks like it came right out of a fantasy novel. I even bought a postcard of it. This is Ritterburg (Knight's Castle) by Karl Friedrich Lessing.

This is Gothic Cathedral with Imperial Palace by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. It's got a Gothic cathedral and a rainbow. Super awesome.

This one is gorgeous. You can even see a deer walking around by the tree in the front. It's another painting by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and it's called Castle by the River.

We also saw paintings by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, and Renoir, and even some sculptures by Rodin. I feel like we see these painters in every single museum we go to though. Except for Cézanne. I don't think I've seen his stuff in real life before.

This is a painting by Cézanne. You can tell because (A) it has flowers and fruit and (B) the tablecloth is totally distorted. Tablecloths would never look like that in real life. His paintings were very geometric and rigid.

Even though Monk by the Sea and Abbey Among Oak Trees had been removed (grrrrrr), there were still some other Caspar David Friedrich paintings on display. I really like how he paints silhouettes of people staring off into magnificent landscapes, as well as the dark, slightly Gothic tone of many of his paintings. I just like how gloomy and dramatic his paintings are.

The Oak Tree in the Snow. Ooh look, a dead tree! I much prefer the dead trees if they are the backdrop to some kind of abbey ruins or something.

This is Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon

Moonrise Over the Sea. I really like this one. And he seems to really like watching the moon.

After the Alte Nationalgalerie, we decided to go to the Pergamon Museum to see the famous Pergamon Altar from the ancient city of Pergamon, an old Greek city in modern-day Turkey. Unfortunately, the line went way outside of the building, and we were told that it would be a three-hour wait, so we decided to go to the Neues Museum instead. This museum had artifacts from the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Middle Ages, as well as an extensive collection of Egyptian stuff. We saw lots of weapons and carvings and jewelry and stuff. The two most famous items in the museum are the Nefertiti bust and The Golden Hat.

Egyptian jewelry. There was tons of this stuff.

SKULLS!!!

The bust of Nefertiti is 3,300 years old. Nefertiti was the wife of an Egyptian pharaoh, and she was widely known then and now for her beauty. The bust is actually pretty cool looking. It was the one room in the entire museum where you couldn’t take pictures, and they had two museum attendants waiting to swoop down on anyone who so much as reached for their camera. So here is a picture from Wikipedia. : )

The Nefertiti bust. It is remarkably well-preserved.

The other famous item in this museum is The Golden Hat. This weird hat thing was apparently worn by priests from a sun cult in southern Germany during the Bronze Age. Only four of these hats have been found. They really don’t know much about these hats, other than that they look cool. They suspect that they were used as a calendar, because somehow the little etchings in the gold leaf could have been used to determine the date based on a lunar and solar calendar. Other than that, this hat seems like it would be a pain to wear.

The Golden Hat. It looks terribly uncomfortable and impractical. But hey, it would make

After leaving the museums, we decided to lounge on the grass in front of the Berlin Cathedral before heading back to the airport since we couldn’t actually go inside the Cathedral. The people dressed in all white doing weird Kung-Fu type poses that we saw the other day at the Reichstag showed up here too. I wish I knew what they were doing or who they were or something.

The beautiful Berlin Cathedral!

In front of the Berlin Cathedral, trying to keep my eyes open while staring into the sun.

Berlin Cathedral dome

I really liked the statue of this angel playing the violin. So pretty! I have never seen a statue of an angel playing a violin before.

Getting back to the train station was actually kind of a disaster. The train line that we needed to take was closed, but it was hard to figure that out because we know absolutely zero German. After walking to two different train stations and finding out that the line was closed there as well, we ended up taking a taxi to a different train station that we could use to get to the airport since we had already bought a train ticket. Our taxi driver (thankfully) knew some English, and it was really fun talking to him. He told us how he was in Germany when the Berlin wall came down. He was working in a car factory outside of Berlin, and he said that someone came in that morning all excited that people had started taking down the wall, but nobody believed him. They all thought that it was impossible. They didn’t realize that it really had been taken down until they went home that night and watched the news! He drove us by a section of the wall that was still standing but that had been covered with graffiti artwork, and that was fun to see.

We finally made it to the train station and finally made it to the airport, where luckily we were still a bit early for our flight. We made it home to King's College late that night, and promptly went to bed because we were so exhausted.