Germany - Berlin

9 September 2007

Today, we chased a train for the first time, and I discovered that it's not a pleasant experience, running with your bags on, willing a moving vehicle to stop -- and seeing it go on without you.

To start at the beginning, Andrew and I rose early and took the (doubledecker!) train from the Hague to Amsterdam, where we found that--contrary to what all of the train schedule had told us beforehand--there was no direct route to Berlin, and we had to take one to Amersfoort and then transfer.  We arrived on the platform just as that train to Amersfoort was departing.  As we stopped running and caught our breath, I turned -- and there was Megan, wandering up with a bag of chips in her hand and an equally puzzled expression on her face.  The three of us went straight back to the Information desk, where the woman said that getting to Berlin was very difficult today.  She told us to take a train to Amersfoort, a train to Deventer, a bus to Bad Bentheim, and then a train to Berlin.

'...Ooookay,' we said, and we hopped the first train to Deventer.  45-ish minutes later, in the Deventer train station, we were staring at a map and trying to figure out where to go when a Dutch railway attendant popped out of nowhere.

"You are going to Berlin?" she asked.  We stared, and nodded. "Down the stairs and to the right, there is a bus waiting for you.  Hurry!"

We're still a little unsure as to how she knew that we were going to Berlin.  Psychic abilities are part of the required skill set for Dutch railway attendants?

No matter how she knew, we believed her; we scrambled outside with some other people from our train and onto a touring-style bus, which took us on the highway through the Netherlands and just over the German border, to a town called Bad Bentheim.  The countryside looks largely the same as all of the countryside we've been passing.  Green fields, cows, sheep, the occasional small group of houses.

The bus dropped us at the Bad Bentheim train station, where the train to Berlin was waiting for us.  Megan realized that she had forgotten to mail a postcard that she had already put Dutch postage on; when she went back to talk to the bus driver and mentioned her problem, he offered to take it back for her and drop it in the mail.  I can't believe how friendly and accomodating the Dutch people we've met have been! That's not to say that I was expecting anything different; just that they've gone above and beyond the call of duty. The four hour train ride to Berlin went relatively quickly, thanks to iPods and food and card games, and we alighted (alit?) at Hauptbahnhof Station in Berlin, and called the hostel we'd been planning on staying in only to find that they were full up.  We tried a place called the Circus Hostel next; they had beds free, and to go to Rosenthaler Platz, and they gave us directions.  We hopped on the bus, where we stared in confusion at the bus driver for a moment and said, "How ... much?" and he waved at us impatiently and said, "Eh, on!  On!"  Alright, free transportation!  We got moving, passed a few stops -- and then we passed Rosenthaler. I said, '...uh, guys?'  But Andrew and Megan were sure that it was Rosa Luxemburg Platz that we were looking for, as that was what the hostel guidebook said.

When we reached the address on Rosa Luxemburgstraße, though -- slight problem.  There was a place called St. Christopher's Inn, not the Circus Hostel.  We went in, and apparently, St. Christopher's bought the location several years ago and the guidebook information was out of date.  They gave us directions to the other hostel on Rosenthaler Platz, but by that point, we were tired and shaking our heads at ourselves, and Megan was all about the other St. Christopher's hostels that she had stayed in before, and -- mostly, we were lazy.  So we stayed, unreasonably proud of the ridiculousness of the journey that had finally gotten us here.

That was the right decision; this place is probably the nicest hostel we've stayed in so far.  We were in an eight-person room with three guys who we never talked to.  The walls were bright and cheerful, it was well-lit, and generally really nice, and the hostel bar was ace!  We spent the night in, resting, having dinner, finding really cheap internet, and watching Andrew teach Megan to play chess. 

God, we're so cool.

10 September 2007

It's a really small world.

We woke up this morning, moved our stuff down into the luggage storage room, since we had to switch rooms for the second night, and we sat down to have breakfast in the hostel bar.  I caught sight of a guy, dark-haired and sharply-dressed but ordinary looking, out of the corner of my eye, and for a second, I thought he looked familiar.  'That's crazy talk,' I told myself, and I turned back to my typical European breakfast of ham, toast, and dry cereal. For the record, European breakfasts are seriously not made for people who can't eat cheese or milk.

Later, though, as we geared up to go out into the rain on a walking tour, I heard a voice from behind me say to Andrew, 'Hey, Brussels, right?'  Familiar Guy was the Australian from the testosterone table in the Brussels hostel.  How insane is that?  Not only is Steve in Berlin at the same time that we are, but at the same hostel, which we weren't even planning on staying at in the first place.

The four of us wound up spending most of the walking tour together.  It was a really great tour; Annabel, a cheerful Australian expatriate who was leading it, was enthusiastic and funny and seriously knew her Berlin stuff.  Unfortunately, it was, A) raining, and B) pretty impressively cold, while I was, A) lacking in a jacket; B) had lost my umbrella back in Amsterdam; and C) wearing a skirt.  Megan and I huddled together under her broken umbrella for the entire four hours. But, like I said, the tour was completely worth it.  Oh, and did I mention it was free? Score!  
I wish I could have taken notes; there was more information imparted than I could possibly remember, and it was all fascinating.

We saw so many places that I can't possibly write them all up, so instead, I'm going to go for a list.

Sites seen:
*-Brandenburg Gate
*-The Reichstag
-German and French Cathedrals and the Berlin Concert Hall
**-The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
-Museum Island -- Berlin Cathedral, the Old Museum, etc.
*-Checkpoint Charlie (a replica, not the real thing)
-the former headquarters of the Luftwaffe
*-Berlin Wall
*-Topography of Terror (former SS headquarters)
*-site of Hitler's bunker
-Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny

* = studied in the course that I took last year called Thinking and Remembering
** = wrote a paper on for the course that I took last year called Thinking and Remembering

Being in Berlin after learning about it in that class last year, where we studied Europe post-World War II and the intersection of history and memory, was absolutely incredible.  I did my homework on all of the cities that we went to, at least to the point of reading about their history, but I found myself grinning like an idiot repeatedly in Berlin as I saw things that I genuinely recognized.  Thanks to that course, I was able to explain the concepts of mahnmal and denkmal to the people around me; I had heard of most of the places that we walked to.  I even wrote an eight-page paper on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and heard the architect, Peter Eisenmann, speak at Hampshire.  That's the way to travel, with a broad knowledge base about your destination's recent history and its current issues.  This is the first time that I've been able to put something that I learned in college into very practical use, and it was such a nice feeling.  I'm struggling with putting into words just how amazing it was to be walking through the streets that I had spent a semester reading about.  Just know this -- it was amazing.  I wish I'd had more time to get in-depth with the history that we were seeing, to go inside the buildings, but that was my own fault for cutting a day from Berlin.

I know that I made a list up there, but I can't let this post go by without discussing the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  Its name is often shortened to the Holocaust Memorial, in English, but that's not really what it is, and it's certainly not what the lengthy German name means.  I have to admit, the paper that I wrote for class last year criticized the design.  I thought it was stupid.  A bunch of big gray stelae, organized in terms of size and shape, staggered throughout a field in Berlin?  I saw photos of people eating their lunches on top of the lower stelae; children running through them on beautiful summer days. 'That doesn't look like a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,' I said to myself.

Let me be the first to admit how wrong I was.

As you get farther and farther in the stelae become higher and higher and the corridors narrower, til you've lost sight of everyone and everything around you and you're being forced through tighter and tighter spaces.  The rain pouring down, everything wet and gray and cold, the ground tilting up at more of an angle under you the deeper into the field that you get -- it is honestly one of the eeriest things I've ever experienced.

The tour was fun, despite the weather misery.  There were three Americans (us), a couple of Australians, a bunch of guys from Ireland (they were funny; they were wearing straw Aussie hats, which did nothing to keep them dry, and the first chance they got, they stopped to buy umbrellas and beer).  A few older British couples were on the tour as well, but by and large, it was made up of young people.  The one incongruous part of the tour was that we stopped to eat lunch at Schlotsky's, which is apparently an American deli chain; Megan was excited to see it because it's originally from Texas.  I felt like we should be eating sauerkraut and schnitzel and wurst (wursts?) of some sort, rather than perfectly normal turkey club sandwiches.

After the tour ended, Andrew and I went to the Old Museum and saw the ancient Greek and Egyptian exhibits.  I saw the bust of Pericles, kourai and pottery and old weapons and statues.  I remember studying the types of Greek art in Mr. Brogan's world history class in my freshman year of high school, and wondering when I would ever need to know the difference between Classical and Hellenistic era figures.  Well, today was that day.  The museum had the exhibit set up in those very same categories that I had had to learn, from Mycenaean right up through Hellenistic.  I wandered with my audioguide dangling from my ears, having to resist the urge to stuff my fist in my mouth and squeal.

I did manage to keep from making too many embarrassing noises.  I could not, however, stop myself from saying, 'THIS. IS. SPARTAAAAAAA' when I saw a display of the familiar-styled helmets. You can take the girl out of the U.S., but you can't take the geek out of the girl.

Upstairs was the Egyptian exhibit, which was fantastic.  Busts, statues, sections of walls with hieroglyphics, paintings, papyrus, sarcophogi, burial shrouds, organ jars -- so good.  I've had a weird thing about ancient Egypt since I was really young, and this exhibit was basically like dropping a really squeaky blonde kid in a candy store.
I saw names that I recognized, like Hatshepsut, the woman-king, and her steward, Tutmosis, a couple of Rameses and Ptolemies, busts of Caesar and Cleopatra, more names that I (of course) can't remember now, and best of all -- So much stuff on Amarna, Amenhotep IV/Akhenaton, the pharoah who turned the Egyptian world upside down by declaring that there was only one god, and his wife, the queen Nefertiti. 

For context on why I'm talking about them as if they were rock stars, I did a project on Akhenaton and Nefertiti for the same freshman history class, and I have had a strange fascination for the pair ever since.  Apparently, German archaeologists were some of the first on-scene at Amarna, which would explain why the Ägyptisches Museum is so full of artifacts from the site.  Among the best-known of the artifacts in the museum is the famous bust of Nefertiti.  It had a room essentially to itself, hidden away behind glass in a display case, with people surrounding it on all sides.  Again, in Mr. B's history class, I drew that bust for that same project.  It's so strange to see it up close when I spent hours slaving over the shape of its jawbone, sitting on the living room floor in a small house in Maine six years ago.  I wandered into Schinkel's pantheon, designed by a German architect (named, you guessed it, Schinkel) and made up of statues of the pantheon of Greek gods, while waiting for Andrew to finish going through the museum behind me.

While still waiting for Andrew, I bought postcards and sat down at a table outside, on the upper floor of the museum, to write.  Naturally, now that the tour had finished, the rain was nowhere to be seen, and the sun shone bright and cheerful.  Naturally.  The view coming down the museum steps was gorgeous.

Andrew and I walked back to the hostel, where we found Megan and Steve and went to an Italian punk pizza place.  Yes, you read that right.  It was a pizza place owned by Italian punks.  The walls were coated with the signatures of some huge-name punk bands who'd played there.  I couldn't read much of the Italian menu, which doesn't bode well for Italy.  Andrew did better with the German; he learned some in high school.  Steve is a personable guy; in his early twenties, with a degree in finance or business or something like that.  The impression that I got from talking to him was that it wasn't that unusual for young Australians to take time off from work to travel extensively.  We've certainly met a huge number of Aussies on our travels already.  Andrew, Megan, and I struggled to understand his accent at times; he did some hilarious (and impressively good) American regional accents, all of which he said that he learned from TV and movies.  It was interesting to hear what he did and didn't know about the U.S. and American geography and culture.  It makes me excited to get to England, at the end of all of this, and see what the culture clash is like.

It was another chess kind of night back in the smoky hostel bar.