Berlin. Last stop on my short, yet long journey. Going into the two-month trip I was a bit sad at how short it would be. Asia was 13 months, South America nearly nine. But traveling around, one country per week, learning new words, norms, maps and metros, train logistics and other ins and outs of travel, felt very long. By the time I got to Berlin, I was entirely tired of small talk with new people I probably will never see again, deciphering metro tickets, and not having a shoulder to rest my head on while I took long bus and train rides.
Looking back I should have felt proud of myself having toughed out weird situations and not taken the easy route of hotels, taxis, or travel packages. I'm a warrior! I impressed some young English girls by walking right out into traffic in Prague because I figured out that they just always stop for pedestrians there. They really do, it's great! I got around Europe without a GPS, phone or tablet, just finding maps and reading them. Most difficult of all though, I combated loneliness and sickness in a foreign land (again).
But enough about me! Let's talk about how super duper freakin' neat Berlin was! At first I was a bit turned off by its lack of palaces, beautiful wrought iron balcony railings, and old city centers that I enjoyed in most other European cities. In the end though, Berlin turned out to be one of my favorite stops.
My first night there I dragged my ass out of bed to walk around the city. Berlin is huge! I walked a long way, but didn't get far. What I did stumble upon was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I had no idea what it was at first though - I just saw this:
Of course I climbed up on one and started to walk, but a guard waved me to get down. Then I figured out why when I saw this sign. Whoops!
If you look in that last photo, you can see some people behind the sign standing at the top of a stairway. It led down into a memorial museum, whose purpose was to give faces and stories to the numbers of souls lost during the holocaust. Here I took photos of some of the letters that were found written by people in the camps. Needless to say, that was a very quiet room. There were also some family histories and a brief timeline of the downward spiral of the holocaust.
From there I walked on toward the Museum of Terror and one of the last remaining bits of the Berlin Wall. The museum was closed, but here you can see what's left of the wall.
One of my days I decided to rent a bike to tour Berlin. It's so big and the weather was so nice, it was unquestionably the best thing to do! At the bike rental shop I met this group of Egyptian and French friends who were meeting up here long after their stint in a French school in Cairo. They were renting bikes and planning to go to a beach bar, and they invited me to come tag along. We went into a big area on the river that was covered in sand and had a bar, hammocks, a football pitch and volleyball court, and Jamaican food huts all inside. We hung out for a few hours playing volleyball in the sun and chatting. Very fun! Then we went out and found a different part of the Berlin wall, which is totally covered in beautiful murals, like the one below.
We biked around town a little bit and saw other neat things, like the bridge above, and this abandoned and graffiti-ed ice factory below.
The next couple of days before my friend Stefan showed up from Stuttgart, I went to some museums and on a city tour. There's a whole huge block of museums there, full of artifacts and stuff to explore! The Pergamon Museum was especially interesting - you walk into a massive room and get to see the Pergamon Altar and the reliefs surrounding it. The thing is over 100' wide! Other rooms had parts of buildings and sculptures and things from the middle east and further east that were beautiful and incredibly well kept.
Another day I took a tour to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This was a really interesting tour. We learned a lot from our guide about how the camps worked and what life was like for everyone in it and around it. The guide's grandmother even remembers ashes falling from the sky, as she lived nearby and the clothes on the line would gather ashes. They didn't always understand what it was though. We saw a small part of the huge camp, that used to house prisoners, house and train SS, and was a large labor force - prisoners counterfeited money, built parts for aircraft bombers, and manufactured bricks to build up Germany. Police are still trained at the grounds near where the prisoners were held. The guide speculated that the reason is to make sure they remember what happens when leaders get too powerful.
The SS barracks and current police training facilities.
From the barracks, you can see right over the block wall to the prisoners area.
The entrance and watch tower that overlooks the camp and can see all the buildings.
On the gate to enter - "Work makes you free" - a slogan on numerous concentration camps, but this was the first one.
Standing at the entrance, you can see buildings used for laundry and cooking. You can also see slabs where the barracks were. The lumber was stolen after the war to help rebuild.
A section of the original fence is shown near the entrance. Some prisoners were so desperate, they ran through it, killing themselves. Stalin's son, Yakov, was one to do this.
In the camp prison (yep, the camp has a prison, to scare them into good behavior), this concrete block is the top part of a concrete hole they put people in as punishment. Other punishments included being wrists being tied behind the back and strung up to a pole, or being made to squat with arms outstretched for periods of time. If an escape attempt was made, the prisoner would be shot or hung in front of the other prisoners.
The poles for hanging prisoners from their wrists.
A reproduction of prisoner's housing.
There is no space between these bunk beds, and three people slept in each bed.
A room to wash up. Prisoners were forced to be clean, but were given very little time to do it in a small space.
Where the barracks stood. You can see the monument in the background, erected after the war by the soviets. It shows 18 red triangles, the symbol Nazis made soviets wear. It also features a plaque at the bottom in memory of the death march.
Looking back at the camp prison walls. The prison would be to the right of the entrance, in plain view.
A building for laundry.
A cart for carrying bodies.
A photo showing everyone lined up. Roll call was done daily and perfectly. If anything was off, it was started over again. Even in the snow, losing prisoners to cold, they would take all day if needed to complete roll call.
The instrument to "measure prisoners' height." Prisoners were taken into an "examination room" by another prisoner, and actually when the stick goes up to the top of the head, a hole in the back of it is opened to reveal the prisoners neck to a guard standing in the room behind it. The guard shoots the prisoner, without ever seeing them, and another prisoner takes the body from straight to the crematorium.
A ramp led Nazis down to a firing range, and prisoners were put in the shack (bottom right) and shot. The white building n the background covers the remains of the gas chamber and crematorium buildings.
The gas chamber.
The crematorium.
The ovens.
A memorial in the crematorium. All the memorials had small stones stacked on them, a Jewish tradition.
To end this section about the holocaust, this is the parking lot that sit over top of Hitler's bunker, where he shot himself at the same time that he bit down on a cyanide capsule. They don't memorialize the area or make it an interesting place because they want to deter neo-Nazis from gathering here.
The Berlin Wall! Is really neat to see now. Covered in murals from dozens of artists. My friend Stefan, who I met in Peru while volunteering, finally arrived and we walked around an artsy part of the city where we were staying. There is a ton of street art, funky shops with homemade items and vintage clothes and things, and great restaurants. It was great!
Look closely, this is a mirror collage outside of a salon. There are rollers and hair things all over it. So weird!
One day we visited Potsdam, the town outside of Berlin that has all the castles and older things to see. Most of Berlin was leveled during the war, so the older buildings are outside of it. This is where Stefan drilled a German phrase into me that I will not soon forget. Cobblestone street = kopfsteinflasterstrasse. There were many and they were bumpy!
We snuck over the chain and climbed to the top of that tower, only to find on the way back down that we could have just unhooked it. Ha.
These royals LOVED their statues! The place was covered!
An old cathedral in Berlin. Hundreds of years old and mostly destroyed by the bombing at the end of WW2. Probably left up to discourage future wars.
We found a skateboard museum! So awesome! Berlin is so wonderfully random.
In the skateboard museum, a pool upstairs has a crazy ramp in it! Not sure I would do this...
One of the best things - a band I like was playing a last show at the Kater Holzig, a ruins venue about to be closed. It was so burner - everything looked like it was tossed together, whatever materials were available were used. Such a neat spot! I loved the 4-story skeleton with the massive disco ball shootin light up at it.
Me with the singer of Bonaparte, a weird indie-punk-rock band that is right up my alley. Great way to finish a badass trip!
