Europe 2018: Berlin

Europe 2018 Trip

Amsterdam --> Berlin --> Dresden -->  Prague --> Munich --> Nuremberg --> Brussels --> Liege --> Bruges --> Amsterdam

Tayler's thoughts are in blue, Rebecca's thoughts in black.
BERLIN

• I didn’t love Berlin, honestly. The main street Unter den Linden (Under the Linden Trees) was beautiful with the old buildings that were still there/rebuilt. Humboldt University was beautiful (though rebuilt after a fire/bombing). There was a memorial there in the square outside of the building, a piece of square glass replaced the ground and there were empty bookshelves from every angle as you peered down. This was to remember when Hitler burned the books--that was where it happened. 
• Berlin seemed dirtier as a city and not very nice. There was a lot of graffiti and it was one of the places I didn’t feel super safe walking at night (to our Airbnb). We did a Rick Steves walking tour one of the days, and I did like the history of it all, but overall was not super impressed with Berlin and glad we hadn’t scheduled more time there. Maybe it was all of the history of Hitler and the war, knowing Berlin was a major headquarters that turned me off. 
• The Memorial/Monument to the Murdered Jews was really neat. A huge plot of what looks like unidentifiable tombstones raised at different levels so that you can’t really see when people are between them, and when you’re walking between them they seem endless. 
• We didn’t have a lot of time in Berlin. We trained there and arrived at night. Our Airbnb was a private room in a shared apartment, but we arrived so late we never heard anyone else until the morning--another couple who appeared to also be tourists. It wasn’t nearly as unpleasant sharing the apartment this time as it had been in London last year--probably because it was very nice and clean--especially in the bathroom. The shared bathroom in London was pretty nasty.
• Walking to our Airbnb that night was a little interesting. We were in a quieter neighborhood and we walked past this sketch park. There was a lot of graffiti all over, and the park just looked unkempt. There was this weird little shack we walked past that was in the park and it had these broken windows and graffitied exterior with this faint blue light--it looked like something scary from I am Legend--like you expected someone to pop out of it any second and start chasing you. When we walked past in the morning it looked better, but still pretty sketch. There was actually someone inside the building the next morning and it looked like they were just working at a computer, haha. Everything’s a little scarier in the dark, right?
• After feeling just a little nervous about the area we were staying in, I think we got off on the wrong foot. We must have picked a neighborhood that was a little more run down. Though the entire first half of our walking tour through Berlin felt that way. We actually ended up trying to listen to the podcast tour backward in short chunks at a time because we stayed essentially at the end of the tour route and didn’t want to bus to the front just to walk all the way back to where we were. The real story is we’re cheapskates and we didn’t want to pay for an extra bus ticket to the front of the city and another one from the end to the train station if we could just do the tour in reverse. It made it a little harder to follow all the directions, but not so bad. 
• The first (or last) part of the tour was around this plaza. The podcast said it was a really great place to just relax and get food from one of the many pop-up shops or food trucks. They billed it as a place to see real Berlin culture, but we must have been there too early in the day because it was dead empty except for a few people setting up tents and trucks. It was also really smelly right around there at that hour.
• We walked through a park and saw a couple statutes of Marx and Engels and a big fountain. This was all okay, but it still felt a little rundown. Everything seemed dry and dirty. I think it was just a difference in traveling in August versus last year in May. The grass, shrubs, and trees all just seemed a little dry and tired. We weren’t feeling very impressed.
• Finally, we got into a part of Berlin that was really great. Rebecca wrote about Unter den Linden Strasse. It’s a long street that leads from Brandenburg Gate to the Berlin Cathedral Church and the Altes Museum. The Altes Museum is a greek-style museum with a big lawn and fountains in front. It’s quite a structured, power-full classical style edifice, and apparently Hitler liked to give his addresses from the front steps of the Altes Museum. The Cathedral was massive and beautiful. Both buildings were on land separated from the rest of Berlin by two small rivers--very similar to the way Notre Dame Cathedral is on a small island in the middle of Paris. Anyway, this little island was similar to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was dotted with museums, just like the National Mall in D.C. is scattered with museums up and down the streets. We didn’t have time to stop and pay to get into any of the museums, but they were pretty from the outside. We saw the square outside Humboldt University (where Marx and Engels studied and where Einstein taught before he left Germany) where Nazis burned thousands of books in the street. There’s an interesting glass pane in the street now where you can look down under Humboldt and see a couple stores under the street a row of empty bookshelves.
• Apparently Berlin is known for their unique signs that signal when pedestrians can cross the street. Rather than just a green-colored like or a red hand to stop, they have this green silhouette of a man in a hat.

Unter den Linden

Humboldt University