Berlin
Berlin photos; the Wall, the Reichstag, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Berlin Zoo, and various other sights.
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=za0rna8.j0b9jxw&x=0&y=ecfg1m
(Click on 'View Photos without signing in')
Heya Peoples,
Well after losing my travel partner Denise to Australia, I had to find someone else to travel around with and that person was Andrew from All Souls Church. A Brisbane guy that I met at church and who wants to travel as well.
Our first trip together, that sounds queer, our first trip was to Berlin. We'd gone with Ryanair and this was to be my first experience with them. We managed to get pretty cheap tickets and the outer airport that Ryanair flies to (Schoenfeld) had good transport links and wasn't too far from the centre of Berlin. It was a pleasant experience on their part but they lack the personal touch and present personal to control the chavs. English bogans who smoke inside the waiting room and also on the tarmac (very dangerous!) and no staff around to tell them not to! And these middle aged men should know better but that's British society today for you!
When we landed and were directed by the nice credit card spruiker lady to the train station I realised how unorganized I was without Denise's research! I guess I thought Andrew was going to do some and I was relying on doing the New Berlin Tour on Fri to help me get an idea of what to do in and around Berlin. The trains were a bit weird as it was late at night and we just had to guess at what tickets to buy (what zone were we in?) and generally just followed the rest of the crowd from the airport as the announcements were in German and the station lady disappeared before we could talk to her! I think we did a pretty good job of figuring it out on the fly though.
Our hotel (Hotel Angleterre) was plush and so it should be considering what we paid for it! Not the most expensive but not the cheapest either but we got the good room on the top floor. It's also in a very good location not far from Checkpoint Charlie. There was a bit of a mix up with free breakfast as the reception guy told us when we checked in that we had free breakfast but when we went down the next morning we had to pay €15 each for it! We sort of suspected this as Andrew knew the room he booked didn't have breakfast and even though we checked with the reception guy a couple of times we figured that it might be a different story at the restaurant.
After breakfast we consulted the map and headed down towards the meeting point for the New Berlin tour (http://www.newberlintours.com/) at the Brandenburg Gate. Their first tour around Berlin is free and you can give them as much as you thought it was worth or what you can afford. These guys are good as they're basically working off tips. The guy we had was a Texan but knew so much about Berlin and was so enthusiastic and passionate about it that it was easily the best city tour I've ever been on! I highly recommend it! There is so much modern history in Berlin that impacted the world it was fantastic to have it all come alive while I was there.
We saw:
• The Brandenburg Gate
• The Reichstag
• Hitler’s bunker (not marked)
• The new Holocaust Memorial
• Potsdamer Platz
• The Berlin Wall
• Checkpoint Charlie
• Museum Island
• The former SS Headquarters
• The Pergamon Museum (Did this ourselves where there is the Babylonian Ishtar Gate and the facade of the throne hall of King Nebuchadnezzar II!!)
The tour was so good that I decided to pay for their one to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (€12 + train ticket). The guy on this tour wasn't as energetic or animated as the Berlin guy but I guess it's hard to be when you're walking around a concentration camp! It's hard to know what things took place there without a guide. For example, the slate path is where they used to make the prisoners wear ill fitting boots and run with heavy backpacks for 10 hrs to break in the boots. You wouldn't know this if you were walking around by yourself. It was a very sombre place and my first "work camp" (as opposed to death camp) experience. As we were walking down the path at the very start the guide told us that this was the same path that all the thousands of prisoners took to enter the camp and I thought that I would feel something but I didn't really feel anything at all. Not to say that the whole camp didn't have an impact on me, which it surely did, but there was no foreboding or sense of despair at this point.
There is so much I can say about what I learnt of the camp when it was run by the Nazis and then the Russian Communists but I will just tell you that this was where Pastor Martin Niemöller was held. He was the guy who wrote this:
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
On the Sunday we went to the Berlin Zoo which is meant to be one of the world's great zoos. Its a bit of a different set up as it is more a botanical garden setting where the animals are housed. Honestly though, it was quite a depressing sight. I expected better, more natural enclosures and while there were some like this, a lot of it was just primitive and no better than the ones they had in Bangkok! Seeing a sad orangutan with his sad face pressed up against the glass or the puma pacing up and down his cage as if he's gone senile is thoroughly uninspiring! Confirmed my belief that animals do have souls! And caging them up in such conditions is just wrong!
Berlin is a fantastic city and one that you should go to with a knowledgeable person (or knowledgeable local) to fully appreciate it's significance.
Oh, on our return to Stansted we managed to get the second last Stansted Express back to Liverpool St (12:15am) but missed the last Tube!!! Had to figure out the buses and wait for the night bus! Didn't get home until 2:30am 'cause those night buses are soooo slow and stop at every single place! And because this one was late there were people at each and every stop so that the night bus behind it overtook it when we got to Hammersmith! Luckily the Monday was a bank holiday and I was able to recover then.
Tschüs!
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=za0rna8.j0b9jxw&x=0&y=ecfg1m
(Click on 'View Photos without signing in')
Heya Peoples,
Well after losing my travel partner Denise to Australia, I had to find someone else to travel around with and that person was Andrew from All Souls Church. A Brisbane guy that I met at church and who wants to travel as well.
Our first trip together, that sounds queer, our first trip was to Berlin. We'd gone with Ryanair and this was to be my first experience with them. We managed to get pretty cheap tickets and the outer airport that Ryanair flies to (Schoenfeld) had good transport links and wasn't too far from the centre of Berlin. It was a pleasant experience on their part but they lack the personal touch and present personal to control the chavs. English bogans who smoke inside the waiting room and also on the tarmac (very dangerous!) and no staff around to tell them not to! And these middle aged men should know better but that's British society today for you!
When we landed and were directed by the nice credit card spruiker lady to the train station I realised how unorganized I was without Denise's research! I guess I thought Andrew was going to do some and I was relying on doing the New Berlin Tour on Fri to help me get an idea of what to do in and around Berlin. The trains were a bit weird as it was late at night and we just had to guess at what tickets to buy (what zone were we in?) and generally just followed the rest of the crowd from the airport as the announcements were in German and the station lady disappeared before we could talk to her! I think we did a pretty good job of figuring it out on the fly though.
Our hotel (Hotel Angleterre) was plush and so it should be considering what we paid for it! Not the most expensive but not the cheapest either but we got the good room on the top floor. It's also in a very good location not far from Checkpoint Charlie. There was a bit of a mix up with free breakfast as the reception guy told us when we checked in that we had free breakfast but when we went down the next morning we had to pay €15 each for it! We sort of suspected this as Andrew knew the room he booked didn't have breakfast and even though we checked with the reception guy a couple of times we figured that it might be a different story at the restaurant.
After breakfast we consulted the map and headed down towards the meeting point for the New Berlin tour (http://www.newberlintours.com/) at the Brandenburg Gate. Their first tour around Berlin is free and you can give them as much as you thought it was worth or what you can afford. These guys are good as they're basically working off tips. The guy we had was a Texan but knew so much about Berlin and was so enthusiastic and passionate about it that it was easily the best city tour I've ever been on! I highly recommend it! There is so much modern history in Berlin that impacted the world it was fantastic to have it all come alive while I was there.
We saw:
• The Brandenburg Gate
• The Reichstag
• Hitler’s bunker (not marked)
• The new Holocaust Memorial
• Potsdamer Platz
• The Berlin Wall
• Checkpoint Charlie
• Museum Island
• The former SS Headquarters
• The Pergamon Museum (Did this ourselves where there is the Babylonian Ishtar Gate and the facade of the throne hall of King Nebuchadnezzar II!!)
The tour was so good that I decided to pay for their one to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (€12 + train ticket). The guy on this tour wasn't as energetic or animated as the Berlin guy but I guess it's hard to be when you're walking around a concentration camp! It's hard to know what things took place there without a guide. For example, the slate path is where they used to make the prisoners wear ill fitting boots and run with heavy backpacks for 10 hrs to break in the boots. You wouldn't know this if you were walking around by yourself. It was a very sombre place and my first "work camp" (as opposed to death camp) experience. As we were walking down the path at the very start the guide told us that this was the same path that all the thousands of prisoners took to enter the camp and I thought that I would feel something but I didn't really feel anything at all. Not to say that the whole camp didn't have an impact on me, which it surely did, but there was no foreboding or sense of despair at this point.
There is so much I can say about what I learnt of the camp when it was run by the Nazis and then the Russian Communists but I will just tell you that this was where Pastor Martin Niemöller was held. He was the guy who wrote this:
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
On the Sunday we went to the Berlin Zoo which is meant to be one of the world's great zoos. Its a bit of a different set up as it is more a botanical garden setting where the animals are housed. Honestly though, it was quite a depressing sight. I expected better, more natural enclosures and while there were some like this, a lot of it was just primitive and no better than the ones they had in Bangkok! Seeing a sad orangutan with his sad face pressed up against the glass or the puma pacing up and down his cage as if he's gone senile is thoroughly uninspiring! Confirmed my belief that animals do have souls! And caging them up in such conditions is just wrong!
Berlin is a fantastic city and one that you should go to with a knowledgeable person (or knowledgeable local) to fully appreciate it's significance.
Oh, on our return to Stansted we managed to get the second last Stansted Express back to Liverpool St (12:15am) but missed the last Tube!!! Had to figure out the buses and wait for the night bus! Didn't get home until 2:30am 'cause those night buses are soooo slow and stop at every single place! And because this one was late there were people at each and every stop so that the night bus behind it overtook it when we got to Hammersmith! Luckily the Monday was a bank holiday and I was able to recover then.
Tschüs!
posted by boarderbob at
9:50 AM
|
1 comments
