Berlin - welcoming and vibrant
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Obviously the massive destruction of World War 2 cleared the way for rebuilding on a grand scale. Streets are wide, many with tram tracks down the centre. This gives a feeling of space and helps absorb the millions of tourists. The majority of tourists are German, with the UK being the next biggest group.
Large imposing buildings (and there are so many) seem to have a fringe of tourists. To see it all would easily take a week – although I did see one man trying to cram it all in by cycling furiously along (bike hire is available everywhere) with a video camera in one hand filming as he pedalled past the "Domo" (Cathedral) and Art Museum. There are cycle paths on the pavements, so take care and look both ways, even on a pavement!
The city is on the river Spree, which in one area has created an island where there is a cluster of museums (Museum Insel), which is handy to save you wandering about, but you could easily spend a day just here (free entry to all of them with the Berlin Welcome Card. This is well worth getting for the transport provision alone, as well as all the discounts and entries it provides)
There are too many attractions to list here, in brief, whatever you seek, you will find it here, including Legoland, a huge model railway, art and culture, activities galore, the radio / TV tower at Alexanderplatz, loads of beautiful churches, and night clubs you could not even imagine. See www.visitberlin.de. They are extremely efficient and can also be contacted by writing to Visit Berlin, Europa Platz 1, 10557 Berlin, Germany. They also have offices at the main railway station and at airports.
Shopping is also a major attraction. There is the massive KaDeWa department store where you will lose yourself for a day if not careful, and the shops along the famous Unter Den Linden Avenue. Near here is Schokowelt (chocolate world) see www.ritter-sport.de/berlin Here you can even drink a marzipan chocolate bar!
The Euro is the currency and credit cards are accepted everywhere. English is spoken just about everywhere as well. Most shops close on Sundays, apart from tourist ones, and the hundreds of shops in the main station, the Hauptbahnhof. This is an architectural tour de force. On at least 5 levels trains appear from 5 directions in a Dan Dare type futuristic new station with light from the glass roof going down to the lowest level. It is packed with people and shops. Reunification after the fall of the wall allowed Germany to put the U Bahn and S Bahn networks back together again, and also to unite all the different main line stations into the new Hauptbahhof. Currently the airport bus to Tegel airport arrives here, but the much delayed new Brandenburg airport (due to finally open in 2017) will have rail links to the city centre and connections to all the underground and overground networks.
Getting about is easy (especially with the Welcome Card) The U and S bahn trains are very convenient, as are the buses and trams. There are no barriers at stations (and I didn’t see any ticket checks at all) which allows some strange characters to travel around begging. Some are very good, like a trio with instruments and backing music on a little wheelbarrow thing, some are rather bad. For example, on Sunday morning a group got on the train, the lassies dropped their gypsy type skirts to the floor to reveal jeans, and they continued to dance to bohemian backing music. At the next stop a wild man in a wheelchair rushed pell-mell onto the train and started a loud rant. One of the "gypsy" lassies came over and gave him a handful of coins and told him to shut up. As in all cities, there are always people asking you for money, usually holding out a cardboard coffee cup.
It is difficult to avoid the war. All tourist shops sell postcards of "then" and "now" scenes. At the Brandenburg Gate, the famous symbol of the cold war border, there are hordes of tourists and loads of characters dressed in military uniforms holding big flags so that you can have your photo taken flanked by US or DDR or Russian officers, and there are also at least 2 Darth Vaders and a big brown bear, and so on. From here a very broad avenue (Strasse des 17 Juni) leads for 2 kilometres to the "Grosser Stern". On the way you pass a huge monument flanked by 2 Russian tanks and field guns and the high statue, dedicated to the thousands of Russian soldiers who died liberating Berlin in May 1945.
The "Stern" is a towering monument in the middle of a 5 road junction. It is topped by a massive statue of victory. This celebrates the German victory over the French in 1871. Tunnels take you from the pavement over to the monument so that you do not have to risk life and limb crossing the circulating rushes of traffic. You can climb up inside the tower and have tremendous views from up there. While I was there the police arrived and sealed off the streets because of a demonstration, so I had to walk all the 2 kilometres back to the Brandenberg Gate! At least I did so via the Tiergarten. This is a large park area (originally laid out for the king to go hunting in) that provides a peaceful lung in the city centre. On the way I saw Trabant safari cars in a convoy carrying large Americans around the city, squashed in like a cartoon, rickshaws, bicycles, segways, endless streams of double decker hop on hop off sightseeing buses, horse drawn carriages, and the funniest of all was a large mobile beer celler, with men sitting on each side all peddling like mad while drinking beer from a barrel on the front. This was obviously a stag do from England according to their t-shirts, and I hope that someone was sober steering the contraption.
I went on the U-bahn to Nordbahn station. This was sealed off into 2 sections in the cold war as it straddled the border between the Russian and American sectors. There is a display of photos in the hall way that make you think just how stupid it was. Across the road is a visitor centre about the wall. Two films are shown, every hour on the hour they are in English and bring home to you how the wall not only split a people and a city, but the whole country. Facing this centre is a remaining section of the wall itself. It is sobering to walk among the wall traces with the panels explaining the deaths and lengths that people went to trying to cross, and the lengths that the Russians went to keeping folk in. The East German guards in the station even had to be sealed into their control positions in the station as they had a habit of escaping through the tunnel into the west!
Two small things interested me. In a supermarket (where prices are the same or slightly less than here) people were coming in with large bags of empty bottles, mostly plastic. They fed them into a machine in the wall and received a receipt which refunded the deposit on the bottles, redeemable at the till off their purchases. What a good idea – we used to do this and it would be good to reintroduce it in the UK to help reduce the number of plastic bottles littering everywhere. One side effect is that it is common to see even very respectably dressed people (one military looking gentleman even had a torch on his wrist to look into the bins) going up to the segregated rubbish bins everywhere and extracting the bottles.
On a street near the KaDeWe department store I saw the street sign "Keithstrasse". It seems that this street is not named after my home town but after a Scottish soldier who was a general in the German army – how odd! This looks like a story for another time!
There are thousands of places to eat well and the prices are good, there is one place that I would recommend. It is unfair to single out one place, but this one appealed to me because of the good welcome, great atmosphere and good food – including a good cup of tea, it is Restaurant Marjellchen, in Mommsenstrasse, see www.marjellchen-berlin.de They specialise in regional dishes from the north east states of Germany. There are hundreds of hotels, to suit all budgets, I stayed at the Motel One Berlin (which had the best sound insulated room I have ever come across) which is clean, efficient and well situated, and the NH Berlin Heinrich Heine hotel. This is difficult to find, tucked away behind another building in a quiet residential part of Berlin, but close to the UBahn and bus routes, where you are away from the hustle and bustle and can see ordinary Berliners going about their day to day business. It is a good quality hotel, and not expensive.
Berlin is one of those places that you just have to visit. It is quite clean and litter free despite the tourists. It gives you the sense of being at the centre of growth, power, dynamism and movement. Because it has so many tourists, it is prepared for them and makes life easy to get around. It is welcoming, vibrant, open for business, and becoming once again THE place to go in Europe.
