I was going to post everything from here, but I can’t get the wireless to work.
The train went fine, although it turns out that just because a friend tells you that they were overloaded with free food in first class on their train from Amsterdam, it doesn’t mean that DB will do the same thing. Or even have food in the dining car other than plain croissants for the first half of a five-hour train trip. They did give us a couple of chocolates, but that was about it; we were quite hungry by the time we arrived in Berlin.
The people at the Info desk at the train station, on the other hand, were very helpful; they wrote on the map to show us where our hotel was, and pointing us in the direction of the correct bus. We got to the hotel with very little confusion, and while our room isn’t as big as Ghent (which was crazily big), it’s nice, and we enjoyed the wonders of CSI Miami in German.
We’ve had several days in Berlin. We’ve tried the currywurst, seen the Brandenburg Gate and the Checkpoint Charlie museum, walked through the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe and seen the Jewish Museum, and generally looked around. C had made a list of the things that she wanted to visit, and she ended up seeing about seven or eight out of twelve; but I am not as enthused by bathtub-washed clothes as some of our travelling companions, so that is why C and I are sitting in a laundromat in Berlin (which was not as easy to find as you might think).
(There was an abortive trip of about an hour, I think, where we tried to go to a laundromat that turned out, when we got there, to have closed down. Curse, you, outdated internet information!)
You get two amusing anecdotes from Checkpoint Charlie. The first concerns a student protesting in Czechoslovakia, some time after the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring. When asked why his placards were blank, he replied, “Everyone knows what they say, and I don’t want to go to prison.”
The other involved the Trabant, and was from the Checkpoint Charlie shop; contemporary jokes about it included that you could double the value of the car by filling it with petrol, and triple it by putting a banana in the back seat. I’ll also note that this toy car, box, and booklet was retailing for about 11 euro in this shop; across the road in a souvenir shop (hardly the bastion of cheapness), the same toy car (sans box and booklet) was 5.50. While there would have been a certain amusement value in taking one back for C’s dad, we eventually decided against it.
Margie is off having fun on her own somewhere; no doubt she’ll tell you about it in her blog.
And now, a specially feature: a guest blog entry from C!
From C: Seeing the Brandenburg Gate was a very cool experience, and following it up with a visit to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (the next day) made for a good follow-up. When we went to see the Gate, we weren’t able to walk through because it was sealed off (with metal gates and police) for the swearing in of the army, but we got to walk around it and had a good look.
We also went that afternoon to a still-standing section of the wall, with placards up along it about the rise to power of the Nazi party, and the downward spiral for German Jews once they came into power. (Our visit to the Jewish Museum the next day added quite a bit of information about the 10 years or so before this of the Weimar Republic, and how this period was a percursor to the things that happened during the war – the inital gains in equality, followed by losses and growing anti-semitic sentiment as conditions worsened in Germany.) It was surprising to see that after the end of the second world war, a lot of public officials (including judges), who’d been public officials under the Nazi regime, retained their jobs (at least for quite a few years), and the same thing happened with much of the intelligence apparatus.
There was a museum of the Topography of Terror located a few meters away from this, which had been put up temporarily in the 70s (or 80s?), and had become a permanent fixture. It was about the SS and the Gestapo – the site had been where the headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin used to be, before it was destroyed (or demolished, I’m not sure). We weren’t too sure about going in, but did anyway, and I think I’m glad we did. There was a special exhibition on inside about the trial of Eichmann in Israel in 1961 (?), and how it was the first time the stories of the victims were really heard, which was pretty strange to find out, considering how important those testimonies feel now. So, that’s some of my version of the last two days 🙂
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