Another Weekend In Berlin

On September 24, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany10 Comments

On the second weekend in September, a group of people who live in Germany and blog in English descended on Berlin for WEBMU 2012.

WEBMU is the “Whiny Expatriate Bloggers MeetUp,” and it’s basically an excuse for a group of really fun people to get together, do a little sightseeing, and eat at a bunch of amazing restaurants. Snooker in Berlin and No Apathy Allowed were the organizers and hosts, and they did a fantastic job. I don’t want to do a lengthy recap of the entire weekend, but I took a some pretty neat pictures while I was in town, so here we go.

I didn’t join all of the tours that the group took part in, but I did go to the Friday morning tour of the Stasi Museum. The original headquarters of East Germany’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit have been converted into a museum and it’s pretty fascinating.

The picture below is a propaganda photograph of Katarina Witt, the German Olympic figure skater. I didn’t fully understand the impact of this photograph until after I’d gotten back home and started doing my traditional pre-blog-post research, when I found this detail:

Following the dissolution of East Germany, Stasi files were found to show that the secret police had worked hard to keep Witt from defecting by giving her cars, accommodations, and permitted travel. Witt found 3,000 pages on her life from the age of eight.

A lot of the original furnishings are still present in the museum, including this cabinet reel to reel system and the rather large conference room table in the next two photographs.

One of the more interesting sections of the museum were all the examples of spy cameras- buttonhole cameras, necktie cameras, bird-feeder cameras. This one was large and obvious by comparison.

One of the display cases contained a selection of period music and pop culture that had been reviewed by the Stasi. This section was fascinating to me.

While walking around Berlin all weekend, I saw a huge variety of street art. This sort of thing rarely happens in Regensburg, but in the big city of Berlin, this stuff was kind of everywhere.

I’d like to take a moment to state that the Berlin Hauptbahnhof is just amazing- the upper levels are S-Bahn trains that go around the city, the mid levels and there are a bunch of levels of other trains. The Berlin Central Station is different than most of the Bahnhofs I’ve been to in that it the trains moving through it are East-West on one level and North-South on a different level- most train stations only have tracks running in one direction, not crisscrossed.

The Berlin HBF also maintains a healthy online and social media presence, as I learned when I asked friends on Twitter for a route and I got answered by @HBF_Berlin.

Most importantly for a nerd like me, though, is that the Berlin HBF is just cool to see. The various levels are somewhat open to each other, and you can see many of the trains criss-crossing the station.

I’m not sure if this counts as street art, but it was at the top of the steps to the U-Bahn closest to the Stasi Museum, so it caught my attention.

One of the most common foods in Berlin is Currywurst. I learned on this trip that Currywurst means an instant migraine for me. Neat, eh?

One of our tours was walking around an urban area and we stumbled across a Saturday morning street market. Interesting stuff.

Walking around on that same tour, the tour guide pointed out that there’s a bar in this building. Can you spot it?

The neighborhood also had its share of what we’ll consider ‘eccentric’ residence. For example, the owner of this charming van.

And sometimes, you just have to ask your neighbors to trim their building.

These signs were all over the city in green spaces. The literal translation is Green Investment Scheme, which makes sense in the marked green areas. There’s a Green Investment Scheme aspect of the Kytoto Protocol for environmental benefits, but I’m not sure if this GIS and that GIS are directly related.

During our walk, I kept getting distracted by little tiny things. For example, this little guy:

Berlin, briefly.

On April 29, 2012May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany7 Comments

Last weekend I took a short trip up to Berlin. I had the chance to visit a new city and an old friend at the same time, and I couldn’t pass that up. I’ve known Heather since high school, and she and her husband Mike were in town for a few days, so off to Berlin I went!

I left after work on Friday, and got in late that night. I took a room at the same hotel that Heather and Mike were using, the Casa Camper. It was a smidge pricier than I would have chosen if left to my own devices, but the hotel was awesome. It has very large rooms, which is unusual for any hotel I’ve been to in Europe thus far. It also has pretty spectacular amenities, including all-included food in a 24 hour snack bar sort of place, and a good sauna at the bottom level of the hotel. I actually did try the sauna for fifteen or twenty minutes, but that’s an entirely different post.

The bed seemed like an American queen sized bed to me, not a typical German bed size. I wouldn’t swear to the measurements though, I just know it seemed like a pretty big bed. The room also had air conditioning, which is something else I haven’t seen much of since I got to Europe. I haven’t slept in air conditioning in more than five months, and I had to turn the AC off to really get comfortable. It’s amazing how quickly no AC has become my new normal.

Needless to say, I slept very well in that big fluffy bed, and Saturday morning after breakfast, we ventured out into the city to do touristy things. First stop: The Brandenburg Gate! Except we ran across a small children’s festival on the way to the Gate, and there were oddities aplenty. For example, there was a parkour demonstration:

We also saw four guys carrying a piano down the street and the world’s shortest rollercoaster. It’s that kind of town. We also saw a Segway tour, and I can never resist taking pictures of a Segway tour.

After some walking past the Reichstag and some other stuff, we found ourselves at the Brandenburger Tor!

Once again, I’m amazed to discover that a major piece of German architecture is based on Greece. In this case, the design is that of the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. If this keeps up, I won’t need to ever visit Greece because I’ll have seen all the things based on the architecture there in other cities.

After we were done at the Gate, we wandered over to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a Holocaust memorial consisting of 2,711 “stelae,” slabs of concrete of various heights arranged in a grid over sloping ground covering 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres). There was also an information center beneath the structure, which holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.

I didn’t know much about this place until we got there, but according to the designing architect, “the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.” I can agree that the place is confusing, but it was also peaceful in a way. Here’s four pictures from there, including one I quite like of a Tibetan monk walking between the stelae.

The city of Berlin knows that when you’ve spent some time in a solemn place, the best thing is to cleanse the palate with something patently ridiculous…. like fourteen guys dressed in banana costumes riding a mobile bar that is powered by the pedals at their feet while a fifteenth guy in the center servers them beer.

No, really.

It turns out the “Bier-Bike” is a pretty common thing for stag parties, and I’ve seen it several times since, including one here in Regensburg where all the participants were wearing standard Lederhosen. This was my first sighting though, and it was kind of magnificent.

Next stop: The Berliner Dom, a big ol’ church. Big pipe organ, big catacombs, and so forth. Plus a rather distinct dome in this Dom. Here’s a few pics from the Dom.

No first trip to Berlin would be complete without a look at some of the historical stuff surrounding the Berlin Wall. In one area, there is a representation of where the wall actually stood, along with representations of tunnels, and a stunning amount of information about how people snuck past the border at times. Here’s the representation of the actual physical location of the wall:

Here’s a physical representation of one of the guard towers.

…and, for good measure, an actual section of the original Berlin Wall, moved to another location by the Nestle corporation for posterity:

We also visited the “House am Checkpoint Charlie,” a museum that has a lot of information about how people crossed the border. There were ultralights, hot air balloons, a personal submarine- people crossed inside of gas tanks and welding machines and in one case, inside the passenger seat of a car. The ingenuity was incredibly impressive. Plus, you know, the actual checkpoint was represented here:

Last but not least, is a very important cultural museum that we spotted on the way to our dinner. The Currywurst Museum.

No, really.

As you can imagine, these eighteen pictures are not a good representation of the entire day- there are 111 photos from Berlin all visible in my Berlin flickr gallery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenglassman/sets/72157629534724430/