We woke up at 6:45 am Lisbon time today and had a quick breakfast at our hotel before taking the hotel's complimentary shuttle to the Lisbon airport. We passed through security and boarded our plane for Berlin around 8:30 am Lisbon time (or 9:30 am Western European time). We slept through most of the flight, only to wake up for the breakfast service and coffee. We landed in Berlin after 3 hours at 1:15 pm Western European time. As soon as we got our bags, we purchased the 72 hour transit pass with the Berlin Welcome Card that has discounts for a lot of sites all over Berlin.
We took the train to the Zoologischer Garten station that is a major interchange and right under our hotel in Berlin. We reached our hotel around 3:10 pm. It's a very prestigious chain of hotels, the Waldorf Astoria. They only have about 25 hotels in the entire world and all of them are 5 star facilities.
We were greeted like royalty and love the hotel. It's everything you see in futuristic movies. Just to give you an idea: there is a TV screen embedded (yes, embedded) within the washroom counter mirror! We quickly freshened up and left for our walking tour of the Berlin city. The tour was from 4 pm to 7 pm and gave us a good overview of the city's history. Our Australian guide gave us an overview of different eras of Berlin's history and showed us some early German palaces and cathedrals, along with more recent World War and Cold War era memorials. Some of the other places that we saw during the walking tour are the Brandenburg Gate, the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, the site of Hitler's former bunker, Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie and Unter den Linden. A little more detail on these sites below.
The Brandenburg Gate is the only surviving gate of the old city of Berlin and is so named because it led to the neighboring city of Brandenburg. On its top, it has the statue of a chariot with four horses driven by the goddess of peace. When Napoleon of France conquered Berlin, he took this statue to The Lourve in Paris and when the Prussians conquered Paris back, they brought back the statue and renamed the goddess as the goddess of victory. Today, the Brandenburg gate is perhaps the most identifiable symbol of Berlin.
Not too far away from the gigantic Brandenburg gate is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It was named so explicitly by the German government to serve as Germany's admission of its dark past with reference to the holocaust in which Hitler's Nazi regime murdered around 6 million Jews during the 1930s and 1940s. The memorial covers one city block and has grey rectangular boxes of varying heights placed in a grid-like pattern. The floor of the memorial rises and falls so that when you're in the center of the grid, the blocks tower around you but are less than a human's height around the edges of the grid. Underneath this grid-like memorial is a small museum that tells the horror stories of holocaust victims and how they were killed.
The next stop was a parking lot diagonally across from the memorial. There is nothing to see here but this is the site of Hitler's former bunker where he spent the last few months of his life before committing suicide at this location. Now a rough parking lot sits on top of the location with no memorial or building and just a plaque with the history of the bunker.
Our next stop was an old building that has survived the Nazi era and was used by the Nazi party of Hitler as a ministry. Today, there is a tax office here. Most other buildings from the Nazi era were bombed and destroyed by the allied troops (US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union) but they left this building standing since it served as a navigational aid for their fighter jets.
Right next to this old building is one section of the former Berlin Wall. When the Second World War was over in 1945, the allied forces divided the city between themselves for administration; the Eastern part of Berlin (or East Berlin) went to the Soviet Union and later on, it became a part of the country of East Germany. In the summer of 1961, the East German government realized that at least 2000 people per day were leaving East Berlin for the Western part and that if the mass exodus continued at that rate, the communist country of East Germany would collapse. Their solution was to erect a 100 miles long wall so that people could no longer go to the Western side. It all happened in an overnight operation and one day in 1961, East Berliners woke up to find a wall of barbed wire restricting their access to West Berlin. Gradually the barbed wire was replaced by a brick and mortar version and over the years the wall kept getting higher and more impenetrable. There was a "death strip" area of no man's land between two walls and guard towers watched over this death strip. We now know that at least 120 people were killed trying to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin and around 1200 people successfully managed the escape. However, thousands more were arrested attempting to flee. The wall stood for 28 years from 1961 to November 9, 1989. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall finally led to the reunification of East Germany and West Germany two years later and it became the unified Germany that we see today.
Another interesting thing that we found out during our tour was that after the First World War ended in 1919, the allied forces held Germany accountable for starting the war and imposed a fine on it that Germany managed to repay completely only a few years ago in 2006.
After seeing the remains of the Berlin Wall, we went to the next stop in our walking tour, the Checkpoint Charlie. This used to be a checkpoint on the Berlin Wall which had both US and Soviet presence - now it's a Disneyfied version of the checkpoint complete with actors and props to make it look like a very inaccurate version of the original checkpoint. The significance of this checkpoint is that an armed standoff of tanks happened between East and West Germany for 18 hours which could have potentially started World War 3 but thankfully the standoff didn't blow up into anything more significant.
Our next stop was Gendarmenmarkt which is a square. It has a royal looking building and on its right and left sides, there are two cathedrals that are identical in architecture and only differ in the statues. The right side cathedral was built for catholic French immigrants whom the French had expelled from their country and whom the Prussians gave refuge happily. Since the King could not just gift something to the French population without giving something to its German people, there was a Protestant cathedral built on the left as well. The statues on top of all three buildings are original and only survived the allied troops' bombing during World War 2 because Hitler asked them to be taken down and kept them safe in the underground subway stations so that they could not be damaged. Today they are back on their original places on top of the restored buildings.
Our next stop was the Bebelplatz. There is a Catholic Church here called the Saint Hedwig's church. Frederick the Great (the most famous Prussian King) built this in a heavily Protestant Christian area to show his religious tolerance of the Catholic Christians. The Kingdom of Prussia was officially a Protestant kingdom. Diagonally opposite the church is the Law Faculty of the Humboldt University in a building that used to be a library built by Frederick the Great. Opposite this Law Faculty building is the Berlin Opera House that has been under restorative construction for the last few years. The architecture of these buildings looks inspired by Greek and Roman architectures but it's not a copy of either but is rather unique. Another famous event that happened in this square was the burning of 20,000 books in 1933 during the Nazi era. These were books written by Jews and other authors whom the Nazi government deemed unfit to live and hence wanted to expunge the works of their intellectual efforts. As a memorial to the burned books, there are empty bookshelves under the square underneath a glass surface and they can hold exactly 20,000 books but are completely empty to signify the loss.
Our last stop was to come back on Unter din Linden where our guide pointed out the location of the Royal Palace that is under construction. We were also shown the war memorial museum for fallen soldiers that was used during different regimes (kingdom, democracy, socialist) for their soldiers and now it is a general memorial for victims of war and tyranny.
After the tour, we had dinner at a halal Doner Kabab place owned by Turkish Germans. The Turkish Germans were the ones who invented the Doner Kabab here in Berlin. The place that we went to is called Motiv Bistro and it is the favorite Doner shop of the current German Chancellor Angela Merkel. We saw several pictures of her hanging inside the shop too. Along with Doner Kabab wrap, we also tried the famous German dish Curry Wurst here since it was halal. It's essentially sausage cooked in curry and tasted quite good. We finished off with Turkish tea and headed back to our hotel by subway.
Today, we will go to bed early to catch up on sleep and to enjoy our excellent hotel room. Tomorrow, we will be going for a tour of the town of Potsdam that is on the outskirts of Berlin and has various Prussian palaces.
Take care and good night.
We took the train to the Zoologischer Garten station that is a major interchange and right under our hotel in Berlin. We reached our hotel around 3:10 pm. It's a very prestigious chain of hotels, the Waldorf Astoria. They only have about 25 hotels in the entire world and all of them are 5 star facilities.
We were greeted like royalty and love the hotel. It's everything you see in futuristic movies. Just to give you an idea: there is a TV screen embedded (yes, embedded) within the washroom counter mirror! We quickly freshened up and left for our walking tour of the Berlin city. The tour was from 4 pm to 7 pm and gave us a good overview of the city's history. Our Australian guide gave us an overview of different eras of Berlin's history and showed us some early German palaces and cathedrals, along with more recent World War and Cold War era memorials. Some of the other places that we saw during the walking tour are the Brandenburg Gate, the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, the site of Hitler's former bunker, Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie and Unter den Linden. A little more detail on these sites below.
The Brandenburg Gate is the only surviving gate of the old city of Berlin and is so named because it led to the neighboring city of Brandenburg. On its top, it has the statue of a chariot with four horses driven by the goddess of peace. When Napoleon of France conquered Berlin, he took this statue to The Lourve in Paris and when the Prussians conquered Paris back, they brought back the statue and renamed the goddess as the goddess of victory. Today, the Brandenburg gate is perhaps the most identifiable symbol of Berlin.
Not too far away from the gigantic Brandenburg gate is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It was named so explicitly by the German government to serve as Germany's admission of its dark past with reference to the holocaust in which Hitler's Nazi regime murdered around 6 million Jews during the 1930s and 1940s. The memorial covers one city block and has grey rectangular boxes of varying heights placed in a grid-like pattern. The floor of the memorial rises and falls so that when you're in the center of the grid, the blocks tower around you but are less than a human's height around the edges of the grid. Underneath this grid-like memorial is a small museum that tells the horror stories of holocaust victims and how they were killed.
The next stop was a parking lot diagonally across from the memorial. There is nothing to see here but this is the site of Hitler's former bunker where he spent the last few months of his life before committing suicide at this location. Now a rough parking lot sits on top of the location with no memorial or building and just a plaque with the history of the bunker.
Our next stop was an old building that has survived the Nazi era and was used by the Nazi party of Hitler as a ministry. Today, there is a tax office here. Most other buildings from the Nazi era were bombed and destroyed by the allied troops (US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union) but they left this building standing since it served as a navigational aid for their fighter jets.
Right next to this old building is one section of the former Berlin Wall. When the Second World War was over in 1945, the allied forces divided the city between themselves for administration; the Eastern part of Berlin (or East Berlin) went to the Soviet Union and later on, it became a part of the country of East Germany. In the summer of 1961, the East German government realized that at least 2000 people per day were leaving East Berlin for the Western part and that if the mass exodus continued at that rate, the communist country of East Germany would collapse. Their solution was to erect a 100 miles long wall so that people could no longer go to the Western side. It all happened in an overnight operation and one day in 1961, East Berliners woke up to find a wall of barbed wire restricting their access to West Berlin. Gradually the barbed wire was replaced by a brick and mortar version and over the years the wall kept getting higher and more impenetrable. There was a "death strip" area of no man's land between two walls and guard towers watched over this death strip. We now know that at least 120 people were killed trying to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin and around 1200 people successfully managed the escape. However, thousands more were arrested attempting to flee. The wall stood for 28 years from 1961 to November 9, 1989. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall finally led to the reunification of East Germany and West Germany two years later and it became the unified Germany that we see today.
Another interesting thing that we found out during our tour was that after the First World War ended in 1919, the allied forces held Germany accountable for starting the war and imposed a fine on it that Germany managed to repay completely only a few years ago in 2006.
After seeing the remains of the Berlin Wall, we went to the next stop in our walking tour, the Checkpoint Charlie. This used to be a checkpoint on the Berlin Wall which had both US and Soviet presence - now it's a Disneyfied version of the checkpoint complete with actors and props to make it look like a very inaccurate version of the original checkpoint. The significance of this checkpoint is that an armed standoff of tanks happened between East and West Germany for 18 hours which could have potentially started World War 3 but thankfully the standoff didn't blow up into anything more significant.
Our next stop was Gendarmenmarkt which is a square. It has a royal looking building and on its right and left sides, there are two cathedrals that are identical in architecture and only differ in the statues. The right side cathedral was built for catholic French immigrants whom the French had expelled from their country and whom the Prussians gave refuge happily. Since the King could not just gift something to the French population without giving something to its German people, there was a Protestant cathedral built on the left as well. The statues on top of all three buildings are original and only survived the allied troops' bombing during World War 2 because Hitler asked them to be taken down and kept them safe in the underground subway stations so that they could not be damaged. Today they are back on their original places on top of the restored buildings.
Our next stop was the Bebelplatz. There is a Catholic Church here called the Saint Hedwig's church. Frederick the Great (the most famous Prussian King) built this in a heavily Protestant Christian area to show his religious tolerance of the Catholic Christians. The Kingdom of Prussia was officially a Protestant kingdom. Diagonally opposite the church is the Law Faculty of the Humboldt University in a building that used to be a library built by Frederick the Great. Opposite this Law Faculty building is the Berlin Opera House that has been under restorative construction for the last few years. The architecture of these buildings looks inspired by Greek and Roman architectures but it's not a copy of either but is rather unique. Another famous event that happened in this square was the burning of 20,000 books in 1933 during the Nazi era. These were books written by Jews and other authors whom the Nazi government deemed unfit to live and hence wanted to expunge the works of their intellectual efforts. As a memorial to the burned books, there are empty bookshelves under the square underneath a glass surface and they can hold exactly 20,000 books but are completely empty to signify the loss.
Our last stop was to come back on Unter din Linden where our guide pointed out the location of the Royal Palace that is under construction. We were also shown the war memorial museum for fallen soldiers that was used during different regimes (kingdom, democracy, socialist) for their soldiers and now it is a general memorial for victims of war and tyranny.
After the tour, we had dinner at a halal Doner Kabab place owned by Turkish Germans. The Turkish Germans were the ones who invented the Doner Kabab here in Berlin. The place that we went to is called Motiv Bistro and it is the favorite Doner shop of the current German Chancellor Angela Merkel. We saw several pictures of her hanging inside the shop too. Along with Doner Kabab wrap, we also tried the famous German dish Curry Wurst here since it was halal. It's essentially sausage cooked in curry and tasted quite good. We finished off with Turkish tea and headed back to our hotel by subway.
Today, we will go to bed early to catch up on sleep and to enjoy our excellent hotel room. Tomorrow, we will be going for a tour of the town of Potsdam that is on the outskirts of Berlin and has various Prussian palaces.
Take care and good night.
No comments:
Post a Comment