Two More Days in Berlin

These last two days have been very tiring (it's getting repetitive now isn't it), but I've been through so much that it doesn't really matter. I'll start by giving yesterday's summary, then moving on to today's events. We first had breakfast at a cafe close to our hotel known as the Einstein Kaffe. It was quite expensive, but much better than the 26 euro fee at our hotel. We then wanted to visit the first museum of our trip, the Deutsch Technikmuseum. It is comparable to the Smithsonian Museums in Washington, DC, but with airplanes, boats, trains, and a brewery. Despite there being signs everywhere in both German and English, and the WelcomeCard book stating that the museum was also in English, we still asked to make sure there would be English. The lady at the ticket booth nonchalantly said yes to our question, so we decided to go in.

Almost everything turned out to be in German, and hard to understand. We tried to not let it ruin our visit, and just decided to look at the exhibits. Eventually on the upper levels, there were some English descriptions, and many of the exhibits were enough of a spectacle on their own. We then continued into the museum's second building, where we saw an old train garage with a rotating circular track directing trains into the garages, as well as an old brewery, where we got an insight into how beer is mass produced. As we left the museum, it began to get quite hot outside. We decided to continue doing indoor activities. After a short train ride to Potsdamer Platz, Berlin's Times Square, we visited the eye-catching Sony Center. This "building" is really 4 or 5 buildings around a fountain, with a mountain shaped roof over it.

Part of this complex is the German Film Museum, which we decided to pay a visit to. I must say, it is quite an extensive and interesting museum... If you're a German interested in the history of German film. The museum was pretty boring for us, but we saw how it could be very interesting for a German. Before visiting our last museum of the day, we decided to pay a short visit to the largest remaining section of the wall in central Berlin, which has a brand new Nazi Police, or Gestapo Museum which shows how Jews were persecuted and prosecuted from 1933-1945 in Nazi Germany.

After this, the last museum we went to was the DDR Museum near Alexanderplatz. This was a very interesting museum that gave us an idea of what life was like in the communist East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik). We saw artifacts from the time, a car from the era, an apartment room similar to what would exist at the time, and learned a lot about the restrictions, economic lives, and recreational lives of DDR citizens. For my father, it was almost a reality, as he spent a good portion of his life growing up in Communist Poland before escaping.

We left the museum after purchasing some books about the Wall. There was also some DDR music we saw, but it was overpriced at that store. Because we still wanted this music, we went to a big media store on Alexanderplatz. Very quickly, we found what we were looking for, but we also noticed that American music there was much cheaper than it is in America. We went crazy, and got quite a few CDs of both German and American music. It was sort of like the international stores talked about in the DDR museum, where tourists in the DDR could purchase western goods for cheaper than in the west.

The last thing we wanted to do that day was visit the TV Tower and have dinner at its 360 degrees rotating restaurant. Our VIP tickets allowed us to skip the lines and go directly up, as long as we showed up between 6:10PM and 6:20PM. At the top, we got some dinner while we admired the surrounding landscape of Berlin. The food was actually very good, authentic German cuisine, despite reviews saying it is mediocre. I found my bacon-wrapped pork fillets with potato noodles very good, and it was made even better with the ever-changing view of Berlin from the EU's tallest structure. The only problem I saw was that there were no window-side tables for groups of two, but it was fine, as it was easy to see beyond the table next to us. We also had an opportunity to see the entire view again from the observation level one floor below the restaurant.

As soon as we returned the surface, we went to the hotel exhausted, and took a dip in the swimming pool. It was quite refreshing for us, to the point where we decided to go back for a night stroll near the Brandenburg Gate. There, we took some pictures in front of the Gate, as well as the Reichstag, which we would visit the next day. Before going back to hotel, we wanted to have a small, additional dinner (Although the portions at the TV Tower were very good, they were quite small), so we stopped by a traditional Berlin Doner Kebap kiosk. Here, I had my very first Doner Kebab, a wrap of minced meat, sauces, and vegetables. It was extremely good, and I must say, doners are now one of my favorite foods. When we returned to the hotel, it was nearly midnight and I was in no mood to write a blog. I went immediately to bed.

Today, we visited quite a few significant places, and also had a guided tour of two authentic Cold War bomb shelters. We started our day by taking a train to Potsdamer Platz and having a nice breakfast at a cafe we discovered there yesterday. Next, we continued our train trip to the Gesundbrunnen station where the offices of the Berliner-Unterwelten (Berlin Underground) are located. Here, we bought tickets for a guided tour of Cold-War fallout shelters, but the tours were about an hour and a half from the time of purchase. We thought it would've been a good idea to visit and get to the top of the Reichstag in that gap. That was a poor calculation, since after the 15 minute train ride, and 5 minute walk to the station, we discovered that the line was almost 2 hours long. We slowly turned around and walked in the other direction, very surprised.

After returning to Gesundbrunnen, we still had quite a bit of time before our tour would start. To counter this, we had a second breakfast at a small cafe outside the station, and by the time we were done, it was time for our tour. The tour was quite intriguing. We saw two fallout shelters. The first we saw was located in the Gesundbrunnen metro station, and was built to hold 3,000 Berliners for 48-hours after a nuclear attack. This one had no electricity or plumbing other than glow in the dark paint, and water tanks. It wouldn't have been the best place to hide in an attack. The second shelter was located in the Pankstrasse station and was much larger and well-equipped. This one could shelter 4,000 people for 14 days. It had a kitchen, generator, and powerful ventilation system with a filter from poison gas or radiation. This one also had real beds and could also actually be used today, given that the warning of an attack was given 3-6 months in advance.

In these shelters, we also learned about who would end up in these shelters (Women and Children), and about the ghost stations of the metro (unused metro stations in the East that had Western trains going through). These were quite famous, since Eastern soldiers had to guard them so that Easterners couldn't escape through metro tunnels. The East even illegally blocked off the emergency exits to prevent escapes. The last thing that was discussed was the whole philosophy of the shelters. Questions like "Would you rather die instantly from the fireball, or slowly and painfully from radiation?" or "What do you do when you leave the shelter and there is no one at the surface?" were posed. We left the museum from a normal door leading directly into the metro station, and it was cool because we realized that there can be quite interesting things behind the doors in a normal subway station.

The rest of the day consisted of us snacking and visiting two famous places. First, it was the Reichstag (Parliament building). We went to the dome, where we had a panoramic view of Berlin comparable to the one atop the TV Tower, although from a lower elevation. The second place we visited, after taking a short dip at our hotel pool, was the Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie. This museum gave an extensive history of the Berlin Wall, displayed many of the ingenious escapes across the wall (suitcases, kayaks, tunnels, gas tanks in cars, hang gliders, hand-made submarines, and even hot air balloons), as well as the tragically halted escape attempts. The only problem with the museum was that it was extremely overwhelming, and seemed to have an endless amount of rooms with walls of text about a certain escape or historical event. We eventually left after seeing about 2/3 of the museum. By then, it was about 10PM, so we had a Doner Kebab dinner before returning to the hotel, where I am now a writing a double blog entry.

Tomorrow, I'll be taking a plane to Paris, France after a final morning in Berlin. There, we will spend the last 5 days of the trip.