We joined a walking tour on our first afternoon & amp; some 5 hours later we at least had some idea of the layout of the city. We also had our first German meal......a turkish kebab or Doner Box as it is locally known. Basically it's a box with chips, kebab meat & salad covered in garlic sauce. I'm not ashamed to say we may have eaten there 3 nights in a row!! It was also my first opportunity to break out the very basic German I could still remember from high school....seems I remembered more than I thought cos the kebab man heard my first couple of sentences & replied with a babble of super-fast Deutsch that I couldn't begin to grasp!! "Sprechen sie Englisch??"......please???
One of the great things about Berlin is that many of it's most popular & best attractions are free. In the centre of Berlin a short stroll from the Brandenburg Gate is the Jewish Memorial or rather The Memorial To The Murdered Jews Of Europe. It is a 5.5 acre memorial consisting of 2,711 stones placed on sloping, uneven ground in an undulating wave-like pattern, giving you the feeling of insecurity as though the stones are on unstable ground. You can enter from all 4 sides, day or night, and wander on your own through the maze of stones, as though visiting a graveyard with nameless tombstones. The columns are sunk into the ground to various depths and at some places, they are higher than your head & there are no set paths or sign posts to guide you. The memorial was designed by architect Peter Eisenman to deliberately disorient people by having all the stones tilted slightly and paths that are not level. Rather than being depressing though I found it quite peaceful. People gathered around it & had picnics, sat & talked, read books, kids ran around it like a maze...I don't mean to sound disrespectful but I find it refreshing to see a memorial to something so attrocious actually being used & appreciated by locals & tourists alike, not just photographed from afar or merely ticked off the list of "war memorials". Under the memorial is a free museum which was also really moving. A small collection of rooms, dimly lit, sparsely furnished.....plenty of room to sit & think & contemplate. One particular room was almost pitch black & every couple of minutes or so a name was projected onto each of the 4 walls.....the name of one of the victims accompanied by a quiet, short narration of their life & death as a Jew in Europe during the war. As strange as it sounds, I found it to be a highlight.
When you're a backpacker free shit is good! In fact every Thursday evening between 6pm & 10pm all the museums in Berlin are free......pretty good considering some of the prices for museums in other European cities. We stopped in at the unusual looking Berlin Gallerie expecting to be pushing & shoving our way through all the other tight arses who didn't want to pay the 19 Euros to see it during the day...we were very pleasantly surprised. Not only was it quiet (we often had entire rooms to ourselves), it was a really lovely gallery. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a museum or art expert by any stretch of the imagination but I know what I like & luckily I found a lot of what I like in here. Evening well spent!
Of course Berlin is most famous for it's past so we did spend a fair amount of our looking through museums & memorials. Another really good one was the very new Topography Of Terror located behind the last remaining section of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately we chose one of hottest days to visit it & despite being so new they didn't seem to have installed any airconditioning!!
To break up the sombre feeling of the day we visited something a bit closer to my heart...the Ritter factory. For those of you who don't know Ritter is the oldest & best selling chocolate brand in Germany. This is not so exciting...what is exciting is that they will make you any flavour combination of chocolate you want in the form of a small sample bar. Think marshmallows, almonds, biscuit pieces, sprinkles.....numnumnums!!
We also visited Checkpoint Charlie where we got our passports stamped with all 7 of the original stamps you would need to get to be allowed to pass from East to West Germany.....maybe a bit touristy but not something everyone will have in their passport so why not!!
On Sundays in Berlin the whole city stays asleep it seems. All the shops were shut & we had seen all the attractions we could handle so we headed up to the north of the city where there is a massive market. There were also heaps of buskers, great food (crepes, waffles, corn on the cob.....yummy!) & a huge amphitheatre where the locals were belting out karaoke! What a great place to chill out & people watch! It was also a nice way to cap off our visit to Berlin.......Auf Wiedersehen!!! (Frau Winkle would be proud!!)
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