Anniversary Zwei

To celebrate 2 amazing, international years of marriage last weekend we made our first trip to 'the continent' since August with a holiday in Berlin! We had heard the German capital has some great architecture, history, and is the happening-est city in Europe, so we packed the most European clothing we own and hopped on a plane to try and go blend in. We figured on the dance floor of an all night underground techno-rave no one would even suspect we aren't locals…

Ok, we actually decided to give the techno raves a miss but were able to enjoy the numerous other highlights of the city in stead. We got in late Friday night to find out that our hotel had given our room away the first night, BUT they put us up at this amazing 5 star place across the street with an espresso machine in the room, then we got to go back to our original hotel the next night where they apologized with a room (or rather, apartment) that was definitely larger than our flat in England! All in all we did very well with Berlin accommodations, and learned how nice it is to have hotels trying to 'make it up to you'.

Leaving the comfort of our posh room for the rainy streets on Saturday morning, our first stop was the Kaiser Wihelm Church also called the "hollow tooth". The original church was badly bombed during the war, but its bell tower has been preserved and a strange hexagonal modern church built around it. There we saw pictures of Berlin in 1945 which showed neat rows of rubble, with about 70% of the buildings in the city destroyed or seriously damaged. You got a sense too for the world of fantasy the government was living in reading official press reports about this “temporary inconvenience” and how the church would be rebuilt even more grandly as soon as the Germans win the war.

After a quick lunch at the American Embassy (Starbucks), we took the U-Bahn (underground) to the eastern side of the city where most of the historic buildings are located. We spent most of the afternoon in the Jewish Museum, which had some unusual symbolic architecture representing the broken shards of Jewish life in Germany and Europe in the 20th century. Many of the exhibits were very moving and well-done, and the volume of information was extensive, tracing the presence of the Jewish people in Germany since the Middle Ages.

The next stop on a real but pretty depressing tour of German history was the Checkpoint Charlie museum featuring the history of the division of Berlin by Soviet forces following WWII and the terrible realities of life in a divided city. The museum was filled with stories of people flying, swimming, tunnelling, and driving trucks through the Berlin Wall to get out of the East, many of whom did not survive. The wall really evolved, beginning as coils of barbed wire that were laid out on the street, dividing neighbourhoods, shops, and even homes. As more and more people fled the east though, the fortifications increased, and by the 1990s the Berlin wall was actually two 10ft solid concrete walls with a "kill zone" between them patrolled by guards and dogs. By the end of the exhibits you got a bit of the sense of how momentous the fall of the wall must have been. The pictures of thousands of people just tearing the wall apart when the border was opened were moving.

Saturday night was had dinner in a traditional German pub from the 1600's and were pleased to see that no one was speaking English—just us and the locals. I think other than our terrible German pronunciation, clothes, and the 6 or 7 attempts to take a picture of us with our food, we did a pretty good job seeming like locals too. For 3 hours after dinner we had the only dry weather of the weekend, and we got to walk along Unter den Linden Strasse to the Brandenburger Gate seeing the significant buildings remaining in former East Berlin.

Sunday our flight out wasn't until 10pm so we decided to see something a little more cheery from before the rather depressing 20th century. Just on the edge of Berlin we visited the impressively royal and pleasantly opulent Charlottenburgh Palace, summer home of the first Kind and Queen of Prussia. The palace was as lavish and over-the-top as you would expect, but also had some beautiful gardens and lots of windows, which gave it a nicer contemporary feel.

In a final blitz-tour of sites, we ate pretzels at a bakery, took the U-Bahn to Potsdamer Platz which was a square of rubble during the Cold War but is now the Times Square of Berlin and has some very impressive architecture. We then walked up by the Brandenburg Gate again, and waited in line for the Reichstag (Parliament Building) in the pouring rain. Just before trenchfoot set in, we made it into the warm and dry interior, only to learn that we then had to go back out onto the roof to experience the new Norman-Foster-designed dome (1995). Though a bit cold on rainy January days, the glass dome that crowns the ancient building is really impressive and offers some amazing views of the city.

The Reichstag was a great capstone to our Berlin experience, and after a quick dinner at this great serve-yourself Italian place we visited our first night (why risk a poor last meal?) we took the S-Bahn to the airport. By 1am we were back in bed a time zone away in Birmingham, having crammed quite a bit into an amazing anniversary weekend!

Yeah Pictures!!