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Berlin Holiday January 2006 Impressions of Berlin |
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We arrived at Berlin's Tegel airport at 2 pm, took a taxi to Louisa's Place (13 euro), and began the adventure. Also see photos we took in Berlin.
We found Louisa's Place (LP) on the internet and what a find! You can also see how beautiful the rooms are in several of our photos. Being the off season we got a terrific deal. LP has a great location right on the Kurfürstendamm (popularly known as the Ku-Damm) but farther away from the tourist area down near Europa Place. It's not a hotel but rather serviced apartments that also offer breakfast and personalized help with just about anything. Nearby are many restaurants, a drugstore, and also two grocery stores. They offer a free Internet cable connection, which we took advantage of by bringing our laptop. Well, the day we arrived was election day in Canada and we wanted to see all the details of who had won! LP is a fabulous place to stay and its staff are wonderful! We cannot praise them enough for their competence, kindness, and hard work. In our short stay they were asked to help us connect our laptop to their DSL Internet system, arrange for a birthday cake with "happy birthday" in German (they added a bottle of champagne on the house), contact a taxi company about the camera we lost, call the Film Museum to see if our camera had been turned into lost and found, and find a nearby hospital that would treat foreigners in its emergency room, arrange for many taxis, and more. They complied with every request and always with a smile. We settled our bill the day before we left since our plane departed early the next morning. Shortly after returning to our apartment, there was a knock at the door and one of the reception staff had complementary Moet and Chandon champagne and fancy chocolates to celebrate our last night! A perfect ending to 5 days in one of the world's great cities! A special thanks to Tanya and Nadine in Reception for all their help and many kindnesses! | TOP | After settling into our apartment at Louisa's Place, we decided to pick up some groceries. Turned out there was a grocery store right around the corner called Aldi. The store was a bare bones "big box" with pretty basic food, some of it literally stacked on the floor, and lots of really cheap wine. First we needed a grocery cart and they only took 1 euro coins. The smallest we had was a 5 euro bill so I went into the long queue at the only checkout in operation. When it was my turn, I asked, "Sprechen sie Englisch, bitte" and the young female cashier looked at me rather sternly and said, "Nein". This was surprising as most young Germans take some English in school. Perhaps she was too busy and tired to cope with using English or perhaps she didn't feel confident enough? Or perhaps she had little patience with tourists who asked this question? Or perhaps she was overworked and underpaid and hence cranky? Or....? Regardless, when I held up the 5 euro bill and pointed to a cart, the cashier said in English, "Ah, change. Okay but you have to wait." She then processed all the people behind me and finally gave me the change. Why I had to wait for the customers behind me I don't know, since I had already waited my turn in line. Hmmm.... See this article, which is perhaps relevant:
Aldi's inventory was really limited so we bought only bread and margarine (for that well known Canadian comfort food, toast!) and something that read crème fraîche for coffee. I was tempted to buy some wine but the cheap prices suggested rot gut so passed (not wanting to pass out later). The queue to check out was long. Some guy ahead of us, clearly a smart shopper, had about 20 bottles of the 5 euro wine! I've since discovered that Aldi is the largest wine retailer in Europe. At checkout there were no bags, so I loaded the goodies in my trusty backpack. When we woke up at about 3 am, we definitely needed munchies and toast filled the bill. First, there was no toaster (toast is not a German thing!), but being the scientific problem solver that I am, I made the toast using the oven's broiler. The second oops! was that the "fresh cream" was not cream for coffee at all and instead was solid, rather like sour cream! I should have known something was amiss by the fact that the top of the container was rather wide and round and would be awkward to pour. Just too tired to think straight, I guess.... Ah, well, black instant coffee never tasted
better!
| TOP | Note: Because of the many links in this section, we recommend that you read it through once without using the links and then return to visit the linked resources. On our first full day we decided to get
oriented with a
tour of the city. We had planned to walk the 15–20 minutes
down the Ku-damm to where the
tour buses were, but it felt close to
–20C with the wind chill, so hailed a taxi. The
taxi driver did not believe us when we said this was colder than when we
left Canada. It sure felt frigid, because of the wind and also the
high humidity. Definitely Brrrrrlin! The city tour was great. We got seats on the top of a double decker bus right at the front window so had a clear view of everything. There were only 3 other people on the tour, a benefit of traveling in the off season on such a cold day. We sat beside a friendly mother and daughter from Argentina. They were in Germany visiting relatives and had come from summer in Argentina so were positively frozen. The only other person on the bus was a German-speaking woman who was on her cell phone the entire trip. The tour covered all the top sites in the city, including the Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie ( also see Charlie demolished), and a stop at the Brandenburger Tor (built in the late 1700s) on Pariser Platz where they had those wonderful celebrations in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and East and West Germany were reunited. The Adlon Hotel (whose past guests included Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and more) is right there too. Couldn't resist taking photos of Peter in front of the Brandenburg Gate and the Adlon. Also got to drive down Unter den Linden, featured in many of my favorite mystery books by authors like Len Deighton (e.g., Winter, a Berlin Family). Just being at Pariser Platz conjured up images of what life must have been like in earlier times:
The bus tour gave a good overview of Berlin and its architecture. The guide told the usual corny jokes that he's probably told a zillion times but they were cute. Further reading: | TOP | The
Ka De We
(Kaufhaus des Westens - department store of the west) was on our
must-see list. It's the largest department store in Germany and was worth
the visit. It
has all the big designer brands, good to look at but with price tags not
for the faint of heart. The 6th floor has a food mart that you have to see to
believe. Besides being able to buy all kinds of food, as in a grocery
store, there is a huge food court with many specialty
restaurants. There was one waiter in the bar who spoke fluent
English, a friendly 40ish Chinese woman, and she patiently interpreted
the extensive menu for us. I was prepared to interpret German menus (Zwei
bier, bitte being the most essential phrase!) but the variety of
dishes was overwhelming and easily exceeded my limited vocabulary. Later one of the cooks offered to take
our
picture. An interesting tidbit - one of the
customers at the bar was a doppelganger for CJ Craig
from the West Wing TV series. | TOP | Being film buffs, we had to see the Berlin Film Museum at the Sony Centre on Potsdammer Platz. It's a fabulous museum, presenting the history of German films from the 1890s to the modern era.The Germans had a thriving film industry
when Hitler was elected in
1933. Once the Nazis took power many Jewish directors and actors (as
well as scientists like Einstein) fled to England and the USA.
These included such luminaries as Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, and
many more. The museum also has the very first Oscar ever awarded (German
actor Emil Jannings in 1928). The section on the Nazi era also had a room with a series of desk drawers which, when opened, showed film clips of Nazi rallies with the sounds of Hitler ranting and crowds roaring. Haunting and chilling.... Lost camera I was so taken with the Dietrich display that I decided to take a photo at which point I realized that one of my two cameras was missing. Did it fall out of my coat pocket in the taxi? Or could it have been stolen by a pickpocket in the museum, perhaps in the elevator going up, as we were jammed in with a large group? We will never know but the camera is gone. Fortunately, it was a back-up to my digital camera and had only a few shots of on it. In all my travels I've never lost a camera before (or had one stolen), but there's always a first time. A good reminder in future to keep cameras more secure. | TOP | The most essential visit on our trip was the Jewish Museum. On an earlier trip to Germany I had visited Dachau concentration camp outside Munich. I have always been fascinated by the Holocaust. Despite pogroms against Jews dating from the 19th C, how could a nation like Germany have created the so-called final solution of the Jewish question - genocide of an entire race many of whom were its own citizens - as documented by the minutes of the 1942 Wannsee conference? How could its physicians have participated in such horrendous medical experiments? Also see It's estimated that 6 million Jews from all over Europe were killed in the Holocaust. When Hitler came to power in 1933 there were more than a half million Jews living in Germany and the largest community was in Berlin with about 160,000 Jews. By 1943 all Jewish residents of Berlin were deported to concentration camps. Only 7,000 returned to Berlin after the war. The Jewish Museum traces two millennia of German Jewish history presented in 14 sections. Bit by bit visitors learn about German Jews, their occupations and positions in society, the discrimination they suffered throughout history, as well as a sample of what their daily family lives were like. The permanent exhibition begins in the year 321 and runs through the world wars of the 20th C to the present. The museum designers showed a vibrant and cultured people who were German in every respect, and who were ultimately demonized by the Nazis as sub-human. We found the museum to be a moving experience. There were many visitors on the morning that we went, including several groups of teenage school children. They listened politely to their teachers, who spoke at length in front of each exhibit, but I saw none of the intensity, sadness, comprehension of the horrors that had occurred, and perhaps guilt and shame that I had seen on the faces of school children at Dachau in the mid-60s. Maybe it's because WWII was more recent then and now must seem remote to people under 20? Or maybe it was simply info overload by young people whose attention span is often said to be about 15 minutes? Or maybe today's teenagers are used to hiding their feelings in order to appear cool? Regardless, it was fascinating to compare the faces then and now. Worth reading (added 4 Nov. 2006): Did you hear the one about Hitler, Goering and Goebbels? (great article on new book on humour in 3rd Reich, "Heil Hitler, Das Schwein ist tot!" - "Heil Hitler, the pig is dead!") | TOP | On Peter's birthday we choose the Mövenpick
restaurant in the Europa Centre for lunch (now closed). The restaurant in the Europa Centre is beside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, probably the most well known sight of the Berlin skyline. We lucked out and got a non-smoking window seat with a perfect view of the Memorial Church. They had an English menu, which we happily used. Being a vegetarian, I had the salad bar (a great buy for 13 euros) and Peter had the daily special, which was fish. For desert we had lattes and walnut ice cream, a throw back to Locarno where we would often go for ice cream and vino at the Mövenpick patio looking onto Lake Maggiore. It was fun to observe a well dressed young German family at the next table. The parents were 30ish and the two girls perhaps 5 and 8 years old. We were struck by how well behaved the children were and how talkative they were, carrying on polite but animated conversation with Mom and Dad. But what was most striking was the food that they ordered and how they ate it. Each child had a bowl of pasta (linguine) and a fabulous looking red lettuce side salad. And they both ate the pasta in the traditional North American way (I haven't seen it done in Italy) using a fork to twirl the pasta around in the spoon. No speaking with their mouths full either. And to top it off, just before they got up to leave, the younger child burst into "Jingle Bells' in English! Even without the tasty food and the people-watching entertainment, it was really neat being able to enjoy the famous view on Peter's birthday! | TOP | As always, we had prepared for a trip to a non-English speaking country by brushing up on the local language. As noted earlier, I'd taken a German course many years ago and more recently (2001) a conversational German course. To prepare for Berlin we'd bought a German phrasebook and had fun with the typical sprechen sie phrases for tourists: Wir kommen aus Kanada, Zwei Bier bitte, etc. Many resources tell prospective tourists that they can get away with using English in most countries, especially in Europe where English is widely taught as a second language and particularly in the more touristy areas. My experience has been that this is mostly true. Indeed, in some countries such as Denmark and Norway, the locals often speak better English than some at home. Guidebooks also recommend learning a few simple phrases, particularly please and thank you as a sign of respect. We have always gone beyond that and tried to learn how to read menus, ask for directions, carry on small talk about the weather, etc. This trip to Berlin has emphasized the importance of knowing as much of the foreign language as possible. Many Berlin cabbies do not (or will not) speak any English (see below). Many restaurant, grocery, and department store staff do not (or will not) speak any English. In particular, restaurant menus are hard to interpret due to the fancy names given so many dishes. For example, it's easy to learn that is chicken is das Huhn and potatoes are die Kartoffeln but it's hard to develop an adequate vocabulary to understand exactly what it is you are ordering. What's needed is a willingness to be adventurous and to be prepared for some truly unexpected dishes. Here's a
simple
menu from the Schweinske
restaurant
| TOP | Because of the cold and limited time, we took taxis everywhere. Taxis are easy to flag down and some places such as outside the Ka De We have taxi stands. A few drivers said they could speak a bit of English and several indicated none at all. It would have been interesting to ask if they were ossis or wessis. Ossis (former East Germans) apparently could take Russian as a second language after 5 years of school, and after 7 years could opt for English or French. Hence they may not be as comfortable with English as wessis, who took more English in school. Berlin's cabbies drive fast, careening in and out of lanes to beat the traffic. This saves on fares but can be hair raising. One cabbie we had almost had 3 accidents in a 2 block stretch of the Ku-damm. By the third slamming of brakes and cursing in German we were white knuckled! On a light note, one older cab driver we
had could not speak English. But after I said, "Wir kommen
aus Kanada" he later tried to make conversation by commenting "Kanada ist grosse."
It means Canada is large but grosse sounds funny and a
bit insulting.
The driver who took us to the airport on the way home was a good guy. As we neared Tegel he asked what airline we were flying and to where, then slowed down to scan a huge lighted sign that showed the gates. Saved us what could have been a long walk once inside the airport and we appreciated it. Further reading: | TOP | Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (Gedaechtniskirche) The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church consists of three buildings: the old bombed out bell tower (damaged in 1943 Allied bombing) and two modern structures, including an octagonal church with blue glass bricks and a huge golden Christ above the alter. An organist was playing in the modern church during our visit and the church has regular concerts throughout the year. The day we visited there were only a few visitors, as shown by Peter out front.One of the buildings is a museum with photos of the church's history and a few remnants. One alcove showed the utter devastation in 1940 of the cathedral in Coventry, England by German Luftwaffe bombers. On the way out of the museum a dignified-looking German lady with a cane ( ~75 and with an old world charm about her) started to talk to Peter in German and conveyed that she needed help going down the icy steps. She talked in German all the way down with Peter nodding appreciatively and saying the odd "Ja! Ja!" to acknowledge her points. He caught the word wonderbar several times and assumed it referred to the church. It was a sweet moment and Peter was touched to oblige. | TOP | A fortuitous day to be in Berlin.... January 27 is World Holocaust Day.Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated on that date and outside the Memorial Church there was a ceremony commemorating holocaust victims, notably the 6 million Jews who disappeared from Europe during Hitler's Third Reich, as well as another 5 million souls, including gypsies, homosexuals, mentally retarded persons, communists, and others deemed unsuitable by the Nazis. The ceremony lasted several hours and drew a dedicated crowd of perhaps 50–60 people willing to stand for that long in the bitter cold. | TOP | Our second last day we were hailing a cab outside the Arkaden shopping centre when Peter didn't notice that there was a drop to the street level and took a header. Falling heavily, he injured his rib cage and left hand, scraped his knee, and had the wind knocked out of him. He was in a lot of pain due to the rib injury. What to do? I asked the driver, who did not speak English, about going to a krankenhaus (hospital) but he looked thunderstruck, shook his head, and said, "Krankenhaus, nein!" Probably he was worried about possible complications and how he could be tied up for some time. With the krankenhaus kaput, we opted
to go back to the hotel and decide what to do. The hotel staff would be
able to tell us if there was a hospital prepared to handle foreign
patients. We went to our room and the reception staff checked and found
that we could go to the
Martin Luther Krankenhaus,
only 5 minutes away. They called a cab and off we went. I suspect that Peter's mistake was blurting
out "I speak only English" instead of the more politically correct,
"Sorry, I do not speak German." He told me later that after this
faux pas the doctor left the examining room muttering, "I speak
only English." From then on she insisted on telling him everything in
German, which she knew he did not understand! Only later did I learn
this tidbit, when I was called in after Peter told her that I spoke some
German. As she rambled on in rapid German, my "Ich nicht
verstehen" killed that notion! Addendum: It turned out that Alberta Health needed everything translated into English, so we just paid the hospital bill ourselves and were glad to do so. |
