germany: berlin

Every year, on or around my birthday, I like to take a trip. It's always a weekend trip, never very long. This year, a few months before my trip someone had posted a list of festivals of light, and I noticed that one of them would be happening over my birthday weekend. I booked the flights and was a happy camper.

My flights to Berlin did not go well, I did not land on time. My first flight, leaving Kyiv departed late. In order to make the connection in Vienna I had to race through the airport. Thankfully I wasn't the only one trying to make this particular connection. Go figure, I got to the second plane on time, and boarded, only to wait again; the second plane departed late as well.

At least arrival in Berlin was easy, as I didn't have to go through passport control again.

I was super excited and figured I could get to my hotel in less than an hour. I felt that way until I exited the airport and saw just how slowly traffic was moving out there. Berlin Tegel is an older airport in the city, there are no metro lines going to the airport. This means if you want to use public transport to get to and from the airport, you have to use a bus. This is all fine and dandy, until you see how SLOWLY traffic moves at 1730 on a Friday evening. The chaos was mostly confined to the area near the airport. After we got less than a kilometer away, traffic opened up and the rest of the bus ride was at normal speed.

The ride wasn't even that long, only about 30 minutes.

It took me more than two hours to get to my hotel, argh. When I got to the hotel I texted Bo, who had arrived in Berlin that morning on a train. We found each other and checked in. We dropped off our bags, bundled up, and went back out into the city. Normally I'm not a huge fan of being out late in the evening, but this festival is one that happens only in the evenings, and we had just two nights to see everything.

The festival of light in Berlin happens every year over 9 days in October. (Two weekends and the week in between them.)

The festival consists of a number of buildings around the city that are lit up with special lighting in the evenings. For several of the buildings, the lighting is more like a video, with music. I'm not sure I'm describing it clearly, I hope some of my photos show it better than I'm writing.

Our hotel was near Potsdamerplatz, a large platz in Berlin. The former Berlin Wall used to run right through this platz, and some of the wall panels are still there. There is also a small hill running the length of the street along which the wall was built.

Inside Potsdamerplatz there is a mall, and a metro station. We went into the mall to find food, as neither of us had eaten a proper meal in a while. We found an Asian food place, and I was happy to have a box with tofu and veggies.

The first building we saw wasn't far from the platz. I think it was a mall on Leipziger street. This was one of the buildings where the lighting changed along with music. We saw faces, and shapes, and general awesomeness. We stood around for a little while, as the whole video played out on the facade of the building. Since this festival is in mid October, the weather is still decent for people to stand around outside. I also enjoyed watching people for a bit.

We ducked into the Sony building, which is also close to Alexanderplatz, because it is a unique building. At night it is lit up every night of the year. Its basically a mall, which I didn't need to explore, but I loved looking up at the ceiling.
On the platz were neon lights shaped into riders on bicycles. Very simple, but I loved them.

We walked up the street, going by the Holocaust memorial at one point. It's a large memorial, very unique. Definitely a place I wanted to come back to in daylight.

We followed the street all the way up to the Brandenburg Gate. (Brandenburger Tor in German.) This was another building (is a gate a building?) lit up with music and moving light. There was a much larger crowd there, so I had more fun watching people. This festival brought out people of all ages: couples, families, friends, and singles; old and young. There were a number of people with cameras on tripods, videoing the entire series of music and light shows on the gate. It was absolutely fascinating to watch the whole thing. I think there were about 4 songs, each with it's own show of light on the gate.

Not far from the gate we could see the Reichstag, so we strolled over after watching everything at the gate. The building was lit up, but it was not part of the festival.

From there we walked back to the hotel, and called it a night.

Since I live an hour ahead of Berlin, I woke up fairly early the next morning. We got out the door of the hotel around 0900, and found breakfast on a corner at Alexanderplatz. I'm a HUGE fan of German bakeries, and always have a hard time choosing how many items I want to buy. There was a coffee shop there too, with different options for hot chocolate drinks. Yum.

We followed the same street we'd walked the night before, going to the Holocaust Memorial first. It is a series of irregular blocks on irregular ground. It seems like you can see everyone there, but as you start to walk through it, the ground goes down and the blocks get taller, so you're hidden from anyone standing on the edge. It's intense, in a quiet way. There are signs on each side reminding people to behave with respect, it's amazing how often that does not happen. We walked all the way through, and all the way around.

As we came out of the Holocaust Memorial it started to sprinkle. I wasn't thrilled, as rain is the one type of weather I really really don't like, especially while traveling.

Since I never get good weather in Berlin I was sortof expecting this, so I was wearing a raincoat.

We crossed the street, into one of the many entries into Tiergarten Park. It's a big park, with many paths, smaller landscaped areas, trees, statues, etc... I'm sure it's a whole lot more impressive when the weather is good. We wound our way through, finding a couple small bodies of water, one of which was completely covered in green. Adding that to the greenery all around made for an interesting photo, but not what I wanted.

When we got to the street that goes through the park, we followed it all the way to the Victory Column, in the middle of the park. This column commemorates the German victory over France and Napoleon. The column is surrounded by reliefs, which were part of political games for a while. If I remember correctly, they were stolen, and kept by France for a while. Not surprisingly, France didn't want memorials to this battle. When they returned the reliefs, there was some breakage, and this is how they are now displayed. It's possible to go up to the top of the tower, but we didn't feel like paying to do that in such crappy weather.

Continuing our walk through the park we saw the presidential schloss (castle,) which was really rather boring, with a plane lawn in front.

On Dulles Street (named for the American guy,) we passed the How of World Culture, which was definitely unique. I didn't like the way it looked very much, but architecture is always very subjective. We saw one guy running the stairs over and over again as we passed by, it didn't look like fun.

Our next stop was the Soviet soldier war memorial. As is typical of Soviet anything, especially memorials, it was big. In a way I'm surprised such a thing exists in Germany, but hey, who am I to say anything.

Due to the rain all over the ground, I could see the reflection of the memorial on the ground in front of it, which was interesting to me as a photographer.

Continuing to follow this street took us back to the Reichstag area again. Before this trip I'd looked into getting tickets to go up in the dome on top of the building, but they were sold out. Argh. Despite the rain, there were still a lot of people in the ground surrounding the Reichstag.

We went through the Brandenburger Tor again, and walked straight along the road. This street is FULL of tourists, and has restaurants, cafes, and shops mostly there for tourists.

The gate is pretty awesome, but dealing with the mess of the street is not so fun. As we were walking along we noticed a bunch of Georgian soldiers doing the tourist thing, I'm guessing they were also doing some sort of military exercises with the German Army?

This main street is called Unter den Linden, and like I just said, is a main street, full of tourists. We walked to the cross street of Friedrichstrasse, which is what you follow to get to Checkpoint Charlie. On our way to the checkpoint, we stopped at the Ampelman store, which they call a lifestyle store. I don't really get how one makes a lifestyle out of their stuff.

Ampelman was the shape of someone walking on street crossing signs, back when there was an East Germany. Now that character has been printed on everything known to man, including t-shirts, mugs, magnets, pencils, plates, etc...

We also stopped in a bakery to pick up food. Not a real meal, but the only food we'd eaten since breakfast several hours ago. I love German bakeries and will use any excuse possible to visit one. It's both good and bad that I don't have access to these bakeries more often.

This was my second trip in recent memory to Checkpoint Charlie, and I was just as disappointed this time around as I was last time.

It has become so commercialized, and so touristed. It's really hard to understand what the place used to be, and what it meant for so many people. The pictures show it well, but with all the extra stuff there now, it's hard to imagine. There is a KFC on the corner, souvenir shops, and more. It's ridiculous. You can even pay total strangers wearing German Army costumes (allegedly they look like the uniforms from back then,) to take pictures. These strangers didn't even serve in the military! Argh.

One of the iconic photos to take here is that of the side that says which zone you are leaving, and which zone you are entering. It says it in several languages, representing the allies who controlled the area. It's pretty much the only photo that doesn't show the modern world that exists there now.

If you look at the ground long enough, you'll find a line of stones on the pavement, showing where the wall used to stand in this area. Bo and I took a photo with each of us straddling this line.

Ironically, there was a car parked over this line, which the owners didn't realize when they first parked. Even though I've seen and learned a lot, it's still amazing to me that this wall existed during my lifetime, and prevented the movement of so many people.

Our next stop wasn't far away, we went to a museum called the Topography of Terror. It's not a museum in the sense of items on display. It is a museum in that there are exhibits, and you learn a lot. As you might guess from the name, this museum is all about those decades in history, in this area of the world.

To get to the entry of the museum, you walk past a number of pieces of the wall still standing. The exteriors of a few of them have been chipped away, so you can see the steel pieces reinforcing the concrete. These panels have not been painted with graffiti, they're just as they were.

We entered the museum and started walking through the different displays. We'd been out walking all day, in crappy weather, and quickly realized neither one of us wanted to read every single display, and look at every single picture. I would like to go back, but I still don't think I would read or look at every single thing in a single visit because that would be way too intense. You see the different groups of people affected by all the laws and the wall, you see the different countries affected by the rules of Communists, you see the people in charge as well as the 'regular' people. Instead of focusing on WW2, there is a focus on everything else related. Since I grew up in a free country, I have a hard time understanding or imagining being persecuted simply because of being born a certain ethnicity.

After leaving, we walked back toward our hotel, stopping at the food court in the mall again for dinner. When I find food I like, I don't mind having it again and again. Bring on the veggies and tofu!

We went back to our hotel for an hour to warm up and put on more clothes for another evening out walking around the city. We left the hotel and went back to the mall we'd first seen the night before. This time, instead of watching the light show we went into the mall, I was looking for a specific watch. The store I found didn't have the watch, (a Timex Ironman,) so I guess I will get it the next time I go to the States.

We walked up the street to Brandenburger Tor again, and watched the light show again. There were even more people out, it was Saturday evening. We managed to make our way through the crowd to walk Unter den Linden again. With the evening festival taking place there were locals out along with all the tourists. Both Bo and I were annoyed with all the pedestrian traffic.

The next building we saw lit up was that of Humboldt University. The light was unchanging, but a whole lot of colours were used.

Nearby the university was the Hotel de Rome, which was lit up with video and sound. Across the street was another lighted building, though I don't know the name of the building. There was a statue in the center of the courtyard, it wasn't part of the display. The music and lighting on this one made me think of trance or house music. Patterns and sounds repeated over and over.

We walked further on the street, finally coming to the Berlin Cathedral. It's big, and visited by heaps of people. I haven't gone inside, because it costs seven euro to do so. That's a lot of money to see the inside of a chuch. If it were two or three euro, I'm sure I would've gone inside. The cathedral also participates in this festival, with a series of changing projections.

Each projection stayed up for a few minutes, then it was changed. There were more people at the cathedral with tripods and expensive cameras.

At that point we felt like it was time to go to sleep. To get back to the hotel we walking along different streets, since we were both really annoyed with all the pedestrian traffic. Walking just one street over made a HUGE difference in how fast we could go.

The next morning we had breakfast again at the two places from the day before, the bakery and the coffee shop.

I found a donut of sorts with cream and sour cherry sauce in the midle, SO GOOD; I had a large hot chocolate to drink. Not the healthiest breakfast ever, but yummy anywho!

This day we walked in a completely different direction, heading to a canal near our hotel. We walked along the canal for a while, it was as if we were in a different city.

Bo recognized the turn we needed to take onto a street that led us straight to a church. Well, it used to be a church. I guess it still is, but it isn't used as a church now. Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was bombed during WW2, and what remains of the building (part of the bell tower and a small amount of the ground floor,) has been left alone as a reminder of what happened.

A new church was built next door, and is rather ugly from the outside, but I really liked the inside. The walls are made of heaps of small squares of stained glass, which made the interior feel really welcoming to me. On a sunny day it must be incredible inside. This church is Protestant.

Across the street was a metro station, we figured it would be easy to get across the city to our next sight. That was true once we figured out where to go inside the metro station. We'd intended to take an S-bahn, but part of the station was under construction, so we had to find another option. Thank goodness Bo speaks German and was able to translate signage for me.

We got off a train at Alexanderplatz. IT's a well known platz in the city, though from a photographers point of view, I've never really understood why. No part of it has ever stayed in my mind for any reason. It's usually full of people, and the metro station there is a connection station. There is also a TV tower there, but we couldn't see it because of fog.

The top half of the tower was completely covered/invisible to us.

It took us a few moments to figured out in which direction we wanted to walk, but eventually we got it sorted. We walked toward the Rotes Rathaus, otherwise called the Red City Hall. It's the old city hall for the building, I think we accidentally walked by the new city hall. Rotes Rathaus is much better looking.

We wound our way through twisty streets to get to Nikolaikirche, another church that charges entry to visitors. We didn't want to pay five euros to see this church, so just the entry area was good enough for us. What is it with expensive churches?

From the church we walked to the East End Gallery, which is a long section of Berlin Wall panels. In this area most of them have been painted, some really well, some not so much. Those that are painted really nicely are blocked off by fences, to protect the painting. We saw a couple people go behind the fences to pose for photos, which I found disrespectful. Argh.

I'm all for getting a photo, but I hope those people remember why the Wall was there, and what happened to all the people.

At one end of the East End Gallery is the Oberbaumbrucke. This bridge was one of the first open connections after the fall of the Wall, it connects east and west Berlin over the river. It's a unique bridge, part of it is covered. I loved the windows, or at least the frames along one side of the bridge.

After crossing the bridge both of us realized we were hungry, so we split a currywurst. A couple years ago I never would've eaten any of the wursts in Germany, but I mostly love them now.

Especially when you add heaps of mustard.

We took the metro back to Potsdamer Platz, close to our hotel. Since I knew I'd be on planes for a few hours and no real chance to eat a decent meal, I picked up yet another box of veggies and tofu. Why fix something that isn't broken?

Back at the hotel we grabbed our packs from behind the front desk (where we'd left them in the morning,) and I headed to the airport. Bo had a few more hours in the city. My ride to the airport went a whole lot faster, and hours later, I was back in Kyiv.

I will definitely be going back to Berlin.