Visit Berlin. Love It. Ich Bin Ein Berliner
13
May 2017
Theme:
The Edison Project List
My plan was not to wait so long between posts. That obviously did not go to plan. I previously hinted I was writing whilst on a flight to tick off another item from The Edison Project list. That trip kind of went to plan, but I have since completed a number of other items from the list between blog posts. My ability to keep up with the blogging is severely lagging. In any case, that flight was to Berlin, Germany.
Item #71 is to visit at least one European capital city within twelve months. I should point out it has to be a European capital city that I have not visited before. The aim is to visit every European capital city within my lifetime.Germany is somewhere I have never been to before, so I was very excited about exploring somewhere completely new.
Germany is somewhere I have never been to before, so I was very excited about exploring somewhere completely new. Berlin was very appealing for a number of reasons. It is a city with so much history, a history that does not tell such a positive story in comparison to other cities. It is also a very creative city with a very big street art scene.
We flew to Berlin with Easyjet, whilst our luggage to our surprise remained at London Luton Airport. This caused a number of unforeseen problems given we were travelling with an eight-month-old baby whose essentials were largely packed away in that luggage. Experiencing delayed luggage proved to be both a blessing and a curse. The biggest blessing was the realisation that we definitely over pack when travelling. It is surprising what you can do without. The curse was obviously the need to buy essentials and then the palaver of trying to find and collect the luggage which arrived 72 hours later. This could quite easily of spoiled our trip, but that was far from the case.
We did not experience everything Berlin had to offer and we could quite easily have stayed longer. Highlights included Sandeman’s Walking Tour, East Side Gallery and Templhof Park.
Berlin Mauer East Side Gallery
Photograph by Nicholas Moon
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Photograph by Nicholas Moon
For anyone who has yet to experience a Sandeman’s Walking Tour then I encourage you to visit their website and join the nearest tour to your location. I try to do the tours in every city I visit, and more recently, I even went as far as to join the tour in London. They are a great introduction to a city and its history, and you choose how much you wish to pay the guide at the end of the tour. It is not expensive given what you get for your money.
The East Side Gallery is a long stretch of the Berlin wall that remains in place as an open-air gallery for street art. Although this section of the wall is impressive to see due to the art, the wall itself is largely underwhelming across the city. It is not particularly tall or thick, and it is hard to visualise how imposing it was in its current state. I was also unaware that the wall was built around West Berlin by East Germany to stop the East Germans from getting in. It was the West Berliners who were actually free to move back and forth.
Prior to our trip to Berlin, Hana’s parents dropped into conversation that they visited Berlin in 1978. We did not delve too deep into this, but we eventually made the connection that they would have been travelling from a communist Czechoslovakia and so their experience of Berlin would have been very different to ours. In fact, their trip was largely restricted to Alexanderplatz.
Templhof Park was a recommendation from an Aussie friend and although we did not walk around it, it was impressive to see. Templhof was once an airport for the city, but it is no longer in operation. The large terminal buildings remain in place and the airfield has been turned into a park with great views of the Berlin skyline.
I have made reference in this blog post to the history associated with Germany and Berlin. A lot of that history is far from positive and certainly not a good advertisement for any country, but Germany has done an excellent job in narrating its history, certainly in Berlin. It has not tried to sweep it under the carpet but instead declares its history in a way that educates and informs the world not to make the same mistakes.
I will conclude this post by stating that walls and discrimination are not a feasible long-term solution. We can learn a lot from our past.
As interesting as always Nick. Thank you. Mr T (Brian)