Poor but Sexy, or Three Days in Berlin.

You may ask why I refer to Berlin as poor but sexy. Well that is because the 2004 mayor of Berlin said "Berlin is poor but sexy." Our tour guide on Sunday told us that the unemployment rate in Berlin just dropped down to around 12%. And I thought us Americans had it bad.

Friday early early early, so early it still seemed like Thursday, two other girls from my program and I ventured from London to Berlin. We were quite an eclectic group. There was the curly haired super-Jew brunette from Chicago (me), a quiet but incredibly sweet blonde girl from South Carolina (aften), and a long-haired red-head who grew up on Long Island but goes to school in Lakeforest outside Chicago. And none of us knew a word of German (Jeremy, where are you when I need you?).

We landed in a sunny Berlin day, checked into our hostel, and headed out to start working on the list of places to go that I had compiled. First stop, Ritter Sport Factory. Duh. Why would we start it out any other way. Seriously now. At this magical wonderland you can get a square Ritter Sport bar of chocolate for just 70 euro cent. You can go through the upstairs exhibit on how their chocolate is produced and the history of the company. The best part, without a doubt, was the make-your-own-flavor station. Everything from nuts to marshmallows, chili to gummy bears. I put rice crispies and chili in mine. Yum. It took thirty minutes for this chocolate making process to happen so we wandered around and ended up in a beautiful square by the concert hall and two churches. There were some people in top hats and vests and long coats styled circa 1900 doing some sort of filming in the square. Very interesting...

After we retrieved our chocolate and tasted it, we went to the Jewish museum. This place is huge. It zigzags in some sort of conceptual architectural ideological manifestation of something or other and seems to go on and on and on. We were so exhausted, saturated, and hungry by the time we zigzaged down to the ground floor that we just skipped it. But boy did we learn about the Jews in Berlin starting with the time of the diaspora. And of course I made sure to obnoxiously fill in any gaps about anything I thought the exhibits were missing. But that's why I'm a super Jew. After the Jewish museum we got dinner. We stumbled into this little restaurant with walls absolutely covered, every single inch, with framed reproductions of paintings. The waiter spoke pretty much no English and we were the only people there. To tell us that certain items on the menu were actually not being served, he had to physically cross them out with his pen. And because Aften and I are both vegetarians, we had to be quite careful about what we ordered (especially in a land known for their sausage). We ended up with spaghetti and tomato sauce. We sat and chatted for a while, caught our breath, and then headed back to the hostel. After getting up at 4:15 am to catch our flight, we were all excited for an early night.

On Saturday we woke up relatively early, ate at the 5 euro all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at the hostel (eggs, cheese, breads, cereals, unlimited coffee, etc) and then got on the train to go to Sachsenhausen. This is a concentration camp near Oranianburg. I'm not sure if its on the outskirts of the city or if its just outside the city limits. Anyways, it was the last stop on the line. It was a chilly day and after some confusion we figured out how to get from the train station to the camp. As you can imagine, we were in for a rather depressing history lesson kind of morning. I guess Sachsenhausen was a work camp for political prisoners, roma & sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses, and mainly non-Jews. But Jews got sent there, too. It was also one that was shown to the public, I think because of how close it is to Berlin. So when foreign diplomats or whoever would come and be like "yo what about these camps you got" the Nazis, and even Himmler himself, would give them a tour of Sachsenhausen which was of course incredibly staged and made to look like a different and less inhumane place than it was on every other day. This was also a place that young boys were taken to for experimentation purposes. Nice, huh? It wasn't a very big camp but I really, really appreciated the reminder that it wasn't just the Jews the Nazis were after, it was pretty much anyone who didn't fit into this small, small idea of the superior race. Gag.

Trying to counteract the depressing cloud sitting on our soldiers, we walked the twenty or so minutes back to the train station and got Nutella crepes. We then proceeded to wait for, I really think, more than 30 minutes for a train back into the city. When it finally came and we finally got out of the cold we took it the Berlin Wall Memorial. This was incredibly depressing and mainly a memorial to the people who died trying to escape East Berlin. Humbling, to say the least. Scary to think how recent the U.S.S.R. came toppling down. I mean basically just a year older than me from Berlin lived during that era. But I guess that was the same frightening realization I had the Museum of Communism in Prague. We then went to the East Side Gallery which is the strip of the wall that has been converted into a public art mural exhibit. This had been the main inspiration for my desire to travel to Berlin (in addition to Irv and the Jewish history), to see these murals. They were incredible. They blew my mind. Really, really spectacular. Heavy day. After this we went to the Ritter Sport factory again to buy some cheap, cheap chocolate to help balance out the depressing Berlin history we had been grappling with all Saturday. Then we found dinner at a small and simple spot and called it a(n exhausting) day.

Sunday was our last day in Berlin. We got up and down to breakfast by 10, checked out, and was out of the hostel by 10:30 or so. We went over to Alexanderplatz to go on a bike tour. This was really fabulous because we got to see a lot more of the city, get a stronger feel than just train stations and museums, and have a young Australian guide tell us history stories. We went to (out of order) Checkpoint Charlie, stood over the place Hitler's bunker had been, former headquarters of Nazie Luftwaffe headquarters, saw a Berlin Wall watchtower, the TV tower, Bebelplatz and the memorial to the Nazi book burning at the university (which is a really, really powerful memorial of underground bookshelves that you can see through a small glass square, the bookshelves are empty but there is room for 20,000 books which is the approximate number lost in the fire), Bradenburg Tor, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Museum Island and the cathedral there that was supposed to out-do St. Peter's in Rome (yeah right), Reichstag, Victory Tower, the American Embassy (unintentionally), and other remnants of the Wall by the Topography of Terror. We had lunch at a beer garden in some huge city park that is probably quite beautiful in the summer when the trees actually have leaves and the flowers are growing. We had sunny weather so the bike ride was pleasant and it was nice to be moving a bit considering we went straight to the airport afterward. The tour was great. We saw a lot and learned a lot that we wouldn't have known if we had wondered around the train systems by ourselves trying to get to all these places.

We came back Sunday night, exhausted and ready for an English speaking country and a hot shower. Successful weekend trip to Berlin.