Berlin

Tuesday 1^st May (May Day Holiday)

We didn’t “surface” today until after 8:30, our sleep being interrupted just after 5:00 by a man returning to the next door apartment and hammering on the door to be let in, followed by a violent argument with one of the participants locking himself in the bathroom and the other yelling and hammering on the door.  After an hour of this I went down and asked the night manager to intervene which calmed the situation for about twenty minutes before restarting.  I don’t know if they were evicted but they weren’t there when we got up.

After breakfast we walked to the station and travelled to the Zoo Station to stand in a queue for thirty minutes to buy our ticket, we should have known better than to go to the zoo on a public holiday.  Tickets were 20 euros each which included admission to the aquarium, if we wanted a map that was another 5 euros.

The zoo has a most extensive collection of birds and animals, some we had never seen before, and included a pair of Australian Magpies “chortling” away in their aviary.  The zoo has to cope with extreme winter conditions so all the displays were attached to pavilions and even though it was 27C many of the animals were inside but the walk through pavilions provided excellent viewing.

The aquarium has the traditional large tank multi species displays and many had extensive displays of corals, sponges, anemones, some of the tanks reminded us of our experience snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.  As well as salt water displays, there were hundreds of fresh water fish on display and many tanks of jelly fish which they have successfully bred.

Also on display were reptiles, frogs and insects which included a bee and several species of ant colonies.

We left the zoo at 5:30 having covered the extensive display and returned to the hostel for “zwei grosse bier bitte”.

Wednesday 2^nd May

Following an undisturbed sleep we were on the move a lot earlier and walked down Friedrichstrasse to the replica of “Checkpoint Charlie” nothing like the guard post we travelled through to enter and leave East Berlin in 1986, having today started our trip on the old East Berlin side.  On our last trip four years ago and on this one it is difficult to believe it is the same town.

Turning right into Zimmerstrasse we followed the route of the wall to the STASI Museum an exhibition of the GDR’s State Security, it’s rather disturbing to see and read how the authorities controlled the population.

Walking further along Zimmerstrasse we passed a car parking are full of East German Trabant popularly known as “Trebi” cars, this is a car hire company as many tourists and even previous East Berlin citizens want to drive them when touring Berlin.  In the GDR days when a person turned 18 they placed an order to buy one and they were 30+ when they had the opportunity to buy one.

Further along the street we arrived at the last remaining segment of the wall and the Topographie des Terrors museum.  This is so named because during the Nazi times many of the “control” ministries, including the SS and Gestapo headquarters were in this location.

Four years ago the display was in the ruins of the Gestapo underground cells, open to the weather.  Today the display has been updated and roofed and a large modern museum constructed on the site next door.  The new museum has a pictorial and document display tracing the Nazi’s rise to power, information about many of the officials and rather graphic information of the various Nazi “solutions”, covering all the different groups the Nazis decided to eliminate.  It was rather horrifying to see the documentation and photos on how these groups were treated, particularly orphan and disabled children.

Our visit today varied in two ways to our last, there is much more information available and the temperature was 30C, last visit it was 10C and after spending several hour in the open and standing on concrete we had to return to our accommodation to soak in a bath to warm up.

Retracing our route and walking on we arrived at a square bordered by the French Dom, with the Huguenot museum on one side, the concert hall in the middle and the German Dom on the other.  This contained a display about the progression of development of German Parliament from the uprisings in 1848 to the present day.

Walking along further the skyline is dominated by the TV tower erected in the then East Berlin, in 1986 this was called “The Pope’s Revenge” because when the sun illuminated the globe it reflected the light in the shape of a cross.

Walking back to our apartment we passed the magnificent Berlin Dom, a Protestant Cathedral and about six large classical buildings in an area known as the “Island of Museums” each museum housing a different display.