Berlin

I didn't do much the night I arrived in Berlin, just some laundry, which as you can imagine badly needed doing after Rock Im Park. The next day I headed off to do the "free" walking tour. I put free in quotes because you have to tip the guides afterwards (unless you're a jerk, or hated the tour) and they have to kick about half their tips back to the company. So really it's more like a try before you buy tour. Anyway, it was really interesting and I'll definitely do their tour in London as well. Berlin is perfect for that sort of thing because so much has happened there historically. In fact, you would be hard pressed to name a city in Europe that has seen as much go on in the 20th century as Berlin (Moscow, maybe? I think Berlin is #1). Here's a few pictures from the tour:



This is the famous Brandenburg Gate, a symbol not just of Berlin but of Germany.



This is the memorial officially titled "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe", which is subtly different from "Holocaust Memorial". It's just a big area of concrete slabs, all the same dimensions except for differing heights. The artist deliberately made it vague and open to interpretation. Some people liked it; personally I found it a bit abstract. I liked the sculpture at Dachau better:



No prizes for guessing what this next one is:



Yep, it's a surviving section of the Berlin Wall. In most places, the Berlin wall was actually two walls, with a section in the middle called the Death Strip, which was guarded by armed guards, land mines, rabid dogs, zombies etc. This section was a single wall, because it was right next door to the main government building, which was - in an incredible piece of socialist bureaucratic self-parody - called the "Ministry of Ministries".



This is Checkpoint Charlie, although - like many things in Berlin - it's just a reconstruction.



This is some building or other that the last Kaiser built. I kind of like it, but it's generally considered an architectural failure. Apparently the Kaiser used to come out every morning and bellow "More statues of ze angels! More of ze columns! More flourishy bits!"



I couldn't fit this whole tower in shot. It's a giant television tower in East Berlin. The government there built it as a demonstration of the might of socialism. However - branching out from self-parody into comic analogy - they discovered they'd built it on swamp and that the thing was collapsing. Swedish engineers had to be secretly called in to stabilise the structure. After this was leaked to the press, Ulbricht had to resign as leader of the government. The East Germans promptly nicknamed the tower "Ulbricht's Last Erection".




This wasn't actually on the walking tour, but I made a special trip to go photograph it, as I think it's the most striking building in Berlin. This is the Kaiser Wilhelm church, which, like most of Berlin, was bombed during the war. The tower was left broken as a memorial to the futility of war.

That night I went on the pub crawl, which was a bit disappointing. We visited some nice pubs along the way - there was one very cool one with a hige beer garden - but the "nightclub" we finished up at turned out to be some shithole bar in the middle of nowhere which clearly only survived because of the pub crawl.

Next day I did very little during the day (just the aforementioned trip out to the church) but that night was the night Smashing Pumpkins were playing in Berlin. Doors opened at 7 and the show was to commence at 8, so having failed to secure a ticket, I headed along at 6 with a notice. On the notice was written "I need a ticket" in German and English, and then under that, the multi-lingual version, which was [sad face] + [drawing of ticket] = [happy face]. My translation of "I need a ticket" was obviously not very good, as everyone who approached me did so immediately in English. Later I saw other people wandering around with similar notices, reading simply "Suche Karte", or literally "Search Ticket".

While there I met up with Josh, a guy from Texas I had met at the hostel who was also trying to secure a ticket. While chatting we were approached by a guy who asked me if I just needed one ticket. I replied that I needed two. If he'd only had one, I'd have given it to Josh as he'd never seen the Smashing Pumpkins. However, the guy replied that he had two tickets! I asked how much, and he launched into a speech, saying he'd paid 60 euro for them because he'd gotten them off some website but now his wife was in hospital and they couldn't go so he was selling them. I asked again how much and he said just 60 euro. This was ripping himself off to such a staggering degree that I gave him 80 euro anyway (Josh later mentioned that he'd witnessed a girl pay 100 euro. I was willing to go to 150). We thanked the guy and he walked off. It was at this point that my brain replayed the conversation and I felt like an ass for not wishing his wife well. At the time my brain was simply filtering out anything that wasn't an answer to the question of how much he wanted for a ticket.

Anyway, we had our tickets and when we got inside, we were able to get a position in about the third row back. The stage was right up against the audience, so I was literally like 5 metres from the band. The venue was surprisingly small. I would say less than half the size of the Thebarton Theatre. It would have held 1,000 people at most, and that with the aid of an overhanging stand. Here's a very blurry pic taken with my camera phone, which should give you an idea how close we were and how small the venue was (given how small the stage is):



The band played for 3 hours this time, over an hour longer than the Rock Im Park set. Because they were playing to a fan crowd and not a festival crowd, they were able to add in some more obscure songs. Additions I remember were Drown, Hummer, an acoustic version of Rocket, Annie Dog and Home (from Machina II). Hummer is one of my favourite SP tracks, but I think my highlight was Drown, mostly because it was so unexpected. I can't say I enjoyed them as much as at Rock Im Park - that would be impossible given the different circumstances - but I still had an awesome time.

Next day I visited the Pergamon, a museum of antiquities. I'd been told they had an original gate from Babylon, which sounded amazing, but when I got there I discovered the gate is mostly a reconstruction. I quickly became pretty bored. Antiquities aren't really my thing anyway, and especially not when I have to keep checking whether they're actually mostly plaster reconstructions. I can see reconstructions of antiquities on the Las Vegas Strip. Anyway, after a while, I headed back over to Checkpoint Charlie, for no reason other than to buy a "You are now leaving the American Sector" tshirt, which I've wanted since I saw a guy wearing one in Paris.

That night we sat outside the hostel, taking advantage of the 1 euro beers. We weren't being very noisy, certainly not by Australian standards, but a little after midnight the police showed up and said they'd had a complaint. This was the exchange:

Fat German cop: OK, so these are the options. You can either quieten right down, or move inside. Or there's a third option, which is that we come back. But you don't want that, trust me.
Girl staying at hostel: We'd be arrested?
Fat German cop: Nono, it's just that I'd drink all your beer.

Thus warned, I decided the night was basically over and retired to bed to get some sleep before checking out the next day and jumping on a train to Warsaw, on which I am writing this post.

Overall impressions of Berlin were quite good. There's no question that it remains a somewhat broken city. 90% of it was bombed flat at the end of World War II and then after German reunification, a stack of East German businesses collapsed in the face of foreign competition. This dealt a powerful blow to the regional economy, from which it has not recovered. Unemployment is at 18%, and it is, as our exuberant tour guide put it, "a city that doesn't know what it wants to be yet". There's a sense of dynamism, though, and I'd be keen to revisit in 20 or 30 years and see what Berlin has managed to make of itself.

A final comment about Germany, as I'm now speeding through the countryside of Poland. It's something I forgot to mention about Rock Im Park. There were 40,000 people there, many of them camping in a huge tent city, with endless supplies of alcohol and aggressive music, for three days straight. In Australia, that sounds like a recipe for a riot. In Germany, not only didn't I see a fight, I didn't see any aggressive behaviour whatsoever. No pushing and shoving (except for fun in front of stage), nobody yelling at each other, nobody throwing bottles, nothing. It was impressive.

OK, so I wrote the above on the train from Berlin to Warsaw. When I got to Warsaw, I asked at the reception to confirm that they had Wifi, as advertised. "Technically,", the staff member explained, "we do. However, it doesn't work.". Hence the lack of blogging. I'm now in Krakow and will blog about that in a day or two.