Berlin in one day

 It was Sunday and my train from Prague took almost five hours. Most of the time we were beside the River Elbe, one of the major waterways of central Europe. It runs from the Czech Republic through Germany to the North Sea.

The train was not an ICE high speed train, it was an electric train but very comfortable. There was a buffet bar where I ordered Goulash and a Draught beer .

It is so lovely watching the green countryside of Europe roll by, and the convenience of a train is hard to beat - city centre, to city centre. If I had flown, it would have been costly and take 2 hours in the air. Add on 2 airport hours and the transfers and the train won at less than half the price!

I checked in to the Adina apartment hotel at Kakescher Markt and being Julius set out to find a corner store to buy some milk for the morning tea. But everything is shut on Sunday here!

Beside the River Spree I came upon this delightful outdoor old time dance venue. They were doing the Tango just now. It's been a while since my Tango days, the rehabilitation was thorough, but the titanium rod in my lower left leg throbs whenever I hear the tell tale music!

Smiling I continued my futile quest. A shop, any shop other than souvenirs or beer. Eventually I just gave in, as you do, and had a beer.

Berlin cannot be done in one day. Not at all. So the next morning I looked out the window to see rain and wind. Fortunately my host in the Czech Republic had awarded me some merchandise, one of which was a perfect weatherproof jacket with hood! 

I chanced the trains, figuring the system and ended near to my target, the Brandenberg Gate.

At this point I've decided to never travel without mobile data again. I loaded the map on the iPhone using wifi at the hotel, and being myself (who I am) managed to navigate away and delete it. The map will triangulate and let you know where you are in reference to phone towers, but without a map it is just a moving blue dot on a sea of blue. Very opaque!

Lucky I had a tourist map with me, and the iPhone still operated as a compass, for West or East. Those are the directions that matter in Berlin.

 The Gates were built in the 1300's I think, and mainly used as an excise point between here and there. But when the wall was built, the Gates became part of no-man's land. Wiki says: "The Eastern Bloc claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" in building a socialist state in East Germany."

But the real sombe event is the Holocast Memorial just down the road.

This memorialto the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, consists of a 19,000 m² (4.7-acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field.  

At first it just seems like an architectural installation, but once you start to travel down these narrow pathways, and go down a hill so the slabs are tall above, it becomes claustrophobic and morbid.

I hurry away, towards Check Point Charlie, where I find a segment of wall standing. There is a display alongside, at the foundations of some SS establishment that was excavated.

There is a kind of museum alongside (I can't find the name, but it is right at the segment of wall) which deals with the slippery descent into the Second Wold War. It is a complicated, devious journey to dictatorship.

Sadly my history is riddled with gaps, so I won't try to fill you in.

The thing that struck me was the entreaty along the lines that when Hitler rose, the people were accepting, or went along with the ride, or kept quiet. The pogrom was around the corner, books were burned, and synagogues razed.

It just went from bad to mad, and of course the country fell. Berlin seems to be the centre of the horrible awakening, and the theme is to admit and to never forget.

This is kind of sick - photo taken before WW2 of some Hitler Youth frolicking with their preferred decorations. From Berlin Wall museum.