Thursday, July 5, 2012

Berlin: Day 3


An iconically dreary photo of Potsdamer Platz. There's multicolored pipelines running through the entire city, although we were only able to figure out that the blue ones carried water (surprising, I know).

A bicycle makes a huge difference in a place like Berlin.

On the last full day of our Berlin trip, my mom and I decided to rent some bikes in order to see some of the less touristy parts of the city (this is a bit of a misnomer – there are touristy areas all over Berlin, but these ones happened not to be smack dab in the city center), and while I still think we’re a far cry from actually having a great grip on Berlin’s daily life, today was certainly much more enlightening than yesterday.

Berlin is, like much of Europe, very light on the skyscrapers. Most of the city’s neighborhoods have that kind of Brookline/Ramat Gan look with lots of three-to-five-story apartments and restaurants lining the streets. This general appearance makes Potsdamer Platz – the modern center of Berlin – look all the more out of place. Potsdamer Platz basically looks like what you would get if you were to rip out a quarter-block section of mid-town Manhattan and plop it down in the middle of Berlin. The piece de resistance is the Sony Center – a hyper-modern-to-the-point-of-satire movie theater cum business office with some cafes thrown in for good measure – but you can also go see the Blue Man Group, eat at Tony Roma’s or take a picture next to a giant Lego giraffe (yes, there’s a Lego store, too). So if you’re looking for the most American area in Germany, well, this may very well be the place.

I wish I had a better photo of this fountain. It's the goofiest thing ever. Every few seconds it shoots a drop of water from the outer edge of the fountain into a spot about three inches further in. The perfect centerpiece for the Sony Center.
Movie screenings in English: how to tell you're in a not-so-German part of Berlin.
Not quite Toys-R-Us-in-New-York-City level, but still pretty cool.
Of course, before I come down too hard on the lack of personality in Potsdamer Platz, it bears mentioning that this part of Berlin was completely decimated during World War II and left to decay during the Cold War, so the overt modernization of Potsdamer Platz has simply been a consequence of the desire to rebuild a once-thriving square. In fact, walking around outside of Berlin’s main tourist areas (around the Tiergarten and Museum Island) makes you realize how devastating the 20th Century was on this metropolis. The in-all-other-situations-amusingly-named Topography of Terror gives you a taste of how difficult it was to be a Berliner for the past 80 years. The outdoor museum is situated below ground level on the site of the old Gestapo headquarters, and right in front of a preserved section of the Berlin Wall. The museum’s goal seems to be to definitively show that, from 1933 to 1989, it really, REALLY sucked to live in Berlin. Beyond the obvious horrors of the Nazi and Cold-War regimes, there’s also the fact that the city was completely ruined during World War II – after Germany surrendered every woman between 15 and 65 was conscripted just to clean the rubble. And places like Potsdamer Platz were essentially ignored until the end of the Cold War (there were some other construction projects in the city – the TV Tower was built as a symbol of East Germany’s supremacy), which makes the current appearance of Berlin all the more impressive.

In any case, there are plenty of other sites to see in Berlin. We biked around to Checkpoint Charlie (touristy), Kreuzberg (international), the Tiergarten (pretty), Schloss Charlottenburg (prettier), the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (under construction), etc. etc. Somehow, the day ended with me feeling like we had both seen very much and very little of the city. Precious though my weekends may be, I think it may very well be worthwhile to come back to Berlin before I leave Germany.

The Tiergarten is a pretty swell place to ride a bike.
We couldn't really figure out why the entrance to the Berlin Zoo has an extremely stereotyped, elephant-laden East Asian theme, but it does look nice.

Berlin is the kind of city where you just happen to stumble across important sites from the Holocaust. This is what's left of the facade of the train station from which Jews were deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt.



Berlin isn't always a blatant tourist trap, but when it is, it puts Germans into military outfits and makes them stand in front of American flags.






The garden behind Schloss Charlottenburg has water, flowers and statues of cherubs. What's not to like?

Not sure if the contrast is quite up to snuff in this picture, but that water is completely green. I know it's just algae, but for some reason these kinds of things give me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.



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