I've wanted to see Berlin ever since 2000. That was when I was studying abroad in Wales. The month of April was a full month off and all the foreign students scattered with their backpacks across Europe. When we reconvened in May, all the backpackers got together in the pub and told tales of what we all had felt, seen, tasted and heard. One of many constants was that Berlin was the place to be. "Cranes!" One said. "Berlin's skyline was covered with cranes as far as the eye could see!"
President's Day was the perfect opportunity to get out of Chisinau for the three day weekend, and six weeks ago Lufthansa was having a sale. That's how it is in Europe - like if I was a Washingtonian wanting to escape to Chicago for a few days by grabbing a cut rate airfare through Memphis... ...it's that easy to jaunt off to a completely different, famous foreign capital - just for the weekend.
And it's a good thing that Munich was my Memphis and not Frankfurt. FRA workers were having a strike that was shutting down a bulk of short haul arrivals.
But having dodged severe travel injury of the inconvenience bullet of labor organization in one place, my foot caught the whizzing by of another. When I arrived in Berlin I was greeted with signs notifying the riding public that there was a "warning" strike that would shut down the U-Bahn all day Saturday. This shot across the nose of the city government would not affect the S-Bahn, though, and it was manageable enough to navigate the metropolis on the surface minus the underground.
Whenever I'm only in a place for 48 hours or so, like any tourist, the main things I do is walk and eat and look. But museums are the main reason I spend hundreds of dollars on a weekend getaway to a European capital. This weekend, I made it to three: the Alte (Old) Gallery, the Berlin Wall Museum and the German Historical Museum.
The Old gallery wasn't quite big enough to satisfy my fine art craving, but it will at least tide me over until I get back to Kyiv. It held a fine collection; particularly nice 19th and early 20th century paintings but a special modern exhibit that I didn't quite emotionally connect to.
Unfortunately, the Berlin Wall Museum was mostly a waste of time and money. While there were a couple of interesting exhibits on escape of those from East Germany (by window, on foot, by kayak, by balloon, by car, by tunnel), this museum was very poorly maintained and amateurishly presented. The museum lacked even one clear map showing where the wall was through Berlin! The final portion was an attention-deficit disorderly hodgepodge of exhibits dedicated to world peace, Ronald Reagan and a disjointed, profoundly subjective criticism of a smattering of regimes.
On the construction curtains outside the museum near Checkpoint Charlie were much better (and free) explanation of events surrounding this extremely important area of Berlin. Entering the American sector, one finds a McDonald's on the right. When leaving the American sector, one finds a non-profit organization slogan on the left.
The German Historical Museum really impressed me. This definitely one of the best historical museums in the world: arranged chronologically from BC to 1989. Unfortunately I spent too much time in the 1st millennium A.D (wow to a map showing the movements over 1,000 years of tribes across Europe) and the 16th and 17th centuries (wow to a 17th century Ottoman battle tent captured during the breaking of the 1683 siege on Vienna). Here I had the opposite problem as the Old Gallery: a half day wasn't nearly long enough. By the time I arrived at the 20th century, my quads were like jelly. On my next visit, perhaps I'll start at the fall of the Berlin Wall and walk back in time.
There were a few other things I had time for when I was in Berlin for the weekend. For example, I picked up an excellent dim sum lunch with an American traveler from Baltimore, a Canadian physicist who spoke Mandarin and a German finance student. I swam laps in two of Berlin's crystal clear public swimming pools. I visited the Brandenburg Gate and the Bundestag. I ate pork and sauerkraut with a large stein of fresh beer on a long wooden table.
Architecture is the one type of art that is forced down everyone's retinas. Here in this city, for the most part, old and new architecture comfortably compliment each other - sometimes new cradles old, sometime old cradles new. Sometimes they throw up on each other, like this picture of the space needle and Baroque statues. But that's OK - it's funny. At mundane places in the city, Berlin sometime reminds me of Washington DC: between 20th and 14th, between K and M - glass boxes, yet creatively apportioned, each one vying for the sparse attention of punctual, workaholic pedestrians.
I was just a little kid when the Berlin wall fell. I remember wondering what all the fuss was about. Today on Freidrichstrasse, I squint my eyes hard to try and imagine what this place must have looked like in 1962 - some sort of no-man's land between the American and Soviet sectors, with burned out buildings and rubble still leftover from the Second World War. My imagination failed me. I couldn't see beyond the glass walls, the bullish banking sector and the slick electronic hope to find disrepair and despair. Today's already changed the empty lots and cranes that my friends saw 12 years ago. The empty lots and the cranes are both fleeing Berlin.
