Berlin. The headquarter of the Nazis, the capital of the most serious country in the world, the city that was divided up by communism and is basically famous for all the wrong reasons. We really didn’t expect it to be any fun, but boy were we surprised. After a long train journey from Bruges, we got straight to the hostel and checked in to rest and then instead of resting, went straight for a walking tour. This was the best walking tour of the trip! Berlin isn’t as compact as other European cities, but still in 3-4 hours, the tour managed to cover a lot of very interesting sites. We started at the Brandenburg gate then went to the Reichstag building, the holocaust memorial (which has a long and politically correct name), Hitler’s bunker (where he spent his last days and died), check point Charlie ( the place to cross over from East Germany to West Germany and effectively the place where US and Russian forces stood in front of each other, creating a face for the cold war) and finally the Berlin wall. Apart from this, we also covered some other interesting sites, but basically in 3 hours we got too much information and all of it was worth it.
For someone as ignorant about the world wars as I was, the
walking tour is something that you simply can’t miss. After the tour, we walked
towards our hostel. The thing is, before our Eurotrip, we were told everyone to
be extremely careful since Europe is full of scams and pickpockets and muggers
especially in Italy and Spain. The only place you can rest assured is Germany. So
imagine our shock when we placed some 40 Euros on the cup which had the ball
under it, but when the street scammer displayed the contents, there was no
ball. This was despite the 10 odd people standing around us telling us to bet
and us having witnessed someone win just before us! Well, lesson learned, mind
your own business and never let your guard down, cause that’s when you will
have a problem when travelling.
When you visit the place, it is really moving to see the
sadistic nature of the place. Its likely that such things would have happened
in other places as well, but something so recent and so well documented really
moves you. In the place you will find quotes from some of the prisoners and the
sheer hopelessness that the people had then is crazy. At sachsenhausen, you
could also get a glimpse of the Nazi strategies and how they thought at the
time. Another shocking thing was that there were doctors there who conducted
experiments on the prisoners. These experiments were also especially inhuman
and what’s more, there experiments went on even after the war had ended and the
Russians took over the camps. The Russians maintained the concentration camps
for their own prisoners of war!
After the heavy day at the concentration camp, we came back
and went for the much famed pub crawls of Berlin. Now I’m not much of a
drinker, but still it’s one of those things you just have to do. The thing is
that I frankly found the pub crawl in Barca to be better. The one here had
fewer people and although the people were nice and the pubs were also pretty
cool, there was nothing that was like wow. So we left without going to the last
place, which was supposed to be the largest pub, but was also a fair distance
from the other ones. We also had to catch the morning train to Poland, so
decided to “bounce”. The next morning, we went first to the East side gallery. That’s
basically the wall. Most of the wall has been broken down, so this is the part
that has been kept as a memorial. It has been painted by famous graffiti
artists from all over the world and some of the art is interesting and
basically if you’re going to Berlin, there is no way you get out without
visiting the site of the biggest event of the last 30 years, the site where the
cold war sort of came to an end. But with that, our trip to Berlin also came to
an end. It really was much better than I had expected and although it wasn’t scenic
or anything, the history completely takes you in and is one of the most
interesting places I’ve been.