Berlin—A must see; 24-28 May

The city itself was a contradiction in many ways—not particularly pretty, but its culture made it beautiful; dilapidated and ugly buildings in certain areas and state of the art architecture in others; a victorious history with its Prussian past and it’s very drastic and saddening past with World War II…There was too much to see in not enough time. In fact, I think I could have stayed a month and still not have seen it all.

But, what we did see and do was pretty incredible. Some highlights:

-Checkpoint Charlie (and museum): It was pretty cool to be in that exact spot where so many people crossed between the east and west. The museum was a bit crowded for my taste, but stories and pieces of people’s escape from the East to the West were fascinating.

-A tour of the city by a ferry on the Spree River... we saw the museum insel (island), which is a UNESCO site (one of the museums has the door from Babylon), the new train station, the Fernsehenturm (which has a huge soccer ball for the World Cup), and many other cool sights.

-The memorial to the murdered Jews during WWII: This memorial sits just north of the Brandenburg Tor and near the American embassy (still in the process of being built) and is enormous. We had a tour guide, which may seem odd for a memorial, but it certainly helped to make sense of it all. He explained the process of choosing a design and what it actually means...they want people to know that it was not a fight between the Jews and Germans rather an unbelievable gruesome act of hatred from one group of people to another and the Jews were not only from Germany, rather across Europe.

It was symbolic and well-done. Just below the memorial is something which can be compared to that of a museum, but not quite. It serves the purpose of helping people relate to those that were murdered instead of just thinking of a statistic. One room was dark except for portions of the floor with writings of the victims that were lit up. One 12-year old girl wrote a postcard to her father telling him good bye because she was about to die and was so afraid. Nothing can put anything in perspective as well as that. There are really no words.

-We also took a city tour by bus and saw the entire city—the east (where our hostel was), the only part of the Berlin wall that is still standing, the Brandenburg Tor, Reichstag (government building for parliament), Schloss Bellevue, and Schloss Charlottenberg (where the king of Prussia once lived), and a trabi (a car that was really popular during the time of the Berlin wall…from East Berlin), Hotel Aldon (where Michael Jackson was famously photographed with a baby out the window), and all of the town ‘hotspots’, and the Kaiser Wilhem Kirche (church) which was destroyed in WWII and was left as it looked after the bombing…So many things to list!

-Saturday, we traveled to Potsdam (capital of the German state, Brandenburg) and only about a 30 min. drive from Berlin near the Wannasee (a big, beautiful lake) and through a heavily wooded area. The city itself was not very pretty, but in it’s own way, it was charming and rich with history. This is where the infamous Potsdam conference took place and where the Prussian royalty ruled (Germany was once a country called Prussia that was much larger than the current area)….The Castles—New Palace and Sanscocci were fascinating to see with a beautiful park/garden in between. Since Sanscocci is a UNESCO site, only 2000 visitors are allowed to go inside each day and we unfortunately didn’t make the cut. But, we did see Kaiser Wilhem II’s grave near it and we also went into the New Palace where he died and we saw the room where the signature was made declaring Germany was going to war for WWI.

**The most amazing experience in Berlin was actually Friday night…we were there for the opening ceremony of the new and now biggest train station in all of Europe. It looked as if it were made all of glass and sits on a big green hill near the Spree River and the Reichstag. It was the most amazing firework/laser show I have seen complete with a video to go along with the music of the live symphony. The first two trains slowly took off with lights streaming from their roofs as the show began. Before the light show, the popular music group, Reamon, held a concert. So cool!

Well, we left as soon as the ceremony was over along with all the other ten thousand people and made our way along the river toward the subway station. Well, we were crowded like sardines with everyone else and thought it would be smarter to slip away from the crowd and take a different path (but much longer) to another subway station. Only five minutes after we had started to go down this other street, a stream of police cars and ambulances came screeching toward us and then toward the crowd. My heart leaped knowing that something must be terribly wrong. Deep down, I prayed for an accident of some sort where no was really hurt. But, I was wrong.

The next morning, we found out at breakfast (after someone watched CNN in their room) that a 16-year old boy, who was drunk and had recently gotten into a fight with his friends, pulled out a knife on more than 30 people in the same spot we would have been had we not taken the other street. The saddest news is the first victim is possibly infected with HIV. I couldn’t believe it. Luckily, no one is dead because of it, but the lives of so many were affected. Now a night that could have been remembered as such a remarkable event will only be remembered as a day marked my tragedy.

Besides that event, I really had a memorable time. I wish we would have had more time to see more museums, but I was blessed to see what I did. It was amazing.