Bestride Berlin!
Written: Oct 17 '04 (Updated Oct 20 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The TV tower, the parliament building are especially must see's.
Cons: Shopping very expensive.
The Bottom Line: Wonderful wonderful wonderful.... read on.
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| cr01's Full Review: Berlin |
Our friends, who are far more accustomed to spending their vacations frying their blue-white northern flesh under a Mediterranean sun, were rather dismissive of our plans for a number of smaller city breaks this year.
Surprisingly to me, our choice of Berlin gathered the most negative comment. It appears that many people who actually haven’t been to Berlin have a picture of a dour, serious and colourless place. It was thus even more satisfying to return from Berlin with positive tales of a green city, a young and lively nightlife, and enough things to do and see to last a month of Sundays. Since our visit, I have seen a number of travel articles which extol Berlin as a cool destination. It would seem that we just managed to beat the rush.
People and language
I’m always a little hesitant to pass on general comment about the people who live in a place, as one really can’t generalise about millions of personalities.
However, as many of my fellow countrymen have a negative image of our German neighbours, I’ll risk the objectivity of the review for a while.
I often find that capital cities can contain some of the most rushed and unfriendly people towards a visitor. Berlin certainly proved to be an exception. Most of the people we encountered were friendly and polite and allowed you time to get off the train with a huge number of bags, helped you with directions, were patient with the time delay that a language barrier can create, and were generally pleasant folk. This is something certainly I usually wouldn’t normally say about Londoners.
There aren’t that many Berliners with a good command of English, but I suspect that even if they don’t like to speak the language through confidence, they can certainly understand more of it. Although my Polish is better than my German (and my Polish is next to non-existent), we had little trouble in explaining what we wanted.
Food
Berlin is generally a very modern city, and there are plenty of bars selling beautiful salads, and Mediterranean style food. These are usually the most reasonably priced options. We often paid a little over € 10 ($12) per person for a standard one course lunch and beer. For a two course evening meal with a bottle of wine and perhaps an espresso to finish, it rose to a little over € 20 ($24) a head. Compared with UK prices (and in particular London prices), food was cheap for us.
Those wanting to sample the usually stodgy, heavy and salty German food and stews (you can probably gauge that I don’t rate it much), will struggle a little in Berlin. Like in Britain, the local people seem to have largely abandoned their native cooking style.
One of the German things you will see and sadly smell everywhere is the ubiquitous Bratwurst, a cheap pink pork sausage on sale on stalls and cheaper restaurants for a euro or two. It generally comes on a paper plate with chips (fries). If you think they smell bad, try a Currywurst, which is the same thing with curry powder added. I was fascinated by some of the mobile Bratwurst stalls; men wandering round with frying hotplates strapped to their middle, and a heavy looking power pack on their backs. I imagine they need to wear asbestos underwear so as to ensure that the wrong sausage isn’t cooked.
More of a loss is the apparent lack of traditional German bars in Berlin. Most places are modern, light wood and open Euro style Bars. Beware that Berlin doesn’t have any licensing laws. Bars will generally stay open for as long as you can remain standing.
Orientation
Of course, one cannot think of Berlin as anything but East and West, even though that infamous wall that divided the city for 28 years was pulled down almost 15 years ago.
Today, the west tends to be sedate and leafy, with wide ornate streets, and with the large park The Tiergarten to the north, while the east is younger, more hip and certainly more lively.
The history of Berlin means that its centre is rather linear (from west to east) and sprawling. Our hotel, the Olivaer Apartment Hotel proved excellent value in a quiet location, about a mile to the west of the edge of the main city centre and Zoo Station. While staying in the West is fine, be reconciled to the fact that if you are looking for nightlife, you will inevitably be drawn to the east, and an € 18 ($20) taxi ride home across town.
Bus Tour
One of the ways to get a mind map of the geography of Berlin is to take a city bus tour. It’s not usually something I contemplate, but our first day in the city was dull and overcast, and we found the scale of the place somewhat over facing for us country bumpkins.
There are a number of tours, all largely covering the same ground, and allowing a choice of around 15 stops, where you can get off and wander, before catching the next bus. Our tour cost € 18 ($20) a person, but you can easily take all day over your tour. You can catch a bus near most of the landmarks of the city. The tour we took was run by the imaginatively titled City Circle, with busses passing by the route every fifteen minutes.
For your money, you get a fairly unreadable route map, but which gives you a grasp of the layout of the city, and a fairly unlistenable recorded guide. The producers of the guide seem to think that they had to provide something that talked at you for every second of your bus journey. While I like sculpture (and Berlin has more than its full share of public sculptures), the descriptions were turgid and laboured.
As we toured through the area where most of the Foreign Embassies are located, we got information about each and every embassy and what type of stone each building was made of. These folk were keen to ensure that you would leave the bus crammed full of boring information.
I suspect they were sponsored by one of Berlin’s breweries. It certainly drove me to drink. The guide can be set to a number of languages, and I got just as much entertainment by switching the dial to Japanese.
Perhaps even worse than the actual commentary, was the state of the headsets, and a number of passengers on each of the busses couldn’t hear the commentary through the dud headsets (with hindsight, I wish I had swapped places). The headsets also got a little grimy, with any number of different passengers having used the ear pieces. I didn’t get the impression that the headsets were changed, cleaned or checked very often.
Although the bus got tiresome, it did allow us to work out which of the sights of Berlin we wanted to see, and so from that respect was probably a reasonable decision.
A far cheaper and ultimately more productive option would have been to catch the #100 and #200 regular bus which covers much of the same ground, only at far cheaper cost, and without inane commentary.
Things to see in the East
As Berlin is crammed full of interesting places, I can’t claim to have covered very much ground at all in the four days we were there, but I can point in the direction of a few of the best sites.
The Fernsehturm
One of the Berlin must do’s for me was to see the Fernsehturm, the huge TV tower built by the East Germans in the 1960’s to show the West just what a mighty force the East was. Today, the tower is still Europe’s second tallest building at around 1200 feet tall. The observation part is about 700 feet up.
I don’t subscribe to the commonly held thought that all old Eastern Europe architecture is bad, although it’s fair to say they were responsible for their full share of crumbling apartment blocks. The Fernsehturm is a typically 1950’s/60’s space age type tower – a large concrete tower with a futuristic sputnik ball stuck on top, and a long spike coming from the top of the ball. The ball is where the observation tower and restaurant are.
Finding the base of the tower is a little voyage of discovery all of its own as we didn’t find a path that led straight to it. Of course, given the height of the tower, you just follow your nose. There are often large queues to go up the tower and we found a queue snaking down the stairs from the lift to the front door entrance. Fortunately, the queue moves fairly rapidly and our wait to get tickets was only around 15 minutes.
On the ground floor is a small gift shop with some old eastern European style mementos for the visitor to take home. I particularly liked the tacky plastic models of the TV Tower that you could buy. Not only did they not stand up vertically, they had been designed by someone who had obviously only glanced at the tower. It wasn’t a particularly good likeness. The shop also sold postcards, books and other standard trinkets.
Tickets to use the very fast and enclosed lifts to the enclosed observation platform cost us € 6.80 ($8) a person. The lifts take about 10 people each, and you are crammed into the available space. I was more than pleased that the lift with the screaming child within was deemed too full to take us.
The attraction offers an audio tour for a few extra Euros, but after the bus tour, I was too crammed with useful facts to be able to take up the offer. After the ticket stall, you go round a large circular corridor lined with fake dark wood panelling – a remaining piece of communist chic!
The viewing area is a crowded but large round room with windows all the way round. It doesn’t take long before a viewing space becomes available. The tower sways gently in the wind, so don’t be surprised to feel a slight movement underfoot.
Although the day was dull, we got an excellent view of Berlin. From this height, we could see how the East Germans had rebuilt many of the more notable bomb damaged buildings after the war, whereas the West Germans had largely started to rebuild their part of the city from scratch. One interesting point is that the East Germans took the opportunity to rebuild their grand old buildings in slightly different places in order to produce the wide parades that they were so fond of. You get a good view of the red roofs and copper green domes of these recovered buildings.
Of course, even in the East, they did a lot of new building work after the war, and from the tower you get a great view of the grey housing blocks and straight marching parade of Karl Marx Allee and the former centre of East Berlin, the Alexanderplatz.
The only downside to the TV tower was that I suspect the windows in the viewing area were slightly darkened.
The entrance steps to the revolving restaurant upstairs were being guarded by a fearsome looking frauline. I assume that this meant the restaurant was busy.
Alexanderplatz
Alexandarplatz gives you the full East German experience, although since the wall came down, the pedestrianised heart of the square has been opened up to traffic, which is a shame.
I was struck by the atmosphere created by the small windows on the large office and apartment blocks. Even the few shop windows on the ground floor are comparatively tiny. If you wander the streets around Alexandarplatz, you will see blocks of flats positioned so that as many of these tiny windows as possible confront you from the street. As we wandered through these near deserted streets, I imagined that the feeling of being watched by Stazi spies would have been intense.
Today, many of these back streets are quite run down and graffiti blighted without even much impressive street artwork to appreciate, although the tower blocks themselves look solid and well maintained.
The local Berlin government are still pondering what to do with Alexandaplatz. They are minded to pull the whole lot down and start again, but given the massive amount of work undertaken over the past fifteen years, the city is teetering towards bankruptcy.
Personally, I don’t particularly see ugly, just a different style of architecture.
The Palast der Republik
The Palast der Republic is the old East German parliament building, built on the site of the old Imperial Palace which had been badly bombed in the war. The Palast is a truly ugly building, looking more like a struggling department store, than a parliament building. The dark bronzed windows add to the dismal look.
The government discovered that the building was contaminated by asbestos just before East Germany collapsed, and they have got as far as stripping out the interior. The palace was being used to house an exhibition of a replica of China’s Terracotta Army while we were there, and it was worth the € 8 entrance fee, just to look at the gloomy concrete and iron girder interior. I kept on peeping behind the curtains around the exhibition to look at the interior of the building, and see the iron girders spray painted with hearts, numbers and initials.
It was certainly eerie to walk in the same building as where those deluded old rulers made decisions about the people in their country.
This is another area where the Berlin government can’t make its mind up about what to do with. As it stands, ugly, unloved and stripped bare, it’s a fair monument to the old East Germany in my opinion.
Drinking in Oranienburger Strasse
One of the revitalised places in Berlin has to be around the Oranienburger Strasse, a little way from the centre of town in the East. We found a number of classy looking bars, all looking like they sold good and reasonably priced food. There is also quite a line of crowded bars, many with pavement seats and tables with portable gas heaters to fend off the chilly night air. We found the area very atmospheric, with its close views of the illuminated TV Tower in the distance.
Opposite the Amrit Indian Restaurant (you can stop here just for a drink if you wish), a strange image of projected outlined images onto the side wall of a large block of flats caught our eye. Further investigation revealed a courtyard with graffitied pieces of old military hardware stashed on a piece of waste ground.
In the courtyard, a shop was open, with its windows covered with scrawled slogans in German, amid scraps of old newspapers.
I felt like I had stumbled upon a U2 music video shoot.
Potsdamer Platz
In the 1930’s the Potsdamer Platz was a bustling hive of shops, clubs and bars. This is an area which straddled East and West. In its truncated form in the West was for so for many years, little more than a run down cul de sac. On the East, war damaged buildings were razed to the ground to create a no-mans land of razor wire behind the wall.
Once unified, it created an obvious empty space in the centre of the city, to enable grand regeneration plans to ferment. It is the area of Berlin which has seen the most building work and development.
The place is certainly worth a wander through at dusk or at night just to look at the bright modern neon high rise glass fronted tower blocks. One of the interesting buildings is the glass domed Daimler-Benz complex, with its huge IMAX style cinema screen, and shops and restaurants. On the other side, is the elegant Sony Centre. Abutting the line of the old wall is the huge but slender sky scraper, using the line of the wall as its boundary.
There are tiny scraps of the old wall remaining in the area, but the sheer scale of the wall can now only be imagined and not felt.
Restaurants in the area tend to be of the pre-prepared chain variety. We walked a little way out of the area to Potsdamer Str 131 for a very nice meal at Steffens, a simple pasta dish and a drink cost around € 10 ($12) a head.
Things to see in the West
Charlottenburg
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to give the grand gardens and ornate palaces of Charlottenburg the justice it deserved. I would have loved for example, to see the 1936 Olympic Stadium where Jesse Owens dispelled Hitler’s belief in the supremacy of the Aryan race. I’ll have to save that for my next visit.
We did however have a quick wander of the streets, and manage a flying visit to the Agyptisches Museum displaying the treasures that the German archaeologists took from Egypt in the early part of the last century (also disproving the theory that Indiana Jones won through every time lol).
The museum is well worth the detour from the centre of the city to see and contains a lot of fascinating Egyptian artefacts including mummies of humans, falcons and cats. Some of the later mummies had some very Roman style faces of the occupants painted on the cloth. We learnt that Roman culture and customs adopted many of the Egyptian gods, and that this family were in fact Roman.
The most impressive thing of the display in the museum is the bust of Nefertiti, a stunningly beautiful model from 1350 BC. It was used in a studio as the template for all images of Nefertiti, and only rediscovered in 1912.
Berlin Zoo
Berlin Zoo is in the Tiergarten (the large park to the north west of the city), and makes for an interesting diversion from the city, although it is fairly bustling in its own right.
Although the Zoo is fairly expensive at around € 9 a head, it does have an extensive array of animals, including Pandas, and a good array of big cats. I was pleased to see that most of the animals had large enclosures, although some of the Bears were showing signs of boredom and stress with their repeated movements. However, I enjoyed seeing the Sun Bears playing together, and the beautiful Sloth Bears who look so much like the Steiff toy bears.
We found ourselves a bench in the sleepy Australian Annexe which was a little walk away from the rest of the zoo, and slumbered with the Kangaroos is the heat of the summer sun.
We also enjoyed watching the kids fascinated with the penguins, seals and sea lions in the aquarium. The Sea Lions in particular obviously enjoyed showing off in front of their audience.
The Bauhaus Museum
Another of our must sees was the exhibition to commemorate the Bauhaus design movement from 1919 – 1933. Although the exhibition was in German, we were given a comprehensive written guide in English.
The idea of the Bauhaus was to merge art and craft into a functional and practical use. It’s surprising when you look at the Bauhaus designed furniture about just how influential the movement was. The Bauhaus was a school for designers, although a number of products were also produced. The furniture designs are boxy and very functional, designed to be mass produced. Indeed, much of the Ikea and Habitat ranges on sale over recent decades could be described as being influenced by the Bauhaus style.
Amongst the teachers at the school was Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee and a number of their paintings are on display in the building.
The museum is quite small, but contained examples of furniture (chrome framed chairs) and kitchens, together with scale models of Bauhaus designed buildings. The actual building of the Bauhaus Museum was Bauhaus designed.
Unfortunately, Hitler wasn’t into the Bauhaus movement, and the founders of the school were subjected to discrimination and persecution (perhaps he preferred chintz?). The Nazi government withdrew funding and ordered the dissolution of the school in 1932. The school moved to Paris for a while, but the principles of Bauhaus continued as former students went on to work around the world.
The Reichstag
The final part of Berlin I was keen to see was the parliament building or Reichstag. Although the building was built only in 1884, the Reichstag has seen a very turbulent history. It has seen the Nazis gain power and set fire to the building, so as to allow it to introduce draconian laws against its people. The Reichstag is also famous for the image of the red flag waving Russian soldier atop its ruined roof at the end of the war and the abortive attempts to hold a parliament there in the years following the building of the Berlin Wall just metres from its perimeter.
Today, the Reichstag has been redeveloped; a modern internal building, using the stone of the original as a shell. If you get inside, you can easily see the blend of new and old.
The building has a new dome on its roof space designed by that master British architect Sir Norman Foster to which the public are allowed access. The dome is truly fantastic. Its base is made from glass, meaning that from the parliament chamber, you get natural light, and from the top of the dome, you can look down on proceedings in the chamber.
Is this a transparent government or what?
From the dome area, you also get to have a wander on the walkways on top of the old roof. Again, the building is designed so that visitors can have a sneak view of various aspects of the building. I particularly liked seeing the office support walkers gathering in the corridors outside various offices having a crafty cigarette and a chat. I was also impressed to be so close to the spot where that famous photograph of the Red Army victory was taken.
Finally, you get to explore the dome itself. I’m no physicist so I couldn’t really work out how the two walkways going up the outer shell of the dome at opposite ends (one up and one down) didn’t somehow cross in the middle somewhere.
I was also fascinated by the mirrors on the outside of the central strut of the dome, as you walk up the walkways, images of people standing at the bottom of the dome are split into pieces by the mirror. I got my bemused beloved to go down from the top of the dome 5 minutes ahead of me, so I could get some pictures of her truncated form. She was fairly happy as there are a lot of detailed boards near the central strut which relay the turbulent history of the Reichstag which she could read, as I wandered up and down the walkways looking for that perfect pose.
At the top, you get a good view of that area of Berlin, and I got another interesting shot of three people dressed in black, yellow and red who just happened to be standing alongside the huge black yellow and red flag which fluttered outside. It’s very easy to be artistic in the dome.
While the dome is a must see, the downside of the visit lies with the queues to get into the place. Visitors have to go through a rigorous security check and frisk before they can enter the building, and are then whisked escorted to the public viewing areas, so as to ensure miscreants don’t wander off. The place is also free which raises its attractiveness.
KaDeWe
I’ll add a final listing for KaDeWe, the première department store in Berlin for almost the last 100 years. If the store could speak; I could only imagine what tales and gossip it could share.
Don’t underestimate the sheer size of the place and the range of goodies on display over six floors. Unfortunately, the store had a strange ordering of products; new styles next to old, cheap and tacky next to expensive. To be truthful, I found the place rather over facing and after a brief look around, we reduced ourselves to hunting down packs of sweets for our work colleagues. While the place is lovely, and probably sells things you can’t easily find anywhere else, beware of the prices. We found the perfumes for example, generally had a 30% mark up on other stores in the city. My tip is not to go wild. Generally shopping in Berlin is expensive.
It’s also worth wandering up to the department store restaurant on the top level. This is a classy food mall like no other. Although, we found the food mall too busy for our tastes, we did linger a while to look out through the huge windows over the city.
Links
Want to explore the Brandenburg Gate?
Want to read about life in the old East Berlin? You might find out a thing or two with Stasiland
Need a cheap clean hotel in the west of the city?
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Apologies for the length of this review; in the end I couldn’t decide how to break up my experiences. Thanks for hanging on there.
cr01 asserts his right to be associated as the author of this review -2004-
Recommended:
Yes
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cr01
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Member: Chris
Location: Yorkshire, England
Reviews written: 443
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In snowy Yorkshire. Dusting down the Sledge.
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