When I first started blogging about my travel abroad experience, I promised myself that I would keep it up-to-date. Well, I have been in Europe for a little over three weeks now and guess what...I'm behind. So here is the final installment of my German adventures before I start blogging about my life in Madrid!
At the end of the last blog post, Theresa and I had spent a few days in Munich and were on our way to Berlin. The train ride to Berlin was about six hours total. I spent the majority of the ride sleeping, reading
The Long Loneliness, (which will get its own blog post when I'm done reading it because it is absolutely mind-blowing), or playing UNO with Theresa. Toward the end of the trip, we started playing Heads Up, a game app that I bought on my phone after playing it with my coworkers on retreat. The game is basically a combination of charades/Catch Phrase/Taboo and it is absolutely hysterical. Player 1 holds the iPhone on their forehead and depending on the category chosen, words, names, songs, or actions will pop up on the screen. Player 2 has to try to get Player 1 to say what appears on the screen without saying the word itself. Each round is 1 minute long and you try to get as many points as you can by correctly guessing what is on the screen.
Because we were sitting next to each other on a fairly crowded train, Theresa and I opted for the "Hey Mr. DJ" category. For this category, a song and its artist appear on the screen and Player 1 must guess the song from Player 2's humming. Perfect! Except that it wasn't. For those of you who know Theresa, you know that she only recently discovered popular music. For those of you who know me, you know that I am tone deaf. I think between the both of us, we scored a whopping 6 or 7 points in 10 rounds. Theresa had no idea what the songs were, but even if she did, I couldn't hum the right tune for her to guess. We couldn't stop laughing at how horrible my humming was and how many songs Theresa had never heard of before. After recovering from one of our craughing
(laughing and crying) fits, we looked up to see an old man watching and laughing with (at) us.
After arriving in Berlin, we made our way to our Hostel, CityStay. For our first hostel booking this semester, I must say, we did a fantastic job. It was cheap, clean, had free wifi, and was literally in the perfect location. We claimed our beds, squeezed our backpacks into the little red lockers, and grabbed our Rick Steves Germany book to figure out how we would spend our evening. A biergarten! We decided that we
had to visit a biergarten in Berlin and the book mentioned a very specific one named Georgbraeu Brauhaus.
Guided by our map of Berlin, we left our hostel and followed the road closest to the river. A few blocks into our journey, the road was completely blocked for construction. There were metal fences and pink pipes everywhere, so we decided to abandon our original route and try a different, more indirect way. We came across this random statue right in the middle of the construction. We walked around it for a solid 5 minutes trying to find a sign that explained the statue and told us who it was, but there was nothing. I didn't think anything about it until my first day of philosophy class when my professor googled Marx and Engles one of the first images that
popped up was that statue!
After wandering around for thirty more minutes, Theresa, who was feeling quite hungry, tried to talk me into just eating at one of the many restaurants that we had already passed. I was determine however to find the Georgbraeu Brauhaus, and let me just tell you, it was so worth it.
We sat down at a table outside and both ordered a beer because, well, we were in Germany. Theresa went with the light house brew and I, feeling a little more adventurous, got the dark house brew. I'm not a huge fan of beer, but it was good. The shot of schnapps on the other hand, the clear stuff seen in the picture, was the worst. So miserable. Just thinking about it makes me cringe.
Enough about the drinks though because the food was the real highlight of the night...or my life. Theresa and I had not eaten since breakfast so we were ready...
She ordered the special that was featured in our Germany travel book and I ordered a bratwurst. Per usual, we were going to do "halfsies" so we could try more food. I'm not even sure I have the words to describe what we ate, so here's the picture..
So. Delicious. Happy. Belly.
Walking back to the hostel that night, Theresa and I came across a picture of us in 60 years. I'm the one with the map confident that we are going the right direction and Theresa is the one with with her hand on her hip not trusting me.
Because we were exhausted from our day of travel, Theresa and I decided we would call it a night and wake up semi-early in the morning to begin our first full day in Berlin. We were the first ones back to our 10-person dorm room for the night and I was enjoying a little bit of quiet time in the room alone when my life intersected the life of Josh, a fine bloke from Australia. Unsure of how you are supposed to greet a stranger that you will be sharing the same living space with for the night, I said "hello!" His response, in what ended up being classic Josh form, was to utter an f-bomb before announcing that I was the first English speaker who had been in the room for a couple of nights. He was so excited to be around another English speaker that he literally talked AT me (and Theresa when she returned) for a solid 45 minutes. He had been traveling around Europe alone since April and quite a few hilarious/fascinating/bizarre/insert-any-adjective-here stories to tell. My favorite Josh story of the night was that he went on a graffiti tour of Berlin and at the end had the opportunity to create his own graffiti. He chose an image of Obama. He was so excited to show us the image because he thought "Obama is sooooo dreamy." He even hung it up directly across from our bunk beds so we could "wake up to the face of [our] fearless leader." I can't say that I am a better person for meeting Josh, but I am positive that he brought a lot of joy and laughs into my life that night.
First Full Day:
We began our day with breakfast at a super cute little coffee shop called Tee Haus where we ate delicious baked goods, drank yummy coffee, and planned our day.
We walked a few miles to our first stop of the day, Checkpoint Charlie, probably the best-known Berlin Wall crossing point between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. There was a historical timeline on the fence that surrounded the museum that Theresa and I read for about half and hour. I loved reading about U.S. war policy from an outside perspective because there wasn't the underlying tone of justification throughout the information.
It was so strange to stand in the exact place where a wall that separated humanity existed 25 years ago. It was incredibly challenging for me to me to witness thousands of tourists smiling in front of sections of the Berlin Wall or saluting with paid actors dressed as U.S. soldiers for a photo. For me, this was not a place of joy and laughter, although I rejoice that the wall finally came down in 1989. For me, this was a place to remember the abuse of power by governments, the denial of basic human rights, the fear of the other, and the unnecessary military spending that led to a physical barrier being built literally overnight. All of the factors that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall are still present and influencing policies today. As I write this, children and parents, brothers and sisters, friends and friends, are separated by an apartheid wall in Palestine, built with funding by the U.S. government. Standing where the Berlin Wall stood, I realized that humanity still has a lot more work to do before each and every human person can live in a world which uplifts their inherent human dignity. We must learn about and remember the horrors of our past so that we may work towards a more just future.
Our next stop was the Jewish Museum of Germany, a museum that had been recommended by friends and travel books alike. We spent around 4 hours walking through the entire museum and there were countless things that impacted me, but I will only list a few.
1) The Holocaust Tower. Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the museum, built the museum with five memory voids to refer to "that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: humanity reduced to ashes" (Libeskind). The Holocaust tower was one of these memory voids. It was an empty, triangular, concrete room with a ceiling height of 92 feet. The only light entered the room through a thin window at the very top. It was dark, cold, and quite. As I stood in the empty room, I prayed for peace; peace in our hearts, peace on our streets, peace in our world.
3) The Garden of Exile. This exhibit represented all of the countries that Jews fled to from Germany. The Garden of Exile consisted of 49 stone pillars with soil and an olive tree on top, forming a canopy. Walking through the maze of pillars, I felt aimless and lost and couldn't even begin to imagine the feelings that so many men, women, and children felt having to flee their homes and leave their possessions behind.
3) Fallen Leaves. This was the last exhibit that Theresa and I saw before we left the museum. This was another memory void, but this one was different from the rest because artist Menashe Kadishman covered the floor with over 10,000 iron faces to symbolize the irretrievable loss of the Jews murdered in Europe. 10,000ish identical faces on the floor. 12,000,000 beautiful and unique lives lost. Each with a story. Each with a promising future that was forcibly ended. How can we best remember so that history can stop repeating itself?
After the museum, Theresa and I ate a delicious lunch of bread, cheese, chocolate, and wine in a park. For the next few hours, we slowly wandered back to our hostel, purposely getting lost in the streets of Berlin just so we could see whatever we could see. We ended up walking by the cathedral which, as you can see from this picture, is gigantic.
We went back to the hostel to relax and freshen up before dinner. We played some UNO, did some journaling, and I continued to read my book. Because we followed Rick Steves' advice the night before for dinner and he did not lead us astray, we thought we would take his advice again. This time, he recommended a Turkish restaurant that seemed to be pretty close to our hostel. Per usual, we couldn't find it and just when Theresa and I turned to each other to announce our defeat, I turned to my right to realizde that we were standing directly in front of the archway that led us down an alley to the Turkish restaurant of our dreams. We split and incredible humus appetizer and a lamb kebab and rice main entree. It was my first time eating lamb and it was incredible. I'm sure I feel asleep with a smile upon my face that night.
Second Full Day:
New coffee shop, same routine; coffee, baked goods, planning.
Our first stop was the historic Brandenburg Gate. It was a ginormous structure with an even more ginormous history. The chariot on top holds the goddess of peace, but when Hitler came to power in Germany, he distorted the goddess as a symbol of peace she became viewed as the goddess of victory. This interpretation remained for many decades as the Berlin Wall was built feet away from the Gate. Today however, the focus on peace has returned to the Brandenburg Gate. While visiting, Theresa and I stumbled upon a non-denominational Room of Silence tucked inside the Gate. According to the
informational brochure that I received, the Room of Silence was created after
Germany’s reunification in 1990 “in the center of Berlin near the former
frontier between opposing military forces and hostile ideologies.” We sat together in silence praying for healing and peace for a world where there are so many divisions and injustices.
The Room of Silence
From the Brandenburg Gate, we walked a couple of blocks to the Memorial for the Murdered Jew of Europe. This was another difficult and challenging experience. The memorial consists an entire city block of over 2,700 columns of different heights, evenly spaced over a hilly surface. Theresa did the math and determined that to have one pillar for every murdered Jew, there would need to be 44 square miles of pillars. It's hard to wrap my mind around the extraordinary loss of human lives.
After the memorial, Theresa and I found our way to a beautiful plaza with two cathedrals: a French one and a German one. Neither of us could figure out why they were called Cathedrals because bishops were never actually seated at either, but they had extremely impressive exteriors. To our disappointment however, the interiors of both were unimpressive. The French cathedral just had a small chapel with minimal decoration and the German cathedral had been transformed into a museum for the Parliament. Everything was in German, so we literally walked in, made a quick circle around the first floor, and walked out. Our disappointment quickly faded however because just across the street from the plaza was a big, famous chocolate store called Fassbender & Rausch.
We bought a box of truffles to share and we walked back over to the German "cathedral" to sit on the grass, enjoy the beautiful day, and destroy our chocolates. There are many reasons why I think Theresa and I are compatible in friendship, but if I were to make a list of the reasons why, reason number 1 would be that she loves dark chocolate and I love white chocolate. Reason number 2 would be that we can talk about anything, anywhere, whenever. And that's exactly what happened. For nearly two hours, we laid in the grass and talked about life. She's such a beautiful soul and I am so blessed to walk this journey of life with her by
my side. LOVE YOU!
That night, we once again used our Rick Steves book to find a restaurant for dinner. Could it be a trifecta of great dinner places in Berlin!? Nope. For the first time during the whole trip, our trusted travel companion let us down. It instructed us to just walk around the "cool" neighborhood and pick out one of the many restaurants that it assured us would be there. We walked up the main street of the neighborhood...nothing. We turned right and walked down a side street in the neighborhood...nothing. Whatever cool/trendy restaurants the book thought were there, were not there (or at least Theresa and I couldn't find them.) We ended up at a small, very American restaurant called Muse, which definitely did have a very hipster atmosphere. There, I learned the painful lesson that water is not free in Europe. I was so thirsty from walking around looking for a restaurant that I quickly downed two glasses of water...for 4 euros!
After our meal, we took a tram back to the hostel to get some good sleep before our early morning train back to Kandern.
THE END. Thanks for reading this blog post-turned-novel. I'm slowly catching back up! Soon I'll post one about Switzerland and France and then I'll
finally get to Madrid!
Peace,
Sarah
