Brrrrlin

aka Berlin, Germany

This past week was our spring (actually mid-winter) break, and I traveled to Berlin and Prague with two of my lovely fellow Americans. We went to Berlin for the first part of week to get our beer and besichtigung (visiting) on. Overall we had a really great time and only had to make bitter comments about the World Wars one time (to be explained later). 

Anyway, Germany! I visited two western German towns for a single day when I was in Belgium, and I have since been looking forward to returning to Germany. I didn't know much about Berlin before going but figured there was no better place to be impressed by German efficiency than in its capital city. 

Also Angela Merkel lives here and she's like the most powerful woman in the world. So yeah. 

Here's me in front of the Brandenburg Gate, or the Brandenburger Tor in German.

As a warning I am wearing the same thing in all of my pictures. And the sky stayed the same color. 

 During the Cold War, the Berlin Wall ran in front of the Gate and now it's a big symbol of Germany n' democracy n' stuff. This is where the most news coverage of the Wall coming down took place in November 1989. I think the Gate itself was built by a Prussian king a long time ago (and assumably served as a real gate to something).

If you look really hard, you can see a statue in the far distance through the space in the very middle of the columns. That's the Victory Column, which was built to commemorate the Prussians kicking someone's butt a long time ago. 

**Detailed and accurate history brought to you by the history major**

Aside from my general excitement about traveling, I was extremely excited about having German sausage and beer. By the time we arrived and had gotten settled in our hostel we were all starving. At the recommendation of the hostel desk assistant, we went to Brauhaus Lemke Hackescher Market. It was a huge restaurant that brewed its own beer, which seemed to be the case with a lot of Berlin restaurants. 

The waitress tried to talk us out of the dark beer. Psssh she don't know where I come from. 

My goal for the first day was to try two different kinds of sausage and two different kinds of beer. And I accomplished all of it in ONE MEAL. A thousand meal points to Gryffindor! 

 I had the three sausage platter. The Nürnberger style sausage tasted like very good breakfast sausage. The Thüringer style Bratwurst, the large one with the Xs on it, tasted exactly how you would imagine delicious German sausage tasting. The outside was extra crunchy. The Gourmet style Bratwurst, the one that looks like it is launching itself at the camera, had cheese inside and was also extremely tasty. It came with fried potatoes and a few vegetables for show. 

My satisfaction with this meal my have been partly fueled by my intense hunger and my love of sausage, but it was also a reflection of my fatigue with my own cooking.
But, really, i<3sausage

Afterwards we worked off our huge meals by getting a little lost and playing in the snow. Because it was snowing that day! It was very cool getting to see snow. It was never very heavy but snowed pretty consistently and it was the largest amount of snow I've ever seen. 

We poor sheltered Louisianians in front of the largest park in Berlin.
This was, of course, before we discovered the snow just makes you really cold. 

The park was beautiful and I finally got to submerge my snow boots, that I have lugged across Europe for two months, in the snow!

                                 We even made snow angels! People do that when it snows.

I'm not one to brag but this was the best snow angel that I have ever done AS WELL as the best Berlin had ever seen. 

And sometimes you just have to have a nice cold Berliner beer to warm yourself up. 

#snowproblem

It also snowed all day the next day when we visited the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. It was about a 45-minute train ride outside of Berlin. It was one of the most important concentration camps, because it is where the SS planned their general evil-doing and controlled hundreds of other camps. It was super depressing and freezing but our tour guide, Mike, was awesome and knew everything ever. 

 Mike was a New Zealander who has lived in Berlin for 13 years because he fell in love with a German girl once. He kept telling us how great his wife was; it was pretty adorable. On the train ride he gave us an overview of Cold War East Berlin as we were passing notable train stops. We were actually on a train line that ran through both East and West Berlin and was restricted to just West Berliners during the Cold War. According to Mike, the train would stop at the East Berlin stops because of technical reasons but the platforms would be guarded by armed men so no one got on or off in East Berlin.

Mike also told us the political history of Nazi Germany, which I've probably learned a million times in school but it felt ten times more real hearing about it in the place that it happened! 

The history of Berlin in the 20th century alone is incredibly amazing. We were constantly shocked at how recent these terrible and huge events happened, which is even more shocking when juxtaposed how Germany is today. 

We casually ran into some of the Berlin Wall when exiting a shopping center. 

Our hostel was in East Berlin, so we spent most of our time in the attractions there. My friend Blair read that if you see yellow tram lines and cobble-stone streets that means you're in East Berlin, but other than that you really couldn't tell which part of Berlin you were in. 

Exhibit A: Did I warm myself up with this delicious treat in East or West Berlin? Who can tell?!

I had this carrot cake and cappuccino after we walked around Sachsenhausen in the snow for four hours. Sometimes you just need a drink with a heart and a star on top to cheer you up about the world. 

It was in East Berlin, on a street that was lined with foreign food restaurants on one side
and an enormous abandoned building on the other. 

To further investigate East Berlin's communist past we went to the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) Museum, which was an interactive museum on life in Germany from 1949 to 1989. It was extremely interesting. 

A few tidbits that I found particularly intriguing: 

            ~~toddlers in pre-school were made to take communal bathroom breaks where they sat on the toilets in a row until everyone had done their business

            ~~when people took vacations to the beach or a lake, everyone was nude because swim suits were considered wasteful. Nudecations! What would Slavoj Zizek say about all of that family nudity?!?

            ~~fashionable clothing was controlled by state entities and was about 10 years beyond Western Europe. Levi's were a BIG DEAL

            ~~a lot of city-dwellers had vacation/weekend homes because they only had limited opportunities to travel outside of the country plus they could use their gardens to cultivate extra food. It was also seen as something good for the communist morale or something like that? 

            ~~There were huge price disparities between goods that could easily be produced in the country and those that had to be imported (as expected). 

            ~~If people were able to buy cars, the cars were just terrible but people learned to function as their own mechanics because they were such prized items. 

One could say that we took a drive through history. Hee hee.

And to answer my dear daddy's question...

nothing in the DDR museum resembled France or Obama's American Dream.  

We also went to two ancient history museums, which we all enjoyed a lot. They were housed in these enormous old buildings in a group called Museum Island. The buildings were partially bombed or otherwise destroyed in World War II but have since been spiffed up. 

Don't dare lean on a column because someone will come and tell you off for desecrating history.
They are trying to make up for all of the previous abuse. 

As a side note, the Germans are super mad about this collection of artifacts discovered on what is thought to be the ancient Greek city of Thebes but was taken by the Russian government during the Soviet occupation of East Germany. The Germans say that it is rightfully German property because the original archeologist paid the Greek government for its value plus like $10,000 extra. Apparently the Russians still won't give it back (oh look, Russia doesn't give a hoot about what you think; it's shocking). The displays in the museum I visited kept adding snide remarks about the Russians, like "There was also a glass pot found in this area but we are unable to display it with this ancient vegetable knife because of Russia's breach of international law in withholding it." 

Talk it out guys. Nerd wars don't help anyone. 

Anywhoozle, all that knowledge made us hungry. 

We looked up best restaurants in Berlin and one was pretty near to the hostel. 

Erin and I split pork roast, schweinebraten in German (I think?), which came with cabbage and fried potato dumplings. The potato dumplings are either called kartoffelpuffer or kartoffeknödel or kartoffelkloesse. (My German is not the best, I'll admit it.)    

 Meat and potatoes!
It looked a little tastier before we split it up between us.

For dessert, I had a chocolate pudding-esque thing that came with white cream. It was a good ending to the meal. 

It's the German take on chocolate mousse, methinks. 

The most mysterious part of the meal was the little leafed berry that came with the dessert. 

It reminded me of the Pokemon Oddish. 

I tried researching it, and I think it MAY be a sea buckthorn. Honestly I have no idea. 

And now on to more landmarks! 

We arranged a visit to the Reichstag, which is the home to the German Bundestag (Parliament). There is a giant dome on top of the building (you can barely see it in the picture below) where the tour takes place. We planned it so we could see the city at sunset (we're like real vacationing adults!), but the sky was a solid grey so we just saw the city at dark grey and then night. It was still awesome. 

I'm pretty positive that Angela Merkel stood here once.
Also note the German flag behind me not behaving properly for my photo opp. 

The Reichstag was a very cool building. It burned down in 1933, when Hitler and other top Nazi officials were conveniently visiting Berlin and staying nearby. That's when the Nazi party blamed the Communist Party for starting the fire and passed 'emergency' measures that suspended civil rights and  eventually gave Hitler unlimited power. (Thanks, Mike!)

The building was pretty much destroyed in World War II and had a long road to recovery. But since 1999, it has housed the Bundestag. The dome was added in 1999 as well. Once inside of the dome, you walk up a very large winding ramp that goes around the outer edge. We received headsets that were programmed to give specific information on buildings or history when you reached a certain point on the ramp. You can see a lot of the city; it's much higher up that I expected. 

It's very eco-friendly! In the middle of the dome, there is a large glass fixture which reflects sunlight down into the plenary chamber* (with the purple chairs). The very top of the dome lets waste air (but not  heat) escape the plenary chamber. It's also warmed by the sunlight in the day. 

 The roof and the dome are transparent as a symbol of German democracy nowadays. 

*Angela Merkel works here....

It was very beautiful even at night. 

The audio tour pointed out the American, French, and Hungarian embassies! How fitting. 

So all this other stuff was fine and dandy, but it does not hold a candle to one of the most exciting meals I have ever had the privilege of eating. 

After the Bundestag we were wandering around the city, looking for someplace to eat. We ended up in a primarily-shopping district so we cut across a street to get to the main road again. We happened upon a Bavarian restaurant that looked exactly how one would expect a German restaurant to look like. Everything was made of wood inside (not the food), there were paintings of German countryside on the walls, and the barmaids were dressed like milkmaids. Or barmaids, whatever. 

I had read about roasted pork knuckle when researching Prague, and I had seen it on every German menu so I decided to try it for my last night in Berlin. 

For those of you innocents unfamiliar with pig slaughtering, the dark pink parts are where the pig knuckle (or knee) comes from: 

That'll do, Babe. 

I think that in German it is called Schweinshaxe, although they should really just call it the 'best-piece-of-pork-ever-stein' or whatever the literal translation of that is. 

Here it is! 

The outside tasted like bacon (I could only stomach two bites of it) and the inside was really tender meat, served with cabbage. 

I regret nothing. 

It was a TON of meat. It was a little difficult to approach, mostly because of its bacon armor. But after I got through that it was heaven. Every time I turned my plate, I discovered a new meat pocket (sorry I couldn't think of any other way to describe that). It was so tasty.

Cheers to using all parts of the animals! 

I think pigs are a lot bigger than I imagine them to be. 

But apparently everything in German is bigger. 

This was to a stuffy church that wanted to charge people 7 euros to tour it.
Puh-lease, we've all heard of the Vatican.

As you may be able to see, I very much enjoyed my brief stay in Berlin. 

The ONLY negative thing was an incident on the train. 

"Oh but I've heard that German public transit is so great," you say. 

Well, yes. It is pretty cool, although all of the trains look ancient.

 But German public transit is also home to the Public Transit Nazis, who are probably actual descendants of Nazis who now terrorize tourists on U-Bahn trains by giving them 40 euro fines for unwittingly buying the wrong kind of ticket! 

FORTY EUROS. THAT IS LIKE TWENTY BEERS. OR FOUR PORK KNUCKLES.  

 This was the time when we made lots of snide remarks to each other about fascism and civilian compliance with war crimes. Then we moved on to listing all of the things that we have saved money on both in France and on the trip to compensate for that 40 euros that we EACH had to pay. And that helped our anger and frustration subside to a dull,yet scar-throbbing pain. 

ANYWAY, I'M SO OVER IT.

I still like you Germany. 

And Angela Merkel. 

Even more because of this picture. 

And then off to Prague!