Berlin Annotated

It's freezing cold outside and I've got nothing to do, so as promised here are the rest of the pictures from my trip. Come with me on a trip to Berlin.

To get to Berlin from Frankfurt, I flew this little German low-cost airline called DBA. Aside from the neon-green color scheme on the outside and inside of the plane, it was actually really comfortable and convenient:

The best part about DBA were the free alcoholic drinks and food. This was a 45-minute flight, in coach, and I got a hot meal. The 'appetizer' was a Koenigs Pilsener beer and paprika-flavored potato chips, which are every bit as horrible as they sound. By the way, the napkin is telling us it's "beautiful that you're with us today" :

Upon arrival in Berlin, I took a stroll down the Kurfuerstendamm, which is the main shopping street - sort of like Michigan Avenue. There I found some polar bear statues engaged in interracial canoodling. Note Commerzbank in the background - who besides Germans (and maybe Andrik) would spell 'commerce' with a z?

At one end of the Kurfuerstendamm is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. It lost part of its steeple during World War II bombing raids and was left by the Allies as a reminder to city of past atrocities. Now it sits like a big broken tooth at the end of the street:

The Germans I saw tended to be very austere and obedient (very different from the oom-pah Oktoberfest-style Germans one would envision.) Here's a group of them waiting at a crosswalk, despite there being no cross traffic. I crossed against the light one time and everyone looked at me like some sort of criminal.

Of course they have Gilmore Girls. It's Germany, not North Korea.

This pointy fellow is the Fernsehturm (literally, "TV tower.") It was built in the 1960s in the middle of what used to be East Berlin. The East Germans claimed it was built to improve television reception in the area, although it's widely acknowledged it was really built as a means of spying on West Berlin without deploying aircraft do it. Nowadays it really is a TV tower, and if you want to wait in a four-block line on a freezing Saturday afternoon, you can take an elevator to the top and look around:

Now that we're deep in the heart of the former East Berlin, you can see some really brutal examples of communist architecture. The main square of East Berlin is the Alexanderplatz, one of the ugliest places I've ever been in my life. The insecure East Germans threw it up in the 1960s in an effort to prove they were every bit as modern as the West. Today they've tried to spruce it up with some oh-so-capitalistic advertisements, but it's still beyond hideous:

I'm not sure exactly what this lady is saying, but I'm guessing she's wondering why she wore a halter top in the middle of winter:


Back in the decadent, capitalistic former West Berlin, I visited KaDeWe (Kaufhof des Westens, or "department store of the west.") Imagine Marshall Field's on steroids - this was nine floors of retail goodness, including a gourmet supermarket, health spa and exotic animal showcase:

The main train station for the city is Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten, immortalized by U2 in the song "Zoo Station" back in the 1980s:

Hee hee. Who fahrted?

On a more serious note, here's the Reichstag, the seat of German parliament. In 1939 the Nazis deliberately set a fire here, which they blamed on their political rivals. In the ensuing "national emergency," they passed laws consolidating their own power and limiting free speech among Germans. Nothing like the Patriot Act, of course. Today the Reichstag has been restored, and like the Fernsehturm you can wait in a three-block-long line to get inside:

The Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate) is the symbol of the city. From 1961 until it fell in 1989, the Berlin Wall ran right in front of it, separating East Berlin from the west. When the wall came down, thousands of East Berliners ran through the gate to meet relatives they hadn't seen in almost 30 years. It was pretty emotional to walk through it:

Speaking of the wall, here's one of the few surviving sections. There were actually several walls all running parallel, separated by minefields, tank traps, trip wires and a floodlit swathe lovingly called the "death strip." Almost every piece of the old wall is gone, but a few sections have been left standing as a memorial:

The route of the wall is commemorated by a brick line that runs the length of the city. It cuts haphazardly across streets, parks, sidewalks and through the middle of buidlings:

Before World War II the biggest and busiest square in Berlin was Potsdamer Platz, at the geographic heart of the city. It was bombed out of existence during the war, and then in 1961 the Wall was cut right across the middle of it. When the wall came down, Berlin found a ten-block wasteland right in the middle of town, ripe for urban renewal. Naturally they tossed up a bunch of glass skyscrapers. This is also where the weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) is held, and where I sampled a disgusting local treat called gluehwein, which is red wine spiced with cloves and served hot. I couldn't finish it.


Germany gets a lot of snow, but except for the southern part near the Alps, it isn't very mountainous. Berlin has enterprisingly built a fake snow hill in the Potsdamer Platz, where kids (and adults who've had too much gluehwein) can go tubing:
This little wooden hut is all that's left of Checkpoint Charlie, which during the Cold War was one of the few places people could pass between East and West Berlin. West Berliners were allowed to visit the East under special circumstances (a dying relative, birth of a grandchild, etc.) but East Berliners were never, ever allowed into West Berlin.

The frightening sign advising West Berliners they were leaving the US-controlled West Berlin and entering the Soviet portion of town:

Peppered all over town are these scary guard towers, which the East Germans put up along the route of the Wall. East Berliners who tried to escape, assuming they made it across the "death strip", were shot on sight from these towers:


So that's a quick photo spin through Berlin. I guess it wasn't that annotated after all. It's not as photogenically beautiful as other European or American cities, but there's a real sense of history there. I highly recommend it.

This week I'm going to Knoxville on business, which although equally foreign, is just a little bit less exciting than Germany. Wish me luck.