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A 'beer-bike':  all the lads are pedalling like fury.

I saw quite a few of these and they always made bystanders laugh out loud, me included

ROBINSON’S GERMAN JOURNEY

ON THE HOOF - 2

OK I admit it.  It was a bloody silly idea to even think about writing any kind of blog while I was on holiday; there’s just too much going on.  There are new vistas and opportunities around every corner, especially when I have a world-class city like Berlin to explore for the very first time.  All I’ve ended up wanting to do is to be out en vadrouille (as our French friends say) taking advantage of the fantastic good fortune that’s enabled me to be here...

It’s only been a few days since my last, skimpy - and wholly uninformative - posting but it seems like weeks have passed.  Once again, I’ve been scribbling like a demented ouija board and am now trying to decipher the things what I have wrote.

So, for the second time on my German Journey, here’s an insipid flavour of thoughts and things and stuff.....

Day 3 - Amsterdam to Berlin...
A train arrived while I was waiting in Centraal Station; the graffito on it - very neat and artistic - read ‘I am Number One - so you’ll just have to try harder’.  Wondered about this for ages.

Change of trains at Hilversum.  So now, I’ve been to the place that used to be on everyone’s radio dial in the days of valves and fine-tuning.  Will this be the high-point of the holiday?  (No).

SE Netherlands countryside much less flat - and not a windmill in sight.  Very ‘clipped’ and neat - and exhaustively farmed.  There can’t be much wildlife out there... Villages look very pretty though...

Couple in the corner seat - well-turned out, in their forties - start ‘making out’ in a strangely passionate and uninhibited way, thus embarrassing my English sensibilities.  I don’t know which way to look.  (Well, I do really.)  Eventually they go into the toilet together.  As far as I know, they were still there four hours later...

Berlin.... First impressions - dire!  Spanking new Hauptbahnhof (Main Station) but surrounded by squalid building sites as far as the eye can see.  It’s like I’ve travelled six hours to arrive in Middlesbrough.  I almost start to cry.

Manage to navigate the Metro (the U-bahn) to my hotel and things pick up at once.  Very nice part of the city - wide boulevards, lots and lots of street cafes, everybody out and about on a warm Friday evening.  I like it here.

Day 4 - Berlin...
Sunny morning in the city’s biggest street-market - the Winterfeldtmarkt.  Great fun - not likely to visit a market as vibrant or as thrilling for a long time.  Makes Grainger Market look like a toy shop.

Saturday morning street-life - Berlin style

As in other great cities, there are some sites you just have to see when you’re here.  The Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Wall.  They were today’s menu.

Potsdamerplatz: the Purple Pipe follows the line of the Wall

It’s very moving and ‘emotional’, all of it.  The scraps of Wall and the story they tell, the wonderful feeling of freedom when it was torn down.  You can see why Berlin is such a ‘liberated’ and free-thinking city.

The Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag

Brandenburg Gate is as impressive as its photographs - and the Reichstag next door, too.  Lots of tourists.  (Japanese people seem to want to photograph everything - kerbstones, patches of grass, dog-walkers; Americans don’t even look through the viewfinder; Brits compose a photo meticulously, to wrist-slitting point.)

 The Holocaust Memorial

There are over 2,700 concrete blocks, all of different sizes...

Holocaust Memorial.  Lots and lots of thoughts here, as is the intention.  Unexpectedly weird design, but it works.  En vadrouille amongst the concrete blocks, you get lost - physically and emotionally.  Very, very sombre.  And humiliating.

That I am human, too - like the people who did these truly awful things...

I’m glad I was alone there today.  Who knows what to say or think?  Who do we condemn?  And for how long?

No language on Earth has the words for all this...

A memorial to the gay victims of Nazism; this one is on the wall of the local Metro station, where many gay people were 'beaten up and left to die'...

The Cathedral and River Spree

Day 5 - Berlin...
By metro and tram to ‘the Humboldt Box’ in the cultural quarter of the city.  Lovely cup of coffee on the roof with views over the Cathedral and Museum Island, and up towards the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column.  Stunning - and very ‘metropolitan’.

A segway tour of the city about to set off

Inside, the model of the pre-war city shows how almost all of it was destroyed by bombs.  It was once as grand as Paris or Rome.

Met Hans-Georg, a ‘helper’ in the Box.  87, with many memories of the War and after.  A lovely man; gentle, kind and thoughtful.  (His English was as bad as my German - so we spoke in French for over an hour.  As he said - how the world has changed!)

Evening meal very late at Eckstein, a Berlin institution.  Got chatting to the Incredible Dr Pfeier, who used to be a Professor of Linguistics; he had overheard my atrocious German accent.  Wonderful, and slightly tipsy, conversation about the comparative characteristics of our two languages.  Doesn't sound like much fun - but it was!

Will try to remember all the stuff he said about our lack of a negative interrogative...

The Metro map - Berlin style!

Today....
Whenever I visit a new place, I make time to jump on a bus or tram just to see where it goes.  So caught a number 29 to Hermannsplatz, deep inside the former East Berlin.

Very different here.  Lots of fairly obvious poverty, vagrancy, jerry-built flats.  I was in Middlesbrough again.

There’s tension, too.  The East is being ‘gentrified’ and ‘owner-occupied’ by rich people from the former West Berlin.  There are anti-West slogans - Nein Verein, No To Unity - everywhere.  But I was glad I made the journey....


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I’ll be really sad to leave this amazing city tomorrow.  But I have other places to go and other things to do...

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