We had an early start, needing to get breakfast and ready to step off the ship at 7am. We had pre-booked a trip to Berlin for the day, but not with Holland America, instead we used an independent operator, along with 21 other people. The upside to this is that it is significantly cheaper. The downside is that if we don't make it back to the ship in time for departure, the ship won't wait for us (or so we're told). The ship was scheduled to depart at 9:30pm, allowing plenty of time for those travelling to Berlin.
Our bus was waiting and we departed just after 7:30am. After a short drive through Warnemunde, we were on the Autobahn. I just love the Autobahn and although we were only travelling at around 100km/h, we were being passed by an endless parade of cars, predominantly Audi, BMW and Mercedes, cruising at around 150km/h. It's a joy to see cars being used the way they were intended.
The scenery was mostly agricultural, endless fields of yellow which we learned was for canola oil. Also we saw thousands of wind turbines scattered across the countryside all throughour farms.
We reached Berlin by about 11am and picked up our English speaking guide, Paul. He's an American who has been living in Berlin since the 1980s. He carried a couple of well-worn photo albums containing personal photos of the Berlin wall, and particular events leading up to, and including, the wall coming down. A very knowledgable guide indeed.
Tomorrow is a public holiday in Germany, and Berlin was preparing for huge celebrations. The centre of the city was due to close to traffic early afternoon, so our guide wanted to get us in to see certain locations, before the streets were closed. As we drove around, it became apparent to both us and our guide that our driver was Polish, didn't speak good English or Germin, and had never driven around Berlin before, so combining this with street closures made for a rather interesting day. Given the circumstances he actually did very well.
There were two common themes to the commentary from our guide. The first topic was about the Berlin Wall, why it was there, the implications to everyday life etc, and mostly we drove around what used to be East Berlin. The second topic was around Hitler, Nazis and WWII, and various key locations related to them.
We past by countless important buildings; museums, embassies, libaries, and so on.
Of particular importance was the Holocaust Memorial, a huge series of concrete blocks that can be walked through. All are varying heights, and angles, and the ground is also not level, so walking through is quite a strange experience.
For me what was most interesting, is that the red and green pedestrian crossing lights are different in what was previously considered East and West Berlin and they've kept the different style in each. There is one crossing with a pedestrian island in the middle, and the Berlin Wall previously went up the middle of the street, so you see both styles on one road crossing.
There are flags flying all over Berlin. All government buildings, museums, embassies etc had their flags at half mast today, as a sign of respect for the Manchester bombing yesterday. Our guide pointed out the one exception, that the Russian Embassy were not flying at half mast. Really makes you think!
Our guide told us how during the cold war, somebody set up a transmitter sending Western televison signals to the east. To stop this, a row of 5 high rises were built near the wall to block the signals. It seems crazy to me that such things occured.
We stopped at a local restaurant for lunch, where we were encouraged to eat "real Berlin food" and sample the beers. Helen had a roast pork with crackling, a safe choice, while I ordered meatloaf and got something unexpected, more the consistency of what we call luncheon sausage in New Zealand only it was cooked. Not my favourite type of meat dish, but was tasty and luckily came with plenty of potato mash and two types of mustard on the side. We also had a large glass of beer each, very nice.
Berlin is a major tourist attraction, there are tour coaches and buses everywhere (and I mean everywhere!) and there are large zones for bus only parking around many key locations. Our guide told us that every day, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 tourists visit Berlin. Not difficult to believe based on what we saw. There are the predictably tacky tourist attractions including being able to rent a Soviet-era Lada to drive around Berlin yourself, and Checkpoint Charlie which is so appalling in its tackyness I won't even post a photo.
We did stop at the last remaining section of wall, another tourist hotspot. It's difficult to imagine this wall cutting an entire city in half.
We did get to a point on our travels, where we pretty much got closed in to the city. Most roads were closed off and we went around in circles. Our guide was a good back street driver, and under his guidance we got out OK. However the traffic was particularly bad and we had to leave the city earlier than planned to ensure we make it back to the ship on time.
Once on the Autobahn, we were moving along OK until about an hour from the ship traffic started to slow to a crawl. Again German driving is amazing. As cars slow on the Autobahn, drivers put their hazard lights on to warn those behind to slow down. This is something we experienced driving ourselves around here in 2010. Even with no speed limits, the system works and competent drivers make it safe. Also people automatically parted to the shoulder of the road in case emergency services need to get through. We crawled along for an hour to what was actually roadworks. All the while I was watching our progress via my smartphone and Google Maps and knew we had plenty of time. Still, it took 4 1/2 hours to get back.
We returned to the ship with 60 minutes to spare. We weren't the last bus back, but already the ship was preparing to sail. An upside was that we didn't have the usual queues for security checks. We boarded with ease, and caught the last 30 minutes of dinner service after a 13 hour day.
This had been a whirlwind visit of Berlin, but interesting and enlightening. I would like to return one day and see it at a more leisurely pace.
No comments:
Post a Comment