The Marathon: Berlin

In order to get to Berlin, we had to take a 3-hour Ryanair flight that left at 6:30am, so, if you’ve ever been on a Ryanair flight, you know it was a fantastic start. If you haven’t you should know that Ryanair has a one carry-on limit (including purses or briefcases) and it is a lot smaller than your normal American sized carry-on (think backpack sized). One of my greatest achievements this trip was making the entire trip with just my Jansport backpack. That’s right, I did an entire 9-day Spring Break trip with just a backpack full of things. We were going to have to take 4 flights with similar one carry-on luggage requirements and I simply did not have the funding to pay 15€ for each flight just for a bag. I did not need extra clothes $85 worth, no way. I hope I never have to achieve such a feat ever again. Going through security has never been so stressful when you need to make everything you own fit in to one bag right before you go through.

Well, we arrived in Berlin around 10am and the next challenge we had to face was figuring out the Berlin metro system. Later we discovered it to be incredibly efficient and useful, but at first glance, it was the most confusing metro system I had ever seen. There was an S-bahn and a U-bahn. One ran aboveground and the other ran underground; they intersected at some stations. We had to buy ABC zone tickets for 3€ for the journey to the hostel. We were really confused for a while, because we didn’t know what to do with our tickets. You didn’t have to go through automated stalls to get on and off the train (like BART or the Madrid metro) and no one was checking tickets on the train. We discovered after that the Berlin metro runs on an honor system. They just expect you to buy tickets and they rarely check. Its only a 40€ fine if you get caught without a ticket during the sporadic times that someone actually walks through the train to check tickets. We rode the metro many times and only had our tickets checked once. Only in Germany could the metro run on an honor system…

After about 45 minutes and 3 train changes, we made it to our stop, Rosenthaler Platz (one of the few stops we could even come close to pronouncing). We got off and could not for the life of us figure out where our street was. We wandered around a busy street corner until some random 70year old German lady approached us and offered us help. She spoke little to no English so we just showed her the street name. She pointed to the street we were on and looked at us like we were crazy. We turned around and could actually see our hostel. We were so exhausted from our crazy travel schedule that we couldn’t see it when it was right in front of us. It had a pretty large sign, it was quite clear Circus Hostel was right there…

We checked-in at reception with a nice German guy, Marion. The reservation was under my name and he asked me if my family was German (Weisenberger being super German, almost as German as my mom’s maiden name, Meyer). I told him that we’re German many generations back and now all the German I speak is counting to 10. I did ask him what my last name meant in German. “Berg” means hill and the “Weisen” part means something along the lines of wise man, or wise old man. Our 8-bed room wasn’t ready yet, so we checked our bags into lockers and began to explore the city.

Our first stop was the Brandenburg gate. It’s essentially the Champ-Elysse of Berlin and used to be the old entrance into the city. It’s the site of many famous Hitler-era marches and was once right alongside the Berlin wall. An interesting side fact is that the US embassy is located right next to the Brandenburg gate. Maya went up to the guard and asked if she could look inside. He sternly told her no, but she could look in. She protested that she was an American and could show her passport, but he still said no. We were a little surprised by the irony of a German national telling US citizens they couldn’t enter their own embassy, but such is life. We just took pictures in front of the sign out front instead. We then wandered over to the nearby Reichstag. It is the seat of the German government. It is a huge, imposing building that was really cool to see.

At this point we are absolutely exhausted and starving, so we decide to get some food and then enjoy one of our favorite Spanish pastimes, the siesta. For lunch the obvious option was Dolores. Dolores was a place we had heard of a long-time ago and was our main food goal for the trip. Dolores is a California-style burrito place. All of us have been craving Mexican food like crazy and the one time we tried a Mexican place in Córdoba it was a disaster, the food did not resemble Mexican food at all. Several Californians had vouched for Dolores as the best burrito place in all of Berlin. We were determined to try it while in Germany. You order Chipotle style there, picking burrito, then meat, then rice type, etc. I got myself a chicken burrito with chipotle sauce. The fire ratings were off, chipotle sauce did not deserve to have 3 flames out of 4 for hotness. Psh. It would be lucky to deserve 2, but Europeans just do not seems to have the same sense for spicy and hot as the rest of us. When we went back a second time a day later, I got the habanero sauce, the hottest with 4 flames, and at least deserved the title of “kind of spicy.” After Dolores I think I may have staved off my Mexican food cravings to a bearable level until I return to California. May have.

Post-siesta (and it was a long siesta) we showered and got ready to take on Berlin at night. We went to a random restaurant and got some pretty good burgers and fries as well as our first German beers. We couldn’t pronounce the name of it to save our life, but we all enjoyed them. When in Rome, do as the Romans, right? When in Germany, drink beer.

We started out the next day early and took the Regional Express train to a town just outside the city called Oranienburg, the location of the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. We were there for a couple hours and it was a chilling experience. It was surreal to see the walls around the camp and the old barracks. There was even building Z, where the cremations took place, and ironic name using the last letter of the alphabet for the prisoner’s last stop. It was a trip that made me nauseous and depressed, but it was something that people need. Humanity’s capacity for horrendous acts of violence has been demonstrated throughout history, from the Spanish inquisition to this concentration camp, which the soviets took over after the war and continued to use it for similar purposes. The most moving parts were the personal stories that we heard on out audio guides, of grueling roll calls and vicious commandants.

Our third day in Berlin started off at the Memorial to the Murdered European Jews and Information Center. What can we say, we like to start our days on a happy note. The memorial is difficult to explain, it is a huge squared with many large concrete stones of differing heights, which are reminiscent of coffins. They are unmarked, to imply that we can never know the real number of murdered Jews as well as never know every person’s name. The information center was also very moving, and had more heart wrenching personal testimonies from holocaust victims and survivors.

Afterwards we headed to one of the most iconic sites in Berlin, the East Side Gallery. It is the largest preserved stretch of the Berlin wall that has been painted on by many different artists. There were some artistic ones that I didn’t understand, and some pretty ones as well. One of my favorite quotes on it said “I painted over the wall of shame so freedom is ashamed no more, inferno ruled too many years, until the people chose the light. I put my faith in you, Berlin, and give to you my colours bright!” –Fulvio Pinna, Italy. It was really hard to look and it and conceive life as a West Berliner, constantly surrounded by these walls. Sona, Maya, and I did what we do best: we took lots of pictures.

Next we wandered to Museum Island, to check out the cool buildings (we were saving museum time for Van Gogh and Picasso). The Berlinner Dom building was gorgeous, and so were some of the museum buildings. We didn’t spend that much time there because we had an early date with the Berlin-Schöenfeld airport the next morning around 7:10am. We woke up at 4:45am Monday morning and were off to our next city!