Berlin, for real this time!

It was Palmer's last week in town, so we had one more trip to go on. After hemming and hawing trying to figure out where to go, we chose to visit Berlin and do all of the tourist stuff. Cori and I had previously been to Berlin for her concerts last year, but didn't do any real tourist stuff while we were there.

The wife took off the last few days of last week, so we hit the road early Wednesday afternoon for the 5 hour drive. As we entered town, we stopped for dinner at a restaurant we found on Trip Advisor. Pretty good, standard German fare.

The Special Olympics World Games happened to be in Berlin this weekend, so we weren't able to find any reasonable place to stay in the city. In Europe, they won't typically let you have 4 people in a room - that's why we used VRBO when we visited Nuremburg and Luxembourg, to avoid having to get two rooms. VRBO's were outrageous in Berlin this weekend, so we stayed out by the airport in the Moxy, and just got two rooms, one for the boys, and one for the girls. The Moxy is a low end traveler hotel in the Marriott chain, with absolutely no frills. We were lucky that the bathrooms in the rooms had walls - we've seen Moxy's with just frosted glass dividers between the room and the bathroom area.

At this point, I feel a contrite apology might be in order. For the last couple of updates, I've overlooked one of the previously highlighted (for me, at least) parts of my narrative... the showers in our units. I'll cover them briefly now, in hopes of assuaging your disappointment - just skip the blue part if you don't care about my shower reviews:

Nuremburg: Our VRBO had 2 full bathrooms, one on the main living level (where the kids rooms were), and one in the upstairs (where the boss and I stayed). The downstairs bath had a stall shower. I am unable to comment on that shower, as I didn't use it. Perhaps I should have, simply for the sake of my review, but I didn't. Sorry - but that'd just be weird. The shower upstairs was weird. You all know how much I enjoy the showers where it's basically a tub with a plexiglass shield attached to half of the tub... if it's been too long since my last shower review, and you don't remember, I'll forgive you, but I just can't stand them. Ours upstairs was one of those, but the tub had a weird shape. Rather than just being a rectangle, it was almost a normal shape, but the end where the spout was was square. I don't remember ever seeing a bathtub that was a truly weird shape, so that was a little odd. I didn't take a picture of it, which might have been a minor mistake on my part. 

Luxembourg: Our VRBO had one and a half baths. The shower was one of the aforementioned tubs with a plexiglass panel on half of it. Not my favorite. Moving on.

Berlin: Traditional stall in the Moxy, with a sliding door on the shower stall. We've stayed in Marriott branded hotels before that didn't have any kind of door on a stall type shower, so this was an additional bonus.

Moving on.

On Thursday, we drove downtown. Our original plan was to take buses and metros to get around, but that was when we were expecting to pay €30 a day for parking at the hotel; the parking lot at the hotel was miniscule, and was always full, so we ended up parking down the street, and driving in (being able to use our expected hotel parking fee for parking in town instead). We parked next to one of the main shopping areas, to be in the right place for our walking tour.

I've mentioned previously that we've had good luck with the "free walking tours" that are available in lots of cities; we signed up for another one, but with a twist. This particular tour was given by a company called "Can You Handle It Tours," and was called the "Rude Bastards Tour." Supposed to be more "R" rated - we chose this one to try to keep the kids engaged. In reality, pretty much the same kind of tour we've gotten everywhere else, but with cursing. Our guide, while he was quite engaging and (mostly) knowledgeable, some of the language came across as a bit forced, almost like he'd just recently learned some of the more offensive words, and was still getting a feel on their proper usage.

Only real criticism that we came up with came up the next day - I'll jump a little ahead to explain. There was a specific museum (called "The Topography of Terror") next to a lengthy section of the Berlin Wall, with an area under the base of the wall section with a bunch of displays. He told us that the sunken section was a display of the foundation of the oldest hotel in Berlin, when in reality it was the cellar of the nearby Gestapo headquarters, where political prisoners were tortured and executed. We discovered the wrong information the next day, when we went through the museum.

Flash-forward complete; let's flashback to the real blog entry now.

In the course of our Rude Bastards tour, we touched on most of the big sites - Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust Memorial, the Gendarmenmarkt (which the Konzerthaus, the German Cathedral, and French Cathedral share), and a parking lot which was the site of Hitler's bunker. The government specifically covered the bunker with cement and buried it, then put a parking lot on top of it to avoid it being turned into a shrine. As it was, there were still a few tour groups that we encountered there. Not really easy to complain about it being turned into a tourist site while we were there being tourists, huh?

One interesting fact that he shared with us; one of the largest buildings in Berlin during the war was the headquarters of the Ministry of Aviation and the Luftwaffe. That building was specifically not bombed by the allies, to use as a navigation waypoint - I just thought that was ironic. That building is still standing, and is now the headquarters of the Ministry of Finance - basically their IRS.

Another fun thing we learned... the symbol on the crosswalks in Berlin is a little different than others we've seen. The characters are differently shaped, wearing cute little hats. After unification, the folks of Berlin threw up such uproar when their crosswalk lights were all changed to the western version, they changed them all to the eastern type instead. It's one of the few things from before the fall of the Iron Curtain to thrive after unification. It's a whole thing, with a store where you can buy merchandise - which, of course there is, and of course the wife had to buy stuff there.

We also passed by a place where you can take a motorized tour of Berlin in a Trabant. Evidently, this was a crappy car that was quite well known in east Germany. Very cheap, very poorly built, plastic body panels, powered by a two cycle 600cc engine. Took over 20 seconds to get to its top speed of 60mph (if you could even get it going that fast). At one point, there was a 13 year wait for these cars.  

About the sites we saw...

• Brandenburg Gate: This sits at the site of the original Berlin Customs Wall, constructed in 1734. The site itself dates back to the 1100's, before Berlin existed. It's pretty well known now - everybody's seen pictures of it, it's one of the most famous tourist sites in Germany. It's immediately between the Embassies to the United States and France, with more embassies further down the block (including the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from the US Embassy). 

• Checkpoint Charlie: Everybody's heard of this one too, the most famous checkpoint between East and West Berlin. The city was divided into the east and west sides by the Berlin Wall (as everyone knows), but West Berlin was broken into three sectors, with different Allied governments administering each one: American, French, and British. Checkpoint Charlie (the third checkpoint - Alpha, Bravo, Charlie in the NATO alphabet) was one of the checkpoints from East Berlin into the American Sector.

• Holocaust Memorial: I'd previously seen pictures of this one online. It's a 200,000 square foot site with 2,700 rectangular pillars, each about 7'9" by 3', from 8 inches tall to over 15 feet tall, arranged in a big grid like a city, generally from shortest to tallest front to back. You can wander throughout the monument, as the passageways are about 2 feet wide between them. One of the ironic pieces of information our guide gave us (which I have not been able to verify independently) is that the blocks are painted with graffiti repellant paint. That's not the ironic part. The ironic part is that the paint was developed by a company named Degussa... one of their subsidiary companies was the main manufacturer and distributor of Zyklon B, the gas used in the extermination chambers. I found that ironic.

(that top pic of the Holocaust Memorial was of our guide, Arthur while he was telling us about it)

A repeated theme of the tour was the attitude of Germany toward France. I'm not sure how factual all of his points were, but he gave several examples of Germany and France specifically taunting each other... for example, a sculpture of Victoria, the Roman Goddess of Victory, sits atop Brandenburg Gate. Her head was sculpted to specifically be looking down on the French Embassy. Pretty much any opportunity the Germans had to thumb their noses at the French, they did so.

After the tour, we headed back to the hotel to rest up a little before dinner, then drove to (what turned out to be) a chain restaurant, but was actually pretty cool. The name of the place was BrewDog, and they've got locations all over the world. Who'd have thunk it? Pretty good food, wide beer selection, and what appeared to be a handful of free video games in cabinets.

The next day, we drove back downtown to visit a couple of museums that interested us. We parked and walked over to the Topography of Terror Museum, which was on the site of the Gestapo Headquarters. There was a lot of reading in there, stories of political and cultural dissidents who were tortured, and in some cases, executed. It honestly was a bit of an overload - it was all pictures and captions / stories. There were a lot of visitors to the museum, and it was difficult to be able to read all of them. After we finished up inside, we went outside, down to the section our guide had told us was the foundation of the oldest hotel in Berlin, which turned out to be an extension of the exhibits inside.

We moved the car to another garage and walked over to the German Museum of Technology; we hadn't walked past it during our tour, but while driving home that day, we'd seen a building with an airplane on the roof - a C-47, of the same type that participated in the Berlin Airlift. Of course, it piqued my interest! Turns out, it's a museum of German technology and innovation - the museum covered everything from ships, to textiles, to trains, boats, planes... honestly, I skipped through most of the museum. I spent most of my time in the area devoted to ships and planes. Pretty interesting, they had quite a few examples of famous German planes, but I did note that they were missing (what I'd consider) two of the most famous German planes: the Fokker Dr.I and the ME-262. They did have quite a few other examples of well known German aircraft: The ME-109, the FW-190, and a burned out JU-87.

Sorry for geeking out in that last paragraph - you knew what you might find when you started reading!

We drove back to the hotel and hung out for a little while, then went to dinner at... any guesses? Of course, it was a barbecue restaurant. Long time readers will remember my predilection for finding barbecue restaurants in whatever cities we visit... this one was better than most, our waitress was from Alabama, and the bartender made one of the top three whiskey sours that I've ever had. I call that a win, for barbecue in Berlin!

Yesterday, we drove back to Frankfurt, and have had a down day today. Palmer returns to the states tomorrow morning, so that's all of the adventures of the whole Shores Family for now... whatever we end up doing with just Cori... well, you'll just have to tune in next time!