The Big November road trip day 3 - Back to Berlin

The stories about the German autobahn are true. The MINIMUM speed limit on dry pavement is 130km, so you set your cruise at 150 and they still fly past you. The weather report said ‘fog’ and I thought they were kidding. In Canada, the sun burns off fog in a couple of hours. Not here apparently. We had ‘fog’ and overcast all day.

In 1988, I did the Eurail pass trip with Michelle and Natasha for our Easter break from Université de Nice. I voted to go north and see Berlin. I got outvoted and we went to Corfu instead. After wandering Berlin today, I don’t know what we would have done here 20 years ago during the occupation. I remember wanting to see the wall. Today, I saw it. It’s smaller (shorter and less imposing) than I imagined it would be. There are pieces of it at Potsdamer Platz. The outline of the line the wall followed is inset into streets and sidewalks. The biggest piece of the wall is at Zimmerstrasse & Niederkirchnerstrasse. It’s been turned into a really good sunken (lower than street level) museum about the rise of the 3^rd Reich, the Nazis, the occupation, and the wall.

There is a lot of interesting architecture, most of it modern when you think about it because it has only been 20 years since the end of the Occupation. What is most impressive is looking at photographs of the results of the bombing of the city at the end of the war, then comparing it to what we saw today. I think the kids will remember the things we saw: the Russian monument, the Reichstad, and the Brandenberg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie and the wall, the Sony Centre and the Tiergarten. I don’t think they grasped much of the story: that the wall only came down 20 years ago, that people died HERE, that there weren’t the freedoms we expect. I need to teach myself more about the war and the German / Soviet history.

We got a taste of Berlin in our afternoon here. Andrew’s favourite thing is that they have cobblestones representing where the wall used to stand. Peter and Elizabeth’s was the Wall museum on Niederkirhnerstrasse (and the schnitzel), as was the mine. As you walk from Potsdamer Platz to Checkpoint Charlie, there’s a big empty field. Makes you wonder if it’s a left over piece of the death zone, the empty space beside the wall, left empty so the East German guards could spot you and shoot you faster if you tried to escape.