Germany - April 2011

Bicycling around Berlin

The Guinness

I’d done my usual research on Guinness in Berlin before coming out and discovered there were quite a lot of Irish bars catering for the tourists and ex-pat community. Some were way out in the suburbs whilst others were the more brash type and no doubt large and noisy. I chose the Lir Bar, named after a sea god in Irish mythology. 

The Lir Bar was indeed a cosy place with just a few ex-pats in passing the afternoon and watching the football. Graham from Dublin was there to serve us the Guinness.  At the start of the second Guinness I explained to Graham what I was up to and got him to pick the straw out of the box. Inside the straw was Baku, Azerbaijan. For the third pint, Graham wrote Baku into the head of the Guinness! 

Getting there and around

Something I’d wanted to do for a long time was to travel to one of these destinations by train and Berlin seemed to present itself as the ideal opportunity. I’d done a bit of train travel as part of this challenge before but never done the complete journey by rail. I ended up booking on the German train DBhan website from London to Berlin return with changes at Brussels and Cologne. On the way out I’d have a night on the train from Cologne to Berlin in a couchette. The return trip I would do in the daytime. All this for a very reasonable €170. This just left me to book the train from Coventry to London and back. Anyone who knows about buying tickets on British railways will know that costs can vary from reasonable to outrageously expensive if you buy on the day.

What few people know about is the special cheap tickets you can get that link up with an already purchased Eurostar ticket. When I say few, I mean few. Not even the people at Coventry railway station admitted to knowing about it until I explained it to them and they looked it up. You need to ask for a ticket to London International. The advantage of this is that not only are they cheap but they are also covered by the European train agreement which means that if you miss a connection e.g. the Eurostar is late on your return route, you do not have to purchase a new ticket. After two trips to Coventry station and a bit of persuading I therefore had my £7.50 each way tickets to London instead of the normal £130 ticket.

For the final leg of the outbound trip I catch is the sleeper train to Berlin, or to put it more accurately the sleeper from Amsterdam to Prague, with some sections of the train going to Moscow and also Belarus. There’s a couple of things to make sure here. Firstly get on the right carriage because every so often they stop in a siding and have a play around with the train set and you may find yourself on the wrong train all together. The other is to make sure you wake up in time – 4am in my case. I really should have done my homework better because now I know that going via Paris rather than Brussels would have got me into Berlin at a much more sensible time rather than the middle of the night.

My sleeping compartment is empty so at least I’m not waking up an irate Dutchman. I’m soon joined by a young German girl going on a business trip to Dresden. We discuss the finer points of the works of Ibsen, Chaucer and Brecht. OK, I lie. We just go straight to sleep actually after a brief conversation about the war – she started it, I wasn’t going to mention it.

The alarm on my phone did its job and woke me at 4am. I’d propped it up in the corner and was surprised to see it still upright having been jolted around all night. I find that was explained by the fact I’d rested it on a bit of discarded chewing gum. Getting down off the top bunk of three, with all your belongings, without disturbing the other occupant was not easy. I don’t think I woke her, at least not till I stood on her head.

In preparation for the trip I'd covered a paperback in brown paper.  Not one of the usual tasks I do before setting off for one of these trips but needs must. The book club I’m a member of was reading Fatherland by Robert Harris, a thriller set in post war Berlin but using the premise that Germany had won the war and that Hitler now ruled. I planned to take the book with me as holiday reading material but had the dilemma that the edition I’d purchased on eBay had a swastika on the cover. I planned to be doing quite a bit of train travel and fearful of upsetting my German travelling companions and being accused of being some sort of war tourist or Nazi sympathiser I thought covering the book was the best option. Now however it risked onlookers thinking I was deliberately trying to cover up something far worse – maybe a Jeffery Archer novel.

Team Makeup

One brave sole signed up to accompany me on this trip – my old school friend Richard Bartlett. We go all the way back to Marlborough Road Infants School in Cardiff and I suppose could be described as a product of Friends Reunited, having been put back in touch with each other and the rest of our small group of friends after 20 years. Richard chose to go the easier route by flying to Berlin and joining me for the weekend.

Accommodation

Our hotel, Hotel Agon, was a fairly non-descript eleven story building on the intersection of two major roads, amongst lots of other buildings of similar appearance.  It was in the old East Berlin, not too far from Alexanderplatz.  My room was enormous but somewhat austere – very soviet in style but clean and functional at the same time, it just looked like ten other people could fit in too.

Food

One of the stalls on the nearby market sold traditional food though from which region of Germany I’m not quite sure. For €6 I had a platter of pork with vegetables, mushrooms, and fried potatoes all cooked in wok style pans, adding up to an unhealthy dose of cholesterol no doubt. To wash it down and celebrate a successful day acclimatising to Berlin I had a large glass of local beer.

One night we ate at the Berliner Republik which seemed to have an irreverent take on German life with cartoons of national leaders adorning the walls. The beer prices were displayed on a screen and changed in price supposedly depending on demand like the prices of shares in a stock exchange. The Berlin soup to start with followed by the monstrous broiled knuckle of pork was authentically German and rather heavy! They describe their menu as hearty – as in bad for the heart I guess. We washed it down with a bottle of Rioja. The urinals were worth a visit. The walls were painted with a comic scene from the old Berlin Wall.

Sightseeing highlights

I arrived in Berlin at 4.35 and a small group of us half-awake tourists fall onto the platform.  I got some cash from an ATM and saw something else I‘d read about, the 100 bus.  It’s a normal Berlin bus but goes west to east through the city past the Tiergarten, taking in many of the main sights.  Doing this at 7am was like having my own personal tour bus. The morning sun glistened off the newly gilded statue of Victoria (Roman Goddess of victory not the English queen apparently) on top of the giant Victory column. The Nazis relocated the column to its present site inanticipation of victory. I caught glimpses of the Reichstag with its Norman Foster-designed glass dome and Brandenburg Gate and the other famous sights but this was just a taster of the days to come. The streets were nicely quiet.

Richard had been very organised and pre-booked us on a bike tour of the city on Saturday. At the allotted time we and about a hundred others congregated at the bike company’s offices at the foot of the TV tower and awaited instructions. We are subdivided into six groups each with their own guide. We chose Lauren, a young American who had graduated in history from a Berlin university and decided to stay in the city. The process of choosing our bikes, having a practice ride around the area and adjusting whatever necessary took a little time but after that we were on our way. Our group of fifteen multi-national tourists headed off, weaving our way in and out of all the other tourists. The bikes all had names to make them easier to retrieve after one of our allotted stops. My bike seemed somewhat heavier than the rest – that’s probably because it was called Black Sabbath ....made of heavy metal.

We also took in Checkpoint Charlie, the only legal crossing point for members of the allied forces, where Lauren gave us a potted history of the post war period aided by a chalk drawing on the pavement. During a visit to a surviving section of the wall we were told how it was topped off with sections of sewage pipe, ordered from West Germany. Now that’s something Churchill, with his love of wall building using red bricks, would certainly not have approved.

The most moving part of the tour was undoubtedly the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. It’s made up of over 2000 grey concrete slabs of subtly differing sizes and laid in an area where the floor also slopes. There’s a lot of modern history to ponder in modern Berlin, a lot of it unpleasant but architect Peter Eisenma has been clever in designing something so very different to other memorials that it encourages visitors to remember its purpose. The crowd pad around solemnly, dwarfed by the blocks.

Quirky moments

A visit to the Kennedy cut out saying the words Ich bin ein Berliner.  Kennedy visited Berlin in June 1963 to make a speech that demonstrated US support for West Germany a few months after the Berlin wall had been constructed. The speech is regarded as being a success but also famed for the Ich bin ein Berliner phrase that could be taken to mean I am a Berliner, a jam doughnut.

Out of the City

Before my travelling companion Richard arrived in Berlin I decided to have a day out to the spa resort of Bad Saarow and Frankfurt am Oder.  I change trains at Fürstenwalde onto a private ODEG train, single carriage modern machine safe in the knowledge that with my day ticket I can travel when and where I please. We arrive at the town of Bad Saarow dead on time. It’s a place that has a strange history, the place where the old East German and Russian military leaders had their holiday homes and where the East German athletes doping programme was masterminded.

After coffee and chocolate mousse cake at the Park Cafe in Bad Saarow  on the side of the lake I wander down to the quayside and as luck would have it have just enough time to buy a ticket and hop on board the boat for a one hour trip to Wendisch-Rietz on the other side of the Scharmützelsee.  I join the majority of the boats occupants on the open air upper deck where we are bathed in sunshine whilst admiring the sumptuous lakeside houses.

Lasting Memories

The sheer number of things to do and see in the city of Berlin.

Meeting up with the editors of 'hidden europe', a top class magazine that I have been subscribing to for many years now.  It explores cultures and communities across the continent and delivers it in articles where you just wallow in the quality of the writing.