Thursday June 4
It was time to get our first flight since arriving in Europe. It just simply isn’t practical to get trains in Western Europe when flights are so cheap. We had a fairly uneventful flight, the usual lack of border control at airports in Europe (which REALLY surprises me). I could have packed 10 kilos of cocaine and no one would have batted an eyelid.
We flew into Berlin and I was finally in Germany. I was looking forward to practising my German and seeing Germany so much, so I was very happy. We got the train in to the city for only 2.80Euros/$5ish Au and checked into a hostel called the Sunflower. It looked good on the flyers we had found at the Back Pack in Budapest. The wall art was very funky but we discovered very quickly it was very big and impersonal. The staff were really slow and pretty unhelpful and we were told we couldn’t use the kitchens as the rooms with kitchens were fully booked. I asked when we could and he said they get too busy when they are fully booked so we really couldn’t, which was a massive pain as I’ve been carting around me friendly food and not getting sick! We left our food in the staff fridge where we couldn’t access it. So we headed out for food and after walking for 15 minutes trying to find somewhere cheap we gave up and got a mid priced meal (6-10 Euros for mains). The menu was in English and the staff spoke English so I was pretty disappointed. I ordered no onion and my meal came with onion and I tried to pick it out but I must not have succeeded as I got sick again the next day. We ran into Melissa, the chick we got the ferry back from Santorini with, at our hostel. We chatted to her for a while before we decided to head out. We went to about 3 or 4 bars, all of which were cool, but dead. This was a contrast to the party Berlin I was expecting. Despite this we got quite drunk and had an awesome time with Melissa. We stumbled back to the hostel around 2.30 but were up at the hostel drinking in the 24 hour bar until 4 after which we crashed out.
Friday June 5
Our alarm went off at 10am as we’d agreed to go to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp with Melissa to save her from a creepy local who’d started ‘stalking’ her. He was taking her to the touristy places and he was getting a bit weird and creepy so we became her wingmen for the day. We paid for breakfast at the hostel because I couldn’t get in to the kitchen for a bowl for my cereal – the rooms with kitchens were protected by codes (we still paid the same amount as the rooms with kitchens – 12 Euros). The breakfast was 3 Euros and so not worth it. I got a bowl of cornflakes and a bit of cheese for my 3 Euros. After breakfast we headed out to the concentration camp. It took us over 3 hours to get there due to infrequent buses and it was a fair way out of Berlin. Despite the sun, it was a freezing day. The camp was fairly isolated and I think the quiet and the cold added to the feeling of the camp. We wandered around there for 3 hours, reading the walls, looking at all the items on display. We pretty much didn’t speak to each other the whole time. It was so deeply disturbing. It highlighted all of the other minorities that were killed by the Nazi’s. It wasn’t all Jews. The camp we were at was more Soviet POWs, most of the ethic people they wanted to kill were exported to Auschwitz. But this was a work/concentration camp rather than extermination camp and so we read the stories about how they were slowly tortured, how they were made to stand for roll call for 20+ hours in the snow without warm clothing until they all just dropped one by one. And then those that didn’t die standing were forced to work all the next day. Most of them died from starvation, disease and exposure. The rest were shot or hung. Some were hung from their arms backwards so their shoulders dislocated. Some were put in tiny cells too small to sit in and left to stand all night, then made to work the next day. Some were put in cells with no air until they suffocated, some in there with no food until they starved to death. It was horrible, and no amount of me telling this story can convey it – it is something you really have to see for yourself. That the camp was in operation for 9 years is staggering. That’s a third of my life time.
We left in the end because we were chilled to the bone, deeply disturbed. We needed to go back somewhere busy and happy and noisy to break the chain of thoughts churning around our heads.
We got the bus back, then got on the train. An inspector got on and asked for tickets. We had tickets but hadn’t validated them and we actually didn’t realise we were in zone C and we had AB tickets. He asked for our passports which we said we didn’t have. Then he said 40 Euros each and we said we didn’t have it and he just left. I reckon he was dodgey, trying to scam the tourists coming from the camp. We’d met a guy in Budapest who’d lived in Berlin years and he said he’d never even seen an inspector so don’t bother buying tickets. So we shrugged our shoulders and went back to our train ride.
We felt so relieved when we got back to our hostel and the chatter of people was a reassuring hum around us. We didn’t do much that night though I was keen to as we were in Berlin! The city that parties every night of the week but Steve was too tired to so I piked too, I wasn’t that energetic that I wanted to fly solo. The day was kind of emotionally draining so we called it a night.
Saturday June 6
Today Cameron that we met in Budapest met up with us in Berlin. First we went to the Ramones museum. On the way there we found a cool shop selling artwork that was really unusal, my kind on art. Being on a poor back packers budget we bought some post cards rather than proper canvas art, I got a business card though as I intend to go back when I have money :P The Ramones Museum was small but pretty cool, lots of the usual type of memorabilia such as tour posters, guitars, tickets, vinyl, t-shirts and other clothing as well as more unusal ones such as the original hand written lyrics and receipts for Johnny’s first guitar. We watched the DVD they had there but it was an hour and a half long so we only watched 50 minutes before we left.
We headed to the Brandenburg Gate to check out something touristy – and it was really touristy. But it was pretty cool.
After that we went grocery shopping for dinner and between beer and dinner we spent 30 Euros ($60 Au) as food in supermarkets in Germany is quite expensive. The beer only made up 8 Euros and we bought a fair bit! Chicken breast was 12 Euros $24 AU) per kilo. Steve cooked a nice white wine and mushroom pasta and Cam came to our hostel to eat with us too.
Cam was in Berlin to see a band that he liked called the Vivian Girls, an all girl band from the states. Apparently they had a really good engineer as their recorded stuff was awesome but he’d heard they really couldn’t sing live and the main guitarist had some work to do too. We went to see them at an odd little venue, we had directions or we would never have found it. The front door looked like a door into an underground car park and the stairs inside looked similar but we continued up a few floors and there really was a club up there. It’s been running illegally for 2 years. You could see where the walls had been knocked down and the stage and DJ box were made from beer crates. It created a crazy underground feel. We were there early as usual and so we left for a few cheap beers across the road and came back. The place had completely filled up when we got back. The Vivian Girls singer still cannot sing. Their guitar work must have improved though as they were not too bad. Cam was loving it anyway.
After we left that venue – which I have no idea what it was called as there is no signage what so ever – we headed out to find Tresor. It was to be our first Berlin techno experience. Techno is of course one of the things Berlin is famous for. Tresor is located inside a disused power station. We didn’t have any trouble finding it as they projected the Tresor logo onto the outside of the building.
I got asked for ID but Steve didn’t which made me feel good since my 29th birthday was fast approaching :P We went inside and were met by lots of concrete, stencil art and minimal techno.
The main bar was pretty cool, they had a strobe light running on low repetition most of the night in both of the rooms we went in, and it was really dark without it, so when the strobe flashed it was the only time you could tell there was anyone else there and that you were in a club. We met some crazy Dutch guys who had come to Berlin just to go to Tresor, We also ran into Sarah and Emily from Melbourne – some girls we know from the scene back home. They were looking for German hard trance and were disappointed to find techno. They hung out with us for a few hours before leaving as they had stuff to do in the morning. So Steve, Cam, the Dutch guys and I hung out between the dance floor and the outside smoking area until around 7am before we headed back to our hostel.
Yes it is light in this picture!
Sunday June 7
Cam had left his gear out our hostel so he came back and picked up his gear. We were due to check out and didn’t want to stay another day as we really didn’t like the place, so we stayed up and found a new hostel. Cam said his goodbyes and headed off to Amsterdam. After a drunken morning skype call to Brian and Julie we moved hostels. The hostel we booked was called the All In and it was the worst hostel we’ve stayed in yet. They had no kitchen, not even a fridge, the rooms were tiny and the lockers were metal (noisy) and too narrow to actually put anything more than our wallets in. We were told we couldn’t check in until 2pm as they were cleaning so we headed out and met Melissa and her friend for lunch/dinner before being able to go there to sleep.
When they finally let us in we couldn’t work out what they had cleaned as there were back packs all over the floor so you could barely walk – they guys in our room had been there the night before too. We passed out and slept until just before check out the next day. After one look at the showers (no curtains, no cubicles just shower heads sticking out of the wall communally) we decided to shower and our next hostel – definitely weren’t going to stay there one more day.
We checked into the BaxPax Kreuzburg Hostel which was heaps better that the previous two. It had a kitchen, nice staff, spacious rooms and a nice common area. Extras like internet and washing were really expensive though, but we found a cheap net cafe 50m away so we spent a bit of time catching up on emails and booking flights etc while we were there. It was then that we had our first major setback. Well two major setbacks. We realised that our flight to the UK was actually from Munich not Berlin. And Citibank had emptied by bank account of cash and not taken money from my credit line due to a massive error on their behalf (which as of the 27th of June I am still fighting – with only $7 in my account). The flights were an easy if expensive fix. It was going to cost 225 Euros ($450 Au) to get the train to Munich from Berlin. WFT? We couldn’t find it cheaper anywhere else online, perhaps if my German was better we could but as it was we couldn’t. We looked at flights and it was cheaper to just lose the flight and rebook. So we booked from Berlin to Liverpool to the tune of around 160 pounds ($330 Au). I suppose we couldn’t go our whole trip without anything going wrong.
We didn’t get up to much on the Monday night, just had a nice meal in the hostel and crashed out.
We headed out to take the free alternative cities tour which kicked off at 11.30am. It was a tour showing the arty side of Berlin rather than the touristy stuff. I hadn’t formed much of an opinion of Berlin on the first day or so – it was just another city to me. By the weekend I was really warming up to it, but it was this tour that was the icing on the cake for me – it sealed the deal – I officially LOVE Berlin. I could easily live there. We went and saw lots of legal art on buildings and got the history behind it, we got told about some of the more well know street artists and their backgrounds. We went to an outdoor Jamaican bar complete with sand and Jamaicans :P We went to Raw Temple – which used to be the main train station that was used for transporting munitions during the second world war so it had been heavily bombed. There were entire sections they deliberately left as they were after the war. The rest of the area had become and arts precinct. There were cafes, student bars, performing space and a large indoor skate park.
We went to a place that sold second hand clothing by the kilo, which was cool, and a place that brewed it’s own ‘proper’ absinthe.
My favourite part however was Tacheles. It was a building that the SS took over during the war and post war had been abandoned as the basement had been flooded by the SS to cover their tracks, it is still flooded to this day. Today, it is filled by art galleries of the craziest abstract art. There were some many things that you look at and go WTF? (Brian and Julie: what the fuck?). We bought some post cards here too, but it was too hard deciding what to get. Outside they had places where they were making stuff out of metal, there was someone welding the whole time we were there.
That night we went on the anti-pub crawl. It’s was 12 Euros and went to bars that were a little bit different. We went to a horror rock themed bar set up by one of the guys from Rammstein, a few smaller bars (one where we had to pay a deposit for our glasses) and then back to Raw Temple. We’d been there with Melissa on the Thursday and it was dead so we didn’t stay but this night it was absolutely ram packed. We stayed there for a few hours before calling it a night.
Wednesday June 10
Ruth
