Berlin, Germany

I stayed in Berlin for one more day to see friends and recover.

Tuesday

The sleeper train cabin was a nice experience and I slept decently well, although I woke up too many times to count this as a full night.

On arrival, I’m tempted to go back immediately: over the span of my 12 hour ride, we’ve gone from a very sunny 31 degrees to a rainy and windy 7 degrees, and my already-sick body does not enjoy this. At all.

At Berlin Hauptbahnhof, I get slightly confused on where to go (the place is huge) to catch a tram, but eventually figure out that unlike the S-Bahnen, the trams are on a plaza outside.

I buy a public transportation pass which includes a discount on a bunch of places in the city, the Berlin WelcomeCard. (When I come back from the trip, I might make a few calculations to be sure, but I think it was a good choice. Given the weather and the sheer size of Berlin, cycling wasn’t an enticing option.)

My first thought is this: Berlin is an island of gay in my incredibly straight trip until now. It’s a real breath of fresh air to see people of all gender presentations, and some skin tone diversity as well, on the street.

My second thought is that Berlin seems to be very enthusiastic about gigantic, and fairly empty, plazas everywhere. It’s also very green.

Alexanderplatz has a really cool world clock, which I’d very much like to transpose, as a smaller version, to my home office.

I start my stay with the DDR Museum, which the online guides seem to all rave about.

It’s probably a nice place, but it’s horribly overcrowded. I can never stand in front of a sign long enough to read it (I’m a slow reader in German!) without being pushed aside by a very noisy family, and I can barely dream of putting my hands on the « super-interactive exhibition » that got all the reviewers so excited. Even in the bathroom, there seems to be half a class of teenagers shouting.

The thing with interactive museums is that they’re great, if they’re spacious enough and have enough crowd control to allow us to enjoy the interaction.

My experience of the DDR Museum is therefore pretty negative, and I don’t recommend it, although it seemed nice.

I almost freeze to death waiting for the bus, which brings me to a ramen place that my friend Jill recommended I visit. I need y’all to understand one thing: in a world where we have to rate everything and where I assume all reviews are fake, I will cross half of Berlin to eat Japanese food if it’s recommended to me by a human being who I know is human and trustworthy. Also, the ramen is the best I’ve ever had.

I then take the U-Bahn to the central section of the city and go see the Brandenburger Tor.

I find it really hard to walk around and see great things in Berlin. Maybe it’s because it’s so spread out, or because it’s hard to find a truly historical element in most of the places – there are nuggets of wonderful, as I’ll find out on Thursday, but my Tuesday is pretty underwhelming.

In the mid-afternoon, I go to my hotel, New Berlin, in Friedrichshain. If you have the budget for it, I highly recommend it as I had a wonderful experience altogether there. I decide to enjoy the luxurious room and not to exert myself more: I want to feel good for dinner with my friends on Thursday!

It’s an easy and sweet afternoon at the hotel, then.

Stats

• Steps: 13 876
• Train: 12h05, 2288km total

Wednesday

I wake up in a good mood, enjoy a truly exceptional breakfast, and then go to Jill’s place: she’ll be housing me on her green velvet couch for the next two days. (I’ll rank my favourite beds in the recap post, probably. Just know this couch is far from last on the list.)

I’m still tired and a bit ill, and I really don’t feel like visiting Berlin at all, especially since Jill lives pretty far away from the city center (a poor excuse as the public transportation network is stellar, but hey). The city is beautiful and nice, but it feels like a « would love to live there » city, not a « tourism » city, if that makes sense.

So I decide to keep on resting to truly enjoy my Thursday in town.

In the evening, I change my mind and hop on an S-Bahn to the city center, to eat Currywurst at the very least.

I walk past Checkpoint Charlie. There’s not much to say, and truly nothing that I can show and that isn’t that one photo of Checkpoint Charlie that everyone takes, so I didn’t bother photographing it.

I then eat a highly gentrified Currywurst from a poutine place. Against all odds, it’s pretty good.

I also notice the pink tubes running all over the city, and after a quick search on the Internet, I find out that they mostly just carry water through the city. They look cool!

Most importantly, on that evening, I walk by a gym that’s also a bar and also a Lululemon store. I thought these only existed in American TV shows and I get thoroughly confused.

Stats

• Steps: 9 359
• Friends: 1

Thursday

All the rest really did the trick: I’m feeling good today, and ready to roam across the city!

I forget my sunglasses, but the sun stays out for about three minutes before disappearing anyway.

I consider going to the TV tower (Fernsehturm) for the view from above, then remember what the « view from above » looks like at the Eiffel tower (plastic sheets scratched to the point of near-opaqueness and people elbowing you to get closer) and decide against it.

Instead, I grab bus 200 to Potsdamer Platz. Buses 100, 200 and 300 are almost tourist buses, honestly. They go to a bunch of great places and I live my best life just sitting there and going across town – I recommend it for cheap but enjoyable fun. (I even found a website that had a free audioguide that you can listen to while going from one end to another of bus 100, which I find hilarious and cool but have not tried out.)

Anyway: I go to Potsdamer Platz.

My only goal at that point is to visit the Spy Museum (Spionagemuseum), because my sister said she really liked it.

The museum is, in fact, very fun and instructive, with a great balance between information dumps and small games. They also strongly control the number of people visiting at any given time (good) and use dynamic surge pricing (bleh), which means you never have to queue for long before you’re at the game stand.

They also make a whole point of finishing the tour by talking about tech companies owning all our data, but you can only use their wifi through Facebook login. Heh.

One thing that makes the visit less enjoyable is that I forgot my word book. My word book is a very small notepad (A6 format) in which I write down all the German words I see and want to check out the meaning of. When I get home, I whip out QuickDic, my Wiktionary-based dictionary app, and check them all, entering the relevant ones into Anki while I’m at it. It allows me to read the signs in German, try to understand with context, pull out the interesting words, then read the English sign, without being glued to my phone. Here, I have to look up all the words as I go, making the visit substantially longer than it would have been otherwise – not that I’m complaining, as the visit is fun.

There’s a giant mall with a food court on Potsdamer Platz, so I eat food court currywurst, which is worse than gentrified poutine currywurst, but still not bad.

Still on the same plaza, there’s the The Wall exhibition, a tiny one-room museum with a very, very detailed audioguide.

I ask for a ticket. The man at the counter hands me my audioguide (« I already set it to French, hehe ») and then compliments me on my German. I point out that I stammered twice when asking for the ticket. He answers « yes, but your German is excellent for a French person in Berlin: you’re trying, at least », which fills me with more shame about being French than pride about my language skills.

The audioguide is intense. There are over 20 segments, most of them between 5 and 10 minutes long. The exhibition has a few objects on display, and mostly photos with explanation text. It’s very didactic, not interactive at all, and I love it. The narration is excellent. The explanations are extremely detailed and really go through chronological order, giving all the context one would need to understand the situation and the history of the Berlin wall and of the DDR in general. This is by far my favourite visit of the trip, and it wasn’t even written down anywhere in the tourist guides.

The exhibition mentions the last watchtower of the wall, which is apparently right next to Potsdamer Platz. I walk around the plaza twice and never find it. Ooops.

My Potsdamer Platz adventure is now finally coming to an end: I walk towards the Brandenburger Tor again, aiming for a walk at the Tiergarten and a long trip to the restaurant my friends and I are meeting at.

On the way to the Tiergarten, I walk past the Holocaust Memorial. I didn’t know how to feel about this, didn’t know of a respectful way of engaging with it, and didn’t plan to visit it – but it’s here, so I do.

It hits hard.

I’ve seen a million photos of this place, and I know about it. But today is a cold and sunny day, and as I start walking towards the core of the memorial, the sun is hidden by the tombs and… well, it works.

It takes me a minute to adjust to being in the cute and green Tiergarten after this.

After a while, it’s still to early to go to the restaurant and I’m not sure what to do… until I see Ritter Sport Schokowelt on my map.

(Context here: Ritter Sport is a chocolate brand. When I lived in Munich, 15 years ago, I had a… Ritter Sport problem. It only got solved by moving back to a country that doesn’t have Ritter Sport.)

When I get there, I expect something like a mini-museum and a place where you can sample all of the different tastes, like in most food-based company « museums ».

This is just a giant shop.

But it’s Ritter Sport.

So I embrace the scam and buy Ritter Sport.

Dammit.

At last, by the time I’m done drinking my Ritter Sport Marzipan mini-chocolate and my (frankly bad) tea, it’s time to embark on the 300 bus and go meet my friends.

But the exploration is not over: bus 300 goes all along the East Side Gallery, the name given to the big stop of the Berlin Wall still standing and decorated by dozens of artists of very different styles. It’s gorgeous.

Jill has a cold and needs to rest, so she stays at home, but I still get to have a wonderful dinner at Aleppo Supper Club with Eduardo and Saba. Jill, Edu and Saba are three ex-colleagues and I love them all so, so much. I’ve missed them terribly and this dinner feels like coming home. It’s soft and sweet.

One note to finish the day: German people are taller than French people on average. But more importantly, this ATM was terribly designed.

Stats

• Steps: 13 127
• Friends: 3

To Munich

I celebrate the beginning of my trip to Munich by embarking on another step of my Croissant Crimes journey. Here’s a Wurst-Croissant, bought at Le Crobag.

• Previous stop: Budapest, Hungary
• Full trip
• Next stop: Munich, Germany