Berlin

The first couple weeks of 2010 were very cold ones for London. There were below 0 temperatures and snow. Not satisfied with the coldness of London I ventured to even colder climes and had a weekend in Berlin.
I have been to Berlin before, but only for a day trip out of Hamburg, and it was almost 2 years ago now. An old friend from Australia was to be studying there for a few weeks and it was a good excuse to catch up and get back to Berlin. We had grand plans to explore the city.
About 8 inches of snow inconveniently lying on the ground and temperatures about -6C put paid to most of our outdoor exploring. So we headed indoors. Our first stop was the Museum of Berlin. The museum starts off with a rather messily laid out medieval history of the city (or it could have been that the info was just lost in translation) and rapidly drags you into the early 20th century. The real interest of the museum begins with Berlin in the 1920s. The grand hotels of Potsdamer Platz, the vibrant and lascivious lives of the city’s wealthy elite and the struggle of the poor caused by reparations following the First World War all set the scene for the events to follow in the 1930s and 40s.
As part of your entry into the museum you get a guided tour of a nuclear bunker beneath the museum. Built in 1974 as a civil defence facility in the old West Berlin, the bunker was capable of housing 3,500 people on a first come first served basis. When opened it was fully stocked with beds and supplies but was quickly converted into an underground car park. It was estimated that it would take 2 weeks to remove the cars and prepare the bunker for use in an ‘emergency’. You wouldn’t be staking your life on the bunker I should think.
It has now been re-fitted with bunks and equipment for tourist purposes. There were very few toilet and shower facilities and with recirculated air it would have been a very hot, humid and unhealthy place with 3,500 people at home.
Having built an appetite climbing in an out of the bunker, and generally trudging through ice and snow we picked our way along the icy pavements to a café recommended in my guidebook. Called the Wintergarden at the Literature House (the name seems to lose something in translation), we dined on German sausage and potato salad and local white while looking out over a snow covered garden. It was all very warm and civilised.
In deference to the cold we retired to Friedrichstrasser and admired the fancy shops along a few blocks closest to my hotel and one particularly large and warm looking department store lured us in with the prospect of hot chocolate and cake.
One of the big problems with winter is Europe is the shortness of the days. In January it’s not light much before 8am and dark by 4:30pm or earlier if it’s a cloudy day. The approaching darkness and further dropping temperature chased us home. We had intended to try and get tickets to the Opera (my friend Georgia being an opera singer and all), but we were for some reason tired from what was in reality not a very big day and decided to get some dinner locally. There was a pub on the corner – a Lowenbrau Brauhaus to be precise – and we fell in there with the intention of having a pint while we figured out where to eat.
It was a large open and pretty well charmless establishment with too much space and too few staff and it was pretty much full! We squeezed into one of the few tables that was free and found ourselves beside a large – very large – group of people dressed in what we guessed was traditional local dress.
We ordered a couple of pints and a menu was put in front of us. We were told that food would take almost an hour to be served due to the large crowd. We drank our first pint, failed to think of anywhere better we might go for dinner and so, despite a long wait for food, slow service and a large crowd of Germans in braces rapidly becoming inebriated beside us, we stayed, ordered food and another pint.
The night wore on. We drank more beer, our food came – it was very good, we drank more beer, the Germans drank more beer and began to sing, the Germans drank more beer and started unpacking their musical instruments, the Germans struck up a brass band in the middle of the restaurant, the Germans started to dance to the brass band in the middle of the restaurant, we all drank more beer. All in all it turned out to be a very good evening. The Germans turned out to be Bavarian – so not quite local to Berlin, but the played, danced and sang very well and entertained Georgia and I no end.
The next morning dawned cloudy, cold and threatening to snow. We had decided to head to Potsdamer Platz. We travelled on the metro and emerging from the station we were hit by a chill breeze blowing across the open expanse of the plaza and swirling about the shiny new office towers and hotels build in what was until 1989, the no-mans-land of the Berlin Wall. It is now a steel, glass, concrete and granite tribute to the economic state of Germany at the turn of the 21st century. I rather wish I have seen it at the turn of the last century when it was a bustling intersections lined with grand hotels, luxurious department stores and plush theatres. A tiny portion of the Hotel Esplanade has been incorporated into the new Sony Centre. Behind a curtain of 21st century glass stands the decrepit grandeur of the Kaisersaal where Wilhelm II once held ‘gentlemen’s evenings’ with his friends, and women who were not their wives...
Potsdamer Platz is no place to be standing about in the middle of winter so we started the short walk to the Brandenburg Gate. It took half an hour on the icy and slippery pavements. We had enough warmth left in our hands to take a couple of photos of the Jewish Memorial on the way past and the Gate itself before collapsing into a Starbucks for a hot chocolate. We were lucky enough to score seats at a bench with a superb view of the Brandenburg Gate and figured it was a damn site better sitting in a warm café looking at it that out in the street with cold feet.
And then it started to snow.
My intention had been to walk back to the hotel from here via Unter den Linden the main boulevard leading from the Brandenburg Gate into the centre of Berlin and then down Friedrichstrasser finding a nice café for lunch on the way. The snow changed those plans. I again consulted my guide book and found a nice restaurant for lunch called Café Einstein. We hailed a cab and headed into the suburbs. Café Einstein proved to be just a delightful as the previous day’s lunch. Another grand old house converted to a restaurant and serving good German food. Although, I think I have eaten quite enough potato for awhile…
The snow got heavier as the afternoon progressed and as I got closer to the airport and my flight back to London. It was with some relief that my flight was on time … and was even more of a relief to arrive back in London and find the temperature 10 degrees warmer!