TRAVELS IN BERLIN // DAY 3

Day threeeeee! On this day most of us were already quite tired, yet this day was our biggest yet with a lot of visits to fit into one day, and no coach! We were up and out of the hostel early and made our way via the Berlin underground system to our first stop, the German Resistance Museum.

After this the weather took another turn for the worse and started pouring with rain, but we still managed to run from the museum to the Reichstag and make it on time. The Reichstag is the government building of Germany, and is a key monument of history due to the Reichstag fire that occurred in 1933. Most of the exterior was rebuilt to match the original, and we got to go to the roof and see some very good views of Berlin.

The dome of the Reichstag has a spiral walkway and a very modern feel which I loved. The beautiful mirror sculpture was in the centre of the dome and was what we were walking around, and the ceiling of the dome had some lovely architecture too. I couldn't stop taking pictures so I had to limit how many mirror pictures I included, along with a few sneaky snaps of myself in the mirror and a couple of my pretty friends.

After this we got back onto the underground and made our way to the famous Berlin Olympic Stadium. This stadium was used in 1936 for the Olympics that were held in Berlin under Nazi Germany. We had a tour guide for our trip there, and got to see not only the stadium but the VIP and guest lounges, as well as changing rooms and the ice bath room. Much of the original architecture of the stadium is still there which is (although reminiscent of bad times in Germany) an amazing design! The interior however was redone for the 2006 World Cup, and so gives a nice contrast between old and new.

The group of us then travelled back to Alexanderplatz (after a good half an hour of searching for toilets) and finished off the day with a little look around the shops and markets. I've heard that the German Christmas markets are amazing, and these little huts reminded me of ones we have in London. If this market is here all year round then I can imagine the Christmas ones would have been incredible! After this we all had a huge tapas meal together and returned to the hostel for our last night.

P H O E B E. G R A C E //

TRAVELS IN BERLIN // DAY 2

Continuing with my short travels in Berlin, on the second day we had booked a coach, and so we went to a couple of places a little further out than Berlin.

 

Our first trip of the day was to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Many people know about the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, one of the most famous being Auschwitz in Poland. I myself have actually been to Auschwitz as well, and so coming to a second concentration camp gave me another sense of how big the holocaust was. Auschwitz was a death camp, meaning that almost everyone there was sent there specifically to die, whereas Sachenhausen was a work camp, where prisoners were forced to work to death.

 

I didn't take many pictures here, as I feel that sometimes it is better to see things with your eyes rather than through a lense, but I would strongly advice anyone with an interest to go to a concentration camp. It is very difficult to explain the experience, I would say it is eye-opening or that it brings the history to reality, and really makes you think. In my opinion, its important not to be ignorant of these things. The triangles you see on the tower below are representative of the red triangles that political prisoners of the Nazi regime had to wear stitched onto their uniforms. All prisoners were identified by numbers and coloured triangles, further removing their identities, such as homosexual prisoners having to wear pink triangles and Jews having to wear two yellow triangles to look like the star of David. The tower commemorating political prisoners was build by Russia in memory of many communists or Russians that would have been imprisoned in Sachenhausen.

After this rather dark morning, we took a rather more light hearted trip to the town of Potsdam. This is a town where the former monarchs of Germany till the end of World War One the Kaisers used to live; meaning huge castle/house type buildings, massive parks and statues!

Unfortunately the weather obviously didn't like us, and most of our park walk was filled with umbrellas breaking and my friends and I desperately trying to take pictures without rain damaging our cameras... but hey nothing is ever perfect! We had a nice time nonetheless. I particularly liked this picture of one of my lovely friends Lauren as well as some pictures of the statues.

We then found a cute little German café (if cafes can be German?) and had a lunch of toasted sandwiches and coffee, followed by the most amazing ice-cream ever; yeah it was raining, and cold, and windy, but the ice cream looked so good we could not pass it up! After returning to the hostel later on that evening we went out to a really nice Mexican restaurant and had such a good meal I forgot to take any pictures... opps.. you'll just have to trust me when I say it was a good end to the day!

See you soon for days 3 and 4! Also, hope you've had a Happy Easter!

P H O E B E. G R A C E //

TRAVELS IN BERLIN // DAY 1

I have recently returned from a brilliant 4 day trip to Berlin, where I have done so much walking I can't even explain! It has been a really, really good city holiday with loads of friends, and I plan on sharing my trip with you guys through the many pictures I took.

We left on Saturday morning at ridiculous o' clock (3am), got a coach to Gatwick airport, and an early flight off to Berlin. I LOVE flying, and take-off gets me super excited which proved highly entertaining for my friends sitting next to me. Once we'd arrived we got another coach to our 5 star hotel... I'm kidding, we stayed in a hostel... But there's nothing wrong with that and we had a brilliant time despite the lumpy pillows!

We then when to one of the most famous memorials in Berlin; the Berlin Wall. Along the way we looked at a couple of other things such as a huge red bricked bridge and the river that runs through Berlin, but the main attraction was the wall. Some of the graffiti on the wall is relatively modern, in contrast with the original writings and art. For any people who have no idea what the Berlin Wall is, it was the wall that separated East Germany which was controlled by the Russians, and West Germany which was controlled by the Americans after World War II. It is interesting walking through Berlin and constantly crossing between former Eastern and Western districts, as you can see the difference in architecture in places. The wall itself definitely expresses the sort of feelings the people of Berlin felt about being split up from the other half of their country.

We then walked along some more streets of Berlin, before we were to look at the memorial of the holocaust from Nazi Germany in World War II. I must mention that all of the people I went on this trip with study History at A-Level, and so our tour of Berlin had a lot of relevance to our topic of Germany from the reign of the Kaiser Reich from the late 1800s to the end of the Nazi Reich in 1945.

The memorial for the holocaust was so interesting, from the surface it simply looked like lots of equal concrete blocks, arranged in straight lines and all the same height apart from some lower ones at the edges. The uniformity of these blocks for me represented the victims of the holocaust loosing their identity's and individual thought. However, as you walked into the memorial, the ground became uneven, and began to get steeper and steeper, meaning that the blocks became taller and taller, and you became more disorientated despite the fact that these blocks were still ordered in straight lines. We agreed that this disorientation seemed to represent the way in which the victims must have felt increasingly lost and isolated in their time as prisoners in concentration camps. The architect Peter Eisenman certainly did a fantastic job with this relatively new memorial.

The group and I then wandered along more streets in the centre of Berlin passing some other monuments that we would visit on other days of the trip such as the Brandenburg gate and the Reichstag government building.

Here you can see a traffic light you might not recognise. This green man is called the Ampelmann and is special as it was the green traffic man used by Russian East Germany, meaning that you can always tell whether you're in former East or West Germany due to the difference in traffic man. This guy looks so cute with his little hat right!?

We then found a place to eat frickin' huge burgers because we we're starving, and paid a quick visit to the Ampelmann store. Hell yeah, they have a store for the cute traffic man and a website. As you can imagine we all went to bed in the hostel absolutely exhausted from doing so much in one day, but its definitely worth doing as much as possible and making the most of it when you're only in a city for a limited amount of time.

I'll keep uploading days 2, 3 and 4 in separate posts once I've edited them (which takes forever), and thanks so much for reading!

P H O E B E. G R A C E //