Walking around Berlin
NXX couldn’t spend the first afternoon with us because of school, so she sent us on a free walking tour of Berlin. Our guide was really interesting, full of amusing stories and anecdotes, but unfortunately our energy wasn’t focused as much on him as trying to not drop dead in the cold. It was -6ºC for those who’re interested – very harsh conditions for the average Singaporean born and bred.
The cold also explains the shoddy quality of the following photos – more often than not we just snapped and hurried along; towards the end our tour (note i used our and not the, you’ll find out why later) we just shut down and stopped taking pictures completely. Obviously we’ve got our priorities right, we value our life more than pretty photos. We are sensible people. Woooo.
The tour started at the Parisier Platz, home to the famous Brandenburg Gate and also the French and American embassies. Apparently the head of the goddess in the restored quadriga on the Gate has been slightly tilted eastward towards the French Embassy to ‘keep an eye on the French’, Germany’s traditional adversaries. Mmm German humour.
On the other end of the square was Hotel Adlon, one of the finest hotels in Europe during the inter-war period, but more recently (by recently I mean in the last decade) in the news because Michael Jackson infamously dangled his son out of one of their windows.
We then checked out the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe (more simply known as the Holocaust Memorial). Wiki says that the memorial ‘represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman [the memorial’s architect] did not use any symbolism’ and was ‘designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason’.
I’m no art analyst, but I think I could see the parallels that Eisenman was trying to draw as I trudged (ok fine, slid) through the memorial’s snowy corridors. Sadly, I think its significance is easily lost on people who don’t know better about the controversy surrounding the mindsets of the Nazi perpetrators in the Third Reich.
Part of a mural which idealises communism at the old Luftwaffe HQ. I think this genre of art is classified as socialist realism.
Tiny part of what’s left of the Berlin Wall. Heaps unimpressive, the fact that it wasn’t even in its original Cold War position didn’t help.
A replica of the Checkpoint Charlie guardhouse, blocked by a huge christmas tree.
At this juncture – 1.5 hours into the tour – Z and I were frozen to the bone and utterly miserable. So we left the pack, ducked into a mall along Friedrichstrasse and indulged in some retail therapy and pie to ward off the cold. :)
Lastly, here’s a list of the places covered by the free walking tour (which runs everyday! i highly recommend it) that we missed because of our early departure:
- The Reichstag
- The 17. June Memorial
- The Former SS Headquarters
- Gendarmenmarkt
- Bebelplatz
- The Book Burning Memorial
- The Old Royal Boulevard
- Neue Wache
- The TV Tower
- Museum Island
