When we heard about the planned trip to Berlin I must confess most of us where quite disappointed. The field of study I was in granted students the choice between two languages (after Dutch, French and English): German of Spanish. My classmates and I had chosen the last option. As a result of that, we had hoped for a visit to Madrid or Barcelona... but Berlin it was.
Yet soon after arriving we found out that Berlin is a great place for culture, shopping and parties. During our visit the town seemed to be crowded by 'Alice kommt' advertisings.
They where absolutely everywhere. On billboards, public transport, in Newspapers, against the fronts of buildings... You just couldn't miss it. We never found out what these ads where really about, as the posters didn't give any explanation. Therefore, our trip started and ended with the mystery called Alice.
We stayed in a cheap residence just outside of the city centre. Here clichés were confirmed: the food was horrible! After the first dinner we all rushed to the nearest shop to buy our own snacks (and drinks), and we made sure we had a good lunch in town to be able to skip dinner.
What I remember most about this trip is Checkpoint Charlie, and honestly, I don't know why. The place is so weird. Today (luckily) cars just carelessly drive over the crossroad, and all that is left of history is a picture of a soldier, placed in the middle of the street.
A little further stands the official announcement, that says: You are now leaving the American sector, in three languages. That's all for the checkpoint really. And yet it's an odd image I won't ever forget. I guess life moves on indeed. In Berlin it certainly does.
Of course many things in this city are reminders of the world war. Lots of monuments honour the deaths or try to make us remember the horrible events of that time. The pieces of the Berlin wall I saw where the most devastating. Though you know that wall has been there for a long time, and everyone has seen movies and pictures about it in his live, being able to stand before those remains really touches you. It suddenly transforms it from something you've only heard of to something real, something that actually happened. And you are able to feel the pain divided friends and families must have felt. That wall was such an awful thing...
We mainly discovered Berlin wandering around. A lot of monuments are to be seen, such as the destroyed church in the hart of the city and the beautiful parlement. We also went to visit East Berlin and an old soviet prison that locked away people who tried to run from the regime. Our guide was a man who himself had been a prisoner there. No need to tell you that his stories where striking and really personal. It hit us all badly, and the bus ride back to the hotel was extremely quite that day.
The concentration camp of Sachsenhousen was another visit that made us all silent. I have lived in Belgium all my life and so I grew up with stories about this war, told to me by my grandparents, my teachers, the media, and so forth and so on. And yet, even though I know quite much about all this facts, reality hits me each time again. You can't say you know about what happened back then until you witnessed those camps, until you touched the gates so many killed innocent people touched. Until you walked that ground to hear the wind haunt between the prison walls. No schoolbooks could tell or teach this tragic. It is a feeling you get, one that rushes over you and sticks with you for live. At least I hope it sticks that long. I don't ever want to forget.
The last evening of our stay we went to see 'The blue men show'. This is an amazing interactive theatre spectacle, which central performances are all about percussion and music. Of course there also was our goodbye party downtown Berlin...
What you really have to do when visiting Germans capital or Germany in general is eating some patisserie. I ordered a piece of cheesecake ones and what I got was simply indescribable. It was huge and soooo delicious. Germans are known (at least in Belgium) as people who can't cook anything but sausages and sauerkraut, yet drink litres of bear. But last but not least, they are also known for the lovely cakes they bake, and I can only confirm. I had my piece in a small take away bar, located in the main street of East Berlin.
