FALL SKETCH TRIP Part 1: Berlin, Germany

Berlin's TV Tower, the tallest structure in Germany

The week before last was a whirlwind of traveling and exploring in which I didn't get much sleep and certainly didn't do much homework.  Now that I'm beginning to recuperate, I can recount some memories from my adventures throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

The fall sketch trip was a week-long break during which we were able to split into groups and travel wherever we wanted and do whatever we wanted, given that we turn in a thorough sketching assignment afterwards.  I joined up with my friends Allie, Natalie, Shachi, Kara, Andrea, Hyein, and Sam to plan an epic voyage into the east.  (Planning the trip was exhausting and frustrating, but fortunately, I now feel very comfortable taking care of my own travel arrangements and finding cheap deals.)  So after class on Friday, October 22, I hastily packed my bags and cleaned up the apartment before heading off with my 7 girlfriends to Berlin, Germany.

Even with the strikes occurring in Paris, we wound our way over to the Paris Nord (North) train station from Versailles.  Those of us who opted to take the train there (Bus ride? Heck no.) settled into our seats for a 3-hour ride to Mannheim.  We hung out there for an hour or so before transferring onto the overnight train that would take us to Berlin.  After a cozy 5 or 6 hours on the sleeper train -- we didn't even have beds, but the seats looked like the reclining pods from Wall-E -- a new day had begun and we suddenly found ourselves in Berlin's ultra-modern Hauptbahnhof station.

It was too early to function properly, so like any good Americans, we camped out at the station's fancy McDonald's for almost 2 hours while eating breakfast and waiting for the day to really begin.  When we finally ventured out into the cold, all we could see was a vast park and river sprawled out before us, dotted with some modern buildings here and there.  Walking towards a tower in the distance seemed like a good idea, so we wandered that way for a bit until we were able to orient ourselves.  After getting some better directions, we learned that we were standing right in front of the Reichstag, the center of Germany's government, from which we were able to walk a block over to the famous Brandenburger Tor.  Admiring the grandeur of Berlin's classical-looking architecture, we strolled down one of its main avenues, Unter den Linden.  We soon came across the Museum Island and the beautiful Berliner Dom church.  Since we were waiting for our friends from the bus to arrive, we sat and sketched the church for a while.

The Brandenburg Gate

The Berliner Dom church and the TV Tower

To find our hostel, we had to wander quite a ways into East Berlin; it was a long but pretty hike.  Some of the surrounding buildings seemed rather cold, and I felt like I could sense the recent presence of Communism in the area, but the neighborhood was filled with gorgeous parks.  We soon found The Generator, a huge hostel that was full of young international people, and put our things away before heading out to lunch.

Having heard that the Alexanderplatz was a popular place in town, we took the train there to see what it was all about.  Situated right beneath Berlin's giant TV spire, the Alexanderplatz was full of shopping centers and little food stands.  We headed over to the outdoor Heineken restaurant where I couldn't help but get some currywurst and a radler of beer again... how I missed Munich!  After that, I was in full-fledged German culture mode for the next 3 days and loved every second of every meal I ate there.

One of the first things we wanted to do in Berlin was take the New Europe free tour so we could see the whole city, learn a lot about it, and then choose where to return later.  I'd had a good experience with the company elsewhere, so I had high hopes for the Berlin tour: and I was not let down.  Our tour guide was Gareth, a nice British guy, and he could not have been any better at bringing Berlin's rich history to life.  Unlike other European cities, Berlin's twentieth-century history gave the tour a dimension of seriousness and gravity that you just don't get anywhere else.  I came away understanding just how important this city was in shaping world events over the past 100 years.  The tour wasn't about looking at pretty architecture or pointing out medieval ruins: what we saw were places where Nazis and Communists once reigned, places filled with modern architecture because almost nothing survived all the wars.  Memories of the horrors that took place here still pervaded the air -- but at the same time, the city felt energetic with a new will to overcome its past.

The massive Holocaust Memorial

One of the first things we saw on the tour was the Holocaust Memorial.  This was definitely the best memorial I've ever seen -- it was a series of gray blocks leading deeper and deeper into a maze-like area that sprawled over a vast space.  We walked through and it was pretty disorienting; it really served as a place for quiet reflection.  Almost too fittingly, we then crossed the street and stood upon the spot where Adolf Hitler's last bunker once existed.  It was very eerie to learn about his last days and his suicide right where it all occurred... that was certainly no boring history book lesson.  Gareth gave us some rather shocking information when he told us about the pristine Nazi bunker that had just been discovered nearby by a construction crew in 2006.  He explained that Germany's Nazi history is still such a touchy subject that they couldn't decide what to do with the bunker full of memorabilia: make it a museum or destroy it completely?  They were so uncertain that they actually sealed the bunker off and postponed the decision for 50 years.  We also saw two of the last remaining examples of Nazi architecture: a train station with bullet-holes still seen all over the facade; and the Luftwaffe headquarters building, which was later used as the Communists' headquarters.  Around the back was the building where the Nazis organized all of their propaganda and controlled the media.  Here's a "fun fact" we learned, if you can call anything about World War Two "fun": when the Nazis were busy sending Jewish people off to concentration camps from that train station, they drank a whole lot of Coca Cola.  But Coke didn't want to get a bad reputation by being too closely associated with them, so it created a brand new drink just for the Nazis: Fanta.  An even worse fact: the Nazis had to purchase a ticket for every single person they were sending off to camps... so they actually tried to take advantage of the fact that children rode for free.  Yeah.

Remnants of the Berlin Wall

A few blocks away was the unavoidable Berlin Wall.  It wasn't very tall or even very thick, but Gareth painted a pretty good picture of how scary it would have been to come within even 200 yards of the wall during the Cold War.  We then walked down to Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point between East and West Berlin, which was considered to be one of the most tense places in the world at the time.  After seeing a few other sites and hearing Gareth's dramatic retelling of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we grabbed a traditional meal at the Kartoffelhaus (a potato restaurant).  It was a long day, full of heavy food and emotionally heavy stories, so I fell asleep pretty early that night.

On Sunday morning we paid to go on a more specific tour that focused solely on the Third Reich's history in Berlin, which gave us even more interesting information on World War II history.  What interested me most were Hitler's plans to rebuild Berlin as a new Rome, hoping to become the next Julius Caesar and laying out plans for some monumental architecture (he was going to build a triumphal arch 3 times bigger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris!).  Later in the day, after doing a lot of walking around, we all got different dinners in the Hackeshermarkt area.  It had ton of lively outdoor restaurants, so Sam and I got some sausages, wine, and sauerkraut at the Weihenstephaner.  We topped off the night by visiting the old Princess' Palace, which featured the most amazing dessert café I've ever seen.  I scarfed down some cheesecake and coffee, even managing to talk to the waitress in German!

Hackeschermarkt at night

A standard German meal... about 10 times better than it looks!

On Monday, our last day in the city, we knew we had to get to work and start some sketches.  We stood in line outside the Reichstag for at least an hour and a half -- it's Berlin's top tourist attraction -- and after security made our way up to Norman Foster's glass dome sitting atop it.  This was a really cool piece of architecture, both structurally and symbolically.  Foster's idea was to allow the common people to look down into Germany's government assembly, representing the new steps forward Germany has recently taken to make its government completely transparent.  The dome itself was very cool, featuring a double helix ramp about an upturned cone at the center.

The Reichstag 

After sketching for a while, we split up for the afternoon.  I went alone to wander in West Berlin near the Zoologischer Garten, which had lots of cool shopping and restaurants.  We explored one more museum that afternoon and then found one last German meal at an authentic little place near the Hackeschermarkt again.  We returned to The Generator for some fun karaoke and drinks at its bar, which was full of high school and college kids, where we ran into some of our friends who had just arrived in Berlin.  I couldn't last for long though, and I crashed in the comfy bunk bed for one last time.