The Jetpacker

We love finding quirky things in places you least expect.  This morning we ate breakfast in a pastry chain called Kamps after determining that pastries are the only thing one can eat for breakfast in Germany.  When we sat down to enjoy our croissants, apple strudel and tea, we noticed this interesting memorial to the Berlin Wall.

The display was called “1 Million Stories” even though it was really just one.  The disjointed story was etched on a small-scale model of the wall, and from what I gather it was about a kid whose family was divided by the wall.  Now we’ve just got to find the 999,999 other displays.

Just down the street is Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous crossing point between East and West Germany.  Remember seeing those photos in your history book of the stand-off between Soviet and American tanks at the Berlin Wall?  This is where it happened.

This is also where many people tried to escape the tyranny of the East for the freedom of the West.  Some succeeded, some failed, and some even died trying.

The Checkpoint Charlie museum chronicles all of the known escape attempts, even showing some of the devices used to traverse the wall like balloons and fake uniforms.  But the museum was unanimously panned by guidebooks and reviews on the web, so we saved €15 a piece and read about the wall at the open-air exhibit down the street.

Just past the replica guard house featuring signs with pictures of actors portraying Soviet and American guards, there’s a series of walls with pictures and details about the checkpoint, the events that led to the tank stand-off, escape attempts and eventually the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.

We even walked along a cobblestone trail where the wall once stood.

That led us to the second-longest preserved stretch of the Berlin Wall, near the site where the headquarters of the SS and Gestapo once existed in Nazi Germany.  Look at how thin the wall was…

This area has become known as the Topography of Terror, an exhaustive outdoor museum that details the frightening practices of the Nazis.

I’ve gotta give it to Berlin… they not only reflect on their dark history openly, but they urge visitors to join them.  And they make it free to do so.

The only problem is that it’s hard to appreciate these massive open-air exhibits when it’s freezing.  Had it been warmer and had we brought those handy fold-out chairs, we could have spent a few more hours at the Topography of Terror.

From there, we headed to the Jewish Museum, which has become one of the most popular museums in Germany since it opened in 2001.

The slanted pillars in front of the museum form the Garden of Exile.

It’s easy to see why. The design alone was worth a visit.  The zigzag shaped building resembles a shattered Star of David with its jagged windows and lines piercing the silver shell of the main building.  It can be very disorienting inside the museum, with its crisscrossing, twisting and shrinking corridors.

But, surprisingly, the museum isn’t all avant-garde or doom-and-gloom.  In fact, it’s a really fun place to learn about a religion and a people that are often misunderstood.

The cleverly designed exhibits present information about the history and evolution of the Jews, demystifying traditions and destroying stereotypes with easy to understand information.

Our favorite exhibits were the interactive ones: writing a wish on a paper pomegranate and placing it in a tree, building synagogues out of blocks, and dropping coins into a spiral funnel that represents the Jew’s history of charity.

What I wanted to discover most was the origins of Jewish persecution.  Early into the tour, we found a placard called “The Jew as Scapegoat.”  It talked about how Jewish persecution began in the 13th century when rumors surfaced after a boy’s death that Jews needed blood for religious rituals.

That led to the murder of many Jews throughout Europe.  And it only got worse when they were blamed for poisoning wells that started the Plague in 1347.  The false accusations followed Jews from that point on.

The most poignant exhibit in the museum, for me at least, were glass cases shaped like humans, and inside there were pictures and mementos remembering holocaust victims.  It was a sobering experience to see a shell of a human who is only remembered by the few items they left behind.

We spent hours at the Jewish Museum, and easily could have spent the whole day there.  It’s probably the most engaging museum we’ve ever visited.

On the way to the subway, we walked across stone tablets featuring quotes from some of the world’s great thinkers.  It was called the Path of Visionaries and I’m surprised so many tourists didn’t even notice what they were walking on.

Just before we got to the station, we heard some German people loudly arguing.  Now, I know in America, comedians and TV shows mock the German language as if every word sounds angry.

But we noticed that the stereotype didn’t fit.  The language actually sounded fun and playful… Until I heard those people arguing.

At that point, I realized that an angry German sounds absolutely frightening.  Even a mildly irritated German would freak me out after hearing how harsh the German language can be.

On the other hand, there are some languages that just don’t evoke fear.  Take, for instance, French.  No matter how mad a French person gets, no matter how much they yell and shoot daggers out of their eyes, you can’t take their anger seriously.  It just sounds too funny.

Case in point, mere moments after overhearing angry German people, we came upon a little spat that a French couple was having.  The guy, we can only assume, was being all snarky and he kept saying “oui” with real attitude.

“Oui!?  OUI!?”  He had the most serious look on his face, but I couldn’t for the life of me take him seriously.  French just doesn’t sound threatening.  German can.  And that is why I will never so much as inconvenience a German.

Anyway, it was time for lunch.  We went to the Gendarmenmarkt, one of the most famous squares in Berlin.

We stopped into a tiny bistro to eat, and when I say it was tiny, I mean t…i…n…y.  This place was only big enough to accommodate about 15 people shoulder-to-shoulder.  It was like eating in a walk-in closet.

The menu wasn’t extensive and the smell of hot sausages from the Christmas market outside was hypnotic, so we had a small lunch consisting of three soups. The strangest was the hotpot: a thick pea soup with chunks of bacon and a whole sausage.

The meal worked better as a rest for our feet and a temporary escape from the cold than a satiating dining experience.

And that’s why we immediately made a bee-line to the sausage stand after paying the bill.  There’s no better way to defeat cold than with a hot sausage and a steaming cup of hot wine.

After raising our body temperature like ten degrees and getting mildly tipsy in the process, we went to the German Cathedral.

This impressive church was almost completely destroyed in WWII and only recently rebuilt.  Today it houses a free exhibit on German parliamentary history…

But what we really wanted to do was climb the massive spiral staircase all the way to the top.

It took some serious soul-searching, but eventually we agreed to do it, the only caveats being that we had to take breaks often and we had to finish the journey no matter how long it took.

Well, four minutes into this leg-cramping, lung-burning, eye-sweating exercise, we hit a wall.  Not the figurative wall that marathoners hit –

A real wall. About five stories up.

I was proud that we had even made it that far, but honestly I felt like with another hour of trudging up those stairs, we could’ve made it to the top.  Nonetheless, it was a sad reminder that I need to use the Stairmaster more often.

By this point Jackie had been itching to do something slightly girly, so we went to Galeries Lafayette.  We had been to the original store in Paris and I was hoping to see something similar to that store’s amazing dome.

Instead, the Berlin store has an upside-down dome.  That’s right, at the center of the store was an intimidating glass funnel that led to a hole to nothingness.

It was actually a little scary looking over the railing into the funnel.  What would happen if you fell in?  Would you disappear into a black hole?  The possibilities are mind-boggling.

On our way out of the store, we came across a piece of the Berlin Wall.  For all the affluent girls who frequent Galeries Lafayette, it’s sad to think that this might be the extent of their historical knowledge.

When it came time for dinner, we decided to head to Potsdamer Platz and stroll through the Christmas market with its ice mountain inner tube ride.  This area was once divided by the Berlin Wall, but today it’s a bustling business and entertainment district.

The popular draw is the Sony Center, with its spider-like canopy covering restaurants and shops.  Surprisingly, there wasn’t much selection, and what they did have was really expensive.

So we went to a cool Asian restaurant nearby called Coa.  It reminded me a lot of Wagamama with its interesting little pan-Asian concoctions like corn, crab and coconut soup.

Just outside, there was another Berlin Wall memorial that documented the last vestiges of the wall’s existence.

It started to feel like there were wall memorials everywhere.  But that actually put things in perspective.

Berlin feels so united that it’s hard to imagine a wall ever dividing this amazing city.

How does that happen anyway?  How do you even split a city that’s existed for almost a thousand years?  People going through divorce can’t even agree on who gets what, so how do you divorce a city?  “Here, you take that landmark, I’ll take this one”?

So far Berlin is like a good movie: it’s answered some questions, but raised many others.  Maybe the answers are out there, but it might take another visit to find them.