DAYS 26-28 ICH BIN EINE JAM DONUT, Um..BERLINER

WEDNESDAY OCT 12TH
Well, I wish I was a Jam Donut. Wow.

That's all I can say. The political melting pot, the hotspot of major world events, the architecturally splendid cityscape, the place where it all happened, and is still arguably the most happening place in Europe....And we've seen it. For two and a half desperately short days. BERLIN.

Pergamon Museum

Jana arranged another private ride to Berlin from Dresden. If you're ever in Germany, and you speak German (or better still, are good friends with some Germans) you can make use of an excellent travelling web tool http://www.mitfahrzentrale.de/ where you find people who are driving between towns and you formally hitch a ride, usually for a paltry 20 Euros to cover fuel. There's usually no shortage of rides available as many drivers use it to help lessen the pain of high European fuel prices.

Berliner Dom

Poor Jana. She has been twice to Australia and we've gotten to know her quite well in that time, as a typical German with a soft center. She works very hard on a career and isolates herself as a result. We know she wanted to spend more time with us but gets driven very hard by the job.

After our sad goodbyes we headed off to Berlin with our appointed driver (another Sebastian) and one other "web-hitchhiker". We sure got our 20 Euro's worth- Sebastian was an excellent tour guide and commentator who made the trip interesting in his Volvo.

He showed us all the weird, failed economic projects of Eastern Germany on the autobahn from Dresden to Berlin. Including; what was planned as a massive Zeppelin manufacturing plant, now a health resort, and my favourite, the Euro Speedway Lausitzring, right on the A86. It has had few major motorsport events since Alex Zanardi misplaced both legs in a nasty crash. Although, there was a round of the fledgeling A1 GP Nations Series there on the same day I was killing my feet in Saxony Switzerland with Jana the bushwalking freak. No, I cannot believe I didn't go either. It must have escaped my notice.

Neue Synagoge, OranienburgerStrasse. Like all Jewish property, guarded by police. We were told, sadly, they are still neccessary after all these years. Any police protection is funded by the state of Brandenburg

And, as we motored along the Autobahns of Brandenburg, probably the flattest land in Germany, naturally I was keen to solicit from Sebastian his own tales from behind the Iron Curtain. Some of them were hilarious, including stories of highly conspicuous spies, complete with big black trenchcoats and wide-brimmed hats, sticking out like sore thumbs at theater meetings known for their lampooning of the communist regime.

He was even impressed that I knew of Karl Eduard Von Schnitzer, a notorious GDR TV personality. Von Schnitzer was the front man for the "black channel", specialising in debunking and insulting whatever was on Western TV, since the regime knew they could not stop anyone from watching it. He was famously known as "Karl Eduard Von Schni..." since that's how much of his name anyone would hear before they hurriedly changed the channel.

Museum Island

You cannot help get swept away by the Berlin fascination. This place has seen more action and notoriety, and been involved in more painful world events than anywhere. Sadly, I suppose, it owes most of it's tourism attraction to this fact. Sure there are some nice buildings (some of them REALLY old) but most come to see where IT all happened. Holocaust, Third Reich, Cold War... that's what Berlin is famous for, whether Berliners like it or not.

As Sebastian's Volvo meandered in from the south we saw the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining section of The Wall with original 1990 artwork, the famous Television Tower and Alexanderplatz, the proud centre square of communist Berlin.

Nice old building....and Lola ran across here!!

But if you can manage to see through all that for a moment you see a cool, happening place. There are SO many pubs and clubs, yet they are ALL full, all of the time. Some of the boutique art galleries were fascinating and classy, the pace is frenetic compared to the rest of Germany...this is real Big City Germany. Artists seem to thrive here, visual arts, performance, music. There is evidence of poverty but not to the point of being unsafe. There is something addictive and infectious about this city, beyond the morbid history.

Remaining section of Berlin Wall, NiederkirchenerStrasse. Not far from here, the wall was cunningly located a metre or two inside the actual "East Berlin border", enabling East German guards to arrest West Germans for walking too close to the wall!

Sebastian dropped us at the S-Bahn just north of the famous Alexanderplatz, and one efficient and fast train ride took us right to the hostel- Circus, it was called, at Rosa-Luxemburg Strasse. Our apartment was magnificent, with views of big city Berlin from the balcony, although to find the apartment involved negotiating the bowels of the hostel complex Maxwell Smart- style.

My art teacher in Geelong had given me the name of a Berlin contact who was expecting us, apparently. Liane Richter runs the Monsters Bar in central Berlin, and her troupe build giant metal monsters. They are known as the Dead Chickens. This form of grotesque art is rather fascinating. You can check it out on www.deadchickens.de. It's quite a good site with some cool effects and some english.

The GDR were good at building crap cars and big, evil walls but hopeless at restoring nice buildings

We didn't have an address for the bar, only directions. It was located in the rear of the darkest, dingiest grafitti-covered alley in the area. But that was it's appeal. This was real, underground nightclub Berlin. The bar itself was dark and the monster sculptures made it surreal, yet the punters were a conservative cross section. Old, young, professionals...they all looked at home.

Having said that, on this particular Wednesday evening, Liane had enlisted a punk band. So, Sharon and I tactfully decided that we had a big day of sightseeing tommorrow so needed to hit the sack.

THURSDAY OCTOBER 13TH

In the morning we had a bit of a look around ourselves, using the handy S-bahn. From underground we emerged at the famous Potsdamer Platz. Once a desolate wasteland of the Death Strip, now a massive development of high-rise and shopping complexes. We wanted to look at different stuff so Sharon and I went our separate ways. I went straight to the Brandenburg Gate and just stared at it for ages. On the way, I found a film crew filming a German soapie. One of the cameramen told me it was funded by Grundy, the Aussie production group responsible for Neighbours. Naturally they politely told me to put my video camera away.

The amazing Potsdamer Platz- barely 15 years ago it was the largest expanse of death strip

But there was only so much we could learn on our own. So we grabbed a great walking tour from the hostel for the afternoon. Check out the website, http://www.brewersberlintours.com/, it's very funky. Our guide was Silvia the Canadian (not American. I gotta stop asking Canadians "Are you American??" and try "Where are you from??" instead). Her knowledge of Berlin was extensive and she was an excellent guide. Although, me being me, I always think I could do things better and quietly dreamed of how I would be a tour guide in Berlin. Then I realised, I could not do it better, I was just thinking I could because I was downright green jealous that she has a better job than me.

She didn't just take us to churches and castles. We took in the Synagogues, the memorials, the places where things happened, the Museum Island, iconic GDR locations...she even pandered to my movie trivia obsession and managed to point out the spots where Lola Ran. Everywhere in Berlin is a story.

A tasteful row of brick paving winds its way through Berlin to remind all of exactly where the city was torn throught the middle. Occasionally the paving is replaced by the real thing, remaining sections of the wall, still being chipped and pilfered by souveneir hunters.

Looking West

The original Hermann Goerring Air Force building, a dark and characteristically Nazi-looking monster which the Allies managed to completely miss with their bombs, is now the tax department, so the building is still hated by the locals. And it is here you find such an original section of the wall. Many know the story of August 1961, where Berliners woke up to see this oppressive wall being built, literally overnight. Following 1989 and the initial haste to rid themselves of this terrible scar, eventually Berlin realised there was tourism to consider, and left some of it intact.

This particular section has a big hole. During the Berlin Love Parade a few years ago some drunk revellers drove their car into it. Following this incident Berliners woke up to see... a fence built around the wall. Oh, the irony...

Checkpoint C ("Charlie") where in 1963, WWIII was almost started because some American wanted to take his wife to the opera.


Then Sylvia brought us to a nondescript carpark in between some ugly GDR apartment buildings. Everybody knows what this place is, and where it is. But no plaques, no memorials, no signs. Nothing to mark it's location. Just the occasional grim-faced tour group, coming and standing there. It is hard to imagine this was once a desolate, charred wasteland pounded by bombs, where a worldwide nightmare finally came to an end, after the waste of 50 million souls.

It was the site of a WWII bunker. The one where Hitler spoke of "Fighting and dying with his kingdom", sent 14 year old boys to fight while he cowered under 5 metres of concrete, giving the naive Eva Braun 5 minutes of marriage, then killing himself.

I wonder how many residents of the surrounding apartments look out the window and see various tour groups standing sombrely here, no smiles, just ashen faces. And to remind you further why, on the nearest street corner is one of many little plaques you find around Berlin. It has a name, date of "deportation" and a deceased date. Sometimes these plaques were placed simply where the person was last seen.

It's funny, as we walked to this spot, not knowing what was coming, I got a phone call from Claudia. She rang us for no other reason than- she was tired, depressed and missing us, especially her "nurse" Sharon who spent more time with her at various medical treatments. The feeling was, naturally, quite mutual. If there is such a thing as good timing for such a call, it was then. It set the mood. After the bunker site, the next stop was the massive, recently completed, Holocaust Memorial- a sea of black monoliths on a mildly undulating block of land. You can walk through them, feeling hemmed in and oppressed.

Holocaust memorial site

Ironically, only a month later when we were back in Oz, Claudia was sent to Weimar, a place near Berlin, for what we would call convalescence- rehabilition and recovery time with other cancer sufferers/survivors. On her afternoon off, she went to Buchenwald, the main concentration camp for the Berlin area. She said it was "something I had to do" and the experience was, somehow, helpful. In hindsight, it was a very well-timed phone call, but very hard to explain why.

"Deported 1942"...all she wrote

Anyways, back to our tour and the spritely Canadian Sylvia. Last but not least, as they say, she took us to the magnificent Reichstag and BrandeburgerTor. You have to see them for real. They are amazing. The mighty Brandenburg gate stands, illuminated at night, finally freed from the wasteland of the East-West deathstrip. Again, so many stories- ranging from the poignant and ironic WWII and Cold War tales, to the ridiculous, such as Michael Jackson dangling his baby from the nearby Hotel Adlon balcony.

BrandenburgerTor. Utterly magnificent. And I betcha Sharon's photos are infinitely better than all the other tourists'

(...And the chocolate version)

Reichstag at dusk

Against the Berlin dusk and the illuminated Brandenburg Gate, the tour officially ended, but Sylvia and a couple of other Aussies kindly joined us to eat what we believed was the best Doner Kebab we have ever tasted. And we've tasted a few. We discovered it the night before near the Monsters Bar. A shared Doner Kebab is probably the best value meal in Europe. It was one of those nights that shouldn't have to end.

Berlin, even more so than Dresden, uses the novelty of the former communist regime to prop up the tourism. Everywhere a humourously painted Trabant, Ampfelmann icon (the cheery looking pedestrian crossing symbol) and bits of the Wall, still for sale. I wonder if those who were cut off from their loved ones in 1961, or families of those whose disappearance is still a mystery, can be quite so nostalgic.

Happy little communist girl says DON'T WALK...or we'll lock you up in a small steel cell and deprive you of sleep for 10 days...

And why should they be. There is more to Berlin than this. That evening, I sat in the packed Monsters Bar, near a sea of loud, crazy, packed bars and pubs, listening to a Berliner tell me how he will launch a new religion called Pastafarianism, which involves cooking and eating pasta as a form of worship. It was one of those intense, yet totally sarcastic and hilarious conversations. The humour was more Pythonesque than German. So much for our typical German stereotypes. This was Berlin. Crazy, fun, ugly, beautiful Berlin.