mychai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ich bin ein Berliner -- with photos! Yeppers, I made it back from Berlin all in one piece. Thank the German ICE train for that, which was quite posh and darn quick. They had little monitors at the end of each car that gave information about time to the next stop, current time, oil pressure, etc. The best one, though, was the speedometer. We got that badboy up to 250! Ok. So, that's kilometers per hour. That translates to about 150 miles per hour, which is still quicker than you can drive. Want some pictures? No? Too bad. First, the characters in this trip: There is Dan and Teresa. They are soon to get wedded over here in Germany. His last name is Rygiel (pronounced "REE-gul") and hers is Siebert (pronounced "SEA_bert"). The running joke in the weather squadron is that they are going to combine their last names in holy matrimony and be known as the Seaguls. Har, har. Funny Air Force "make fun of peoples' names" humor. And then there is Roach. I'm serious as a heart attack. That's her real name. And then there is me. We all know what I look like. Think "Ferris Bueller Gets Chub" and there ya go. We arrived in Berlin's Zoo station at around 11:30am on Saturday and made the walk to the hotel -- which, as the bird flies, was about ten minutes away. But the Seaguls made terrible land navigators and almost broke up three times during the hour it took to find our hotel. It's not like the hour walk was bad. We saw all kinds of cool and interesting things. For instance:
We finally made it to the hotel, and we went into our rooms and did a little bit of refreshing, which was nice since we had all been up since about 3:30. We went in for lunch and looked at the guidebook and found a museum that was described as a spy museum, displaying all kinds of neat gadgets used by Communist spies and their subtle ways of killing. How cool, right? So, we get on the subway (Yours Truly was the subway and rail navigator, and I did a damn fine job, if you have to ask) and ride and ride and finally get out of the station to find out we have ended up in Kansas. As in, the Wizard of Oz's Kansas. The whole place looked grey and bleak. That last picture came out like that. I swear I didn't edit it at all. Even my camera felt like we had entered a weird corner of the Twilight Zone. After a few minutes in the exceptionally boring museum, I realized that we weren't in just any museum, in any old building, in any regular part of town. We were wandering in the former East Berlin. Fifteen years ago, we quite literally would have been shot. But it was so depressing there, I would have been happy shooting myself. No wonder so many people tried to flee. The museum was notable in exactly how boring it really was. They probably would have attracted more people the museum was the "Berlin Grass Growing and Paint Drying Museum." They did have all of the items as was described in the guidebook. But, the guidebook article was only a few sentences long, so it took about two minutes to see everything that was described. The rest of the displays were pictures cut out of newspapers, photocopied onto bigger pieces of plaster, and hung on the walls. I can speak a marginal amount of German. But I can't read entire newpaper articles... yet. Everyone else can't speak a lick of German. You can see how bored we were. For all four floors of the museum. If you just happen to find yourself in Berlin one day, do your best to avoid the Stasi Museum. At all costs. After the really terrible museum, we went back towards the hotel and ate dinner at a bar before heading to bed for the night. We went to a bar that is about three blocks from our hotel (the Hotel Hamburg, by the way). They advertised the special of the night being spaghetti bolognese. Great! We'll have four! They brought the first two out one at a time, and after the second one, Dan and I noticed a Ding! right before she brought it out. We listened for it again, and sure enough... Ding! And the third bowl came out. We were eating leftover spaghetti that was being microwaved and brought out one-by-one. Can you f'n believe that?? I loved it! How charming can you get? It was a small neighborhood bar that only locals visit. They all probably knew one another. I can't explain it. That had unbelievable charm to me. Most people would probably be pissed that they paid good money for "Spaghetti Anytime!" at a pub/restaurant. We went to bed at 7:30 Saturday night. And woke up at 7:30 Sunday morning. That was nice. Checkpoint Charlie was the destination of the day. And, as any good capitalistic economy should have it, it has turned into a major tourist trap, complete with an overpriced (but decent) museum and an "authentic-looking" reconstruction of the original checkpoint, since the first one was ceremoniously destroyed in front of a bunch of onlookers back in 1989. We spent several hours inside of the museum. There was a lot to see, including all of the different ways the East Germans kept people from crossing over the wall and gaining their freedom. My favorite device was a series of cannons that fired 100 little squares of steel in both directions when a wire was triggered. You run through the wire, you get 200 square bullets shooting at you. There were pictures of people who didn't quite make it past the cannons. We stopped and had coffee and ice cream, bought some souviniers, and got back on the subway towards another section of the wall that is less-known and not as commercialized. This section of the wall had a nice memorial to those who died while trying to gain their freedom. This was also one of the very few places left with the wall still standing, in front of which I had my picture taken. This is what caused so much grief for so many people. That little stretch of land was what kept families, friends, and lovers apart for such a long time. In a little stretch of land like that throughout Berlin, hundreds of people died, many more became crippled, and others imprisoned just because they wanted the simplest thing: freedom. It makes me a little upset when I hear the loudest mouths of today spew on and on that we are no longer free in America, that all of our freedoms are being lost. It's when you see sights like I saw in Berlin that you understand that we still have more rights than anybody in the world. Even in Germany today, a movie cannot be made about the government like Michael Moore made about our government. You cannot publically (legally, anyways) insult the German government. In the spirit of recreating the past, and doing something so easily and so safely that couldn't have been done fifteen years prior, I had Roach make a run for it. That was actually in old East Berlin right there. The wall is there on the right. She wouldn't have technically been shot had she made that exact run since she is outside the two walls. But she definitely would have gathered unwanted attention. This is the last peek a lot of people got before they were offed. I am in old East Berlin looking through a crack in the wall into West Berlin. Imagine being that close to those you love, yet being threatened with death or imprisonment if you made any contact with them. Here are some pictures of an old cemetary in old East Berlin. At first, I thought it held the bodies of those killed trying to flee, but it held a lot of old Germans, many who had died before the first World War. We spent a whole day looking at the cost of freedom and were pretty tired from it all. On the way back to the hotel, we did a little shopping and made it through the center of town. I am always keeping my eye open for strange and interesting characters who are sitting about. You don't find them every day, but when you do, boy howdy, do you find a good one! We woke up late the next morning, took all of our bags down to the Zoo station, put them in storage, and went over to the Zoo for which the station was named. Nothing overly interesting to report from there. It's a zoo. Although it was quite good for being a zoo in the middle of one of Germany's largest cities. The best thing was that you could get right up to the orangutans that were snoozing in the monkey house. You could basically put your forehead onto theirs. They would just look you in they eye and move about like you were just one of them. It was incredible to just sit and stare into their eyes and wonder what they were thinking. Such beautiful creatures, the orangutans. I wanted to bring one home. We caught the train leaving Berlin and made it back here at around 10:30, safe and sound. It was an amazing trip. We saw a lot, but we didn't see everything. I will have to go back again soon. Any of you want to go with me? 5:52 p.m. - Wednesday, Jul. 07, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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