Ramifications of Post-War Berlin

I love going to visit friends in between long stretches of being on the road.  It's a huge break from the wonderful traveling stresses of trying to figure out where things are or where you will sleep that night.  It's a mental sigh of contentment, if you will, before picking up one's luggage and resuming the journey.  Yesterday Kat and I decided that we had enough of the experimental living situation that we stumbled into in Berlin and took a train straight to Amsterdam where her sister, Arden, is currently going to art school.  We got in after a 7 hour train ride and proceeded to stuff ourselves with tons of vegan food at Arden's dinner party.  Mental sigh.  Belly sigh.

Back to Berlin.  It took us forever to find our way to the center of Berlin four days ago, after days of small German farming villages.  The tour book we picked up in Rostock was fabulous and I highly recommend getting a biking route map.  It saved us a ton of time and frustration and also spared us from biking along major roads.  There is a series of books that map specific biking routes around Germany that are quite fabulous.  They're called BikeLine and we already have two of them; one from Copenhagen to Berlin (which we just finished) and one from Mainz, Germany to Basel, Switzerland (which we'll be doing a little later).  They also have little tips and history bits about the small towns that you ride through, but it's all in German so we missed all of that.  

The book was great until we got to the outskirts of Berlin and it was like we were just plopped down to figure it out on our own--there weren't anymore handy bike signs at all.  The bus stops luckily, all had big Berlin maps and we slowly figured out our way from there and found the house of our couch surfing host.  It was awesome because he lived really close to the center of town.  It was not awesome because we didn't know what we were getting into.  It was a co-op living situation that had a revolving door of residence and a rather open door policy with couch surfers.  It was filled with a bunch of early 20-something Americans discussing the alcohol content of different beers and the 'cultural ramifications of post-war Berlin'.  Because we were dead tired and in no mood to mentally masturbate, we just wanted to gag all over their greasy hair.  Oh dear, I'm being nasty.  Everyone had to make a mad-dash at the end of the night to grab a cushion to sleep on.  Party goers got the shit end of the stick and had to settle for the hard wood floor.  The first two nights we got lucky, the third we were not. 

Aside from that, Berlin was awesome.  We went to the Museum The Kennedys--go all the way to Berlin and find an entire museum dedicated to an American family.  Amazing.  The lady at the counter explained that after President Kennedy goofed up his German language skills with the "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, Germany just loved him and thus a museum was built.  They also had a special exhibit that compared photos of Kennedy with similar photos of Obama.  I felt like a total sentimental schlep because I kept getting all teary-eyed with emotion.  

We also tried our hand at theater again.  We thought it would be an excellent idea to go to an opera.  Apparently there were two operas playing: Figaro by Mozart and Das Versprechen.  Recommended by a lady at a hotel information desk, we saw Versprechen.  Ten minutes into it we realized that they would not be breaking out into song and that this was not an opera in any sense of the word.  We had no idea what was going on except that it was an entirely depressing play (on account of the down tempo music, the frantic wailing, and displays of alcoholism).  Strike two on our theater card.

We also happened to be in town on the 17th of Juni.  There's a wide boulevard that cuts right through the Central Park of Berlin, called the Tiergarten, named after this date.  We stumbled upon a big parade/march/demonstration of thousands of students walking along the road protesting something that again we had no clue about.  It was really cool to see all these students marching; I mean, they just kept coming, a never-ending stream.  I just googled it...

The Uprising of 1953 in East Germany took place in June 1953. A strike by East Berlin construction workers on June 16 turned into a widespread uprising against the Stalinist German Democratic Republic government the next day. The uprising in Berlin was violently suppressed by tanks of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany.  In spite of the intervention of Soviet troops, the wave of strikes and protests was not easily brought under control. Even after June 17, there were demonstrations in more than 500 towns and villages.~wikipedia

Oh, I love riding a bike around a city!  At first I was petrified about riding around Berlin, trying to haul-ass and keep up with the flow of traffic.  Then we came upon an old man, groceries hanging out of his saddle bags, slowly peddling along and I got the message to just take it easy.  Because if an old man feels comfortable enough to ride his bike along and trust that cars would give him enough room, then by god, I too would relax.  And it's true, cars are way more kind towards bikers in Berlin then they are in Austin, Texas.