There are many people who are out there, writing about their exciting travels around the world. And I’m not one of those folk.
Instead, I do a little bit of travel, think about writing about it, and then decide that I can’t really be arsed. Except for the obligatory posting of a silly picture, obviously.
However, this time round, I hereby resolve to do better. I shall write sensibly about my recent trip to the capital of Germany. Or I’ll try my best to, at least.
TLF and I went out on Friday morning, and back on Sunday night. We stayed in a nice hotel in some part of the town that I couldn’t pronounce. We travelled extensively by U-bahn and walked quite a few miles. We went to the top of the Reichstag and saw the city; we saw the Brandenberg Gate and the haunting Holocaust memorial next to it. We did a couple of museums and …
No, sorry, I can’t do it. I need to get a picture in there. This is just too dull.
One of the museums we went to wasn’t so much a museum as a display before the entrance to the Stasi – der Ausstellung building, where a lot of people were reading their own bits of research into the stasi files. It was all in German, with only a small guide in English. And it was very, very haunting and more than a little bit scary, especially when you think about how many of the things that are in there are effectively the full manifestation of the baby steps being taken by such things as the RIPA and SOCA – that being how such things start.
To get away from such depressing things, I had TLF take me a picture…
We also went into a cold war bunker under Kurfürstendamm, and an excellent centre telling the story of Berlin from its founding until the fall of the Wall. And then we went for a walk to Checkpoint Charlie, which was made that little bit more interesting by the arrival of ALL THE SNOW IN THE WORLD.
What else did we do? We had a very nice walk through the Tiergarten, which was one of my highlights of the trip, for reasons that I can’t really explain. But it was one of things that’d make me go back.
I’m sure that there was plenty of other things, but I’m pretty bored writing. Except to say this: once again, we went somewhere where they managed to deal with feet of snow without any real disruption. This entire country would have stopped with any of the flurries that we saw, but they just got on with it. It’s a little bit embarrassing…
Berlin is a great city to go back to, I’ve been there four times and each time has been different and always enjoyable. The second time we went the temperature hit -12C, and everyone just drank more and smoked in larger numbers….
I think that -7 was the low point when we were there. And it didn’t seem to cause anybody any problem; some seemed to think that it was just a good excuse to go skiing through the Tiergarten. Which seemed like a good idea.