Currywurst and Berlin

Dear everyone-

I am very sorry for not updating this sooner, I went on one of those stereotypical college backpacking trips around Europe. I’m just now recovering from it. I will go through each city I visited one by one over the next few days so that you don’t have too much to read all at once, and so that I can ease myself into writing again…

City 1: Berlin.

I had an oversized bag on my bag with my backpack hooked on the front of me like a pouch on the way to the train station in Paris. I was meeting Sarah to catch our over-night train to Berlin. The metro on the way was more packed than I’ve seen it, which made it hot and sticky, and really uncomfortable. Of course, I found myself standing next to the only twit on the train who didn’t stand up from his fold-out chair amidst the insane amounts of passengers packed in the train-car. This inconvenience of a person forced me to have to stand leaning over him with my arms against the wall behind him, surrounding him in a little Tricia-made hut. I’ll draw a diagram to clarify, because my ergonomically awkward position is not properly portrayed by this description:



The guy next to me started having to lean over the kid too, so he yelled at him to stand up. The kid acted as if he was punched in the face. I wondered what he would have looked like if I really had punched him in the face.

I got to the train station finally, met Sarah, and we got on our train to Berlin. There were people waving out the windows just like in the movies, I couldn’t believe it. I almost started waving just for the sake of it, but there were too many smelly people by the windows, so I just sat down on my little bed thing.



When we got to Berlin, we hopped on the metro to our hostel and watched Berlin roll over us for the first time. The weather was wonderful, and the city was absolutely beautiful looking, even with its visible scars from the war. I couldn’t wait to get my bags off my body and start exploring.




Our Hostel, The Generator Hostel, was a huge building visible from the metro stop. It was gigantic looking from the outside, and looked like something meant to be from the future on the inside. The color scheme was blue and neon green, with rivets, visible metal piping, and air ducts all over, making it seem very industrial and futuristic all at the same time. When we got into our room, it had nice maple wooden floors with steel bunk beds and lockers for everyone to store their things in. One of the walls was completely open with windows overlooking Berlin. I was pleased, it looked clean, and I even got to sleep on a top bunk! I’m terrified of bottom bunks for all those who don’t know; when I was nine or ten a top bunk fell on top of me. I caught it with my cat-like reflexes so I wasn’t physically hurt or anything, but the psychological impacts from that event still haunt me to this day, like when I am assigned bottom bunks at hostels. Thank God for the English girl who got to the room first and took my bottom bunk without saying anything. I liked the hostel already. There was even mood music in the hallway at all times, which usually consisted of top 40 songs from 2 years ago in America, and all things done by Cher with techno backing.

We dropped our stuff off and spent our days in Berlin looking at all the great monuments (we went on a 4 hour tour one day and got the history behind most of old East Berlin). I got freckly, Sarah got a little tan, and we enjoyed every second of that city. There were little markets all over, gardens and parks which softened the city-feel, and everyone we interacted with was incredibly nice and helpful. I never realized how new of a city Berlin was, but 90% of it was destroyed during WWII, and most of it (the East side from what I learned, I'm not sure about the West side) was really built up after the reunification of the country when the Berlin Wall came down. Buildings that looked as if they were hundreds of years old were actually not, they were just made to look old.



The support of the DIY scene in Berlin was also intriguing. There was graffiti everywhere, and I mean everywhere, but it seemed as if it was looked at as more of an art-form integrated into the city as opposed to unruly teen-angst and violence. Sarah and I were wandering down a random road when we peeked into a very graffitied doorway and saw a bunch of sand on the ground. Intrigued, we walked through the door to check it out. It ended up being a bar/art gallery of garbage art made from scrap metal and other strange industrial ingredients. The ground was covered with sand. The building that the art gallery occupied looked abandoned, most of the windows were barred and smashed, garbage was collected at the bottom of the stairwell, and graffiti covered every inch of every wall on the inside. There was a constant smell of urine too, which added to the whole ambiance. I don’t remember how many floors there were in the building, maybe 5 or 6, but every floor had a few studios that were occupied by artists at work, willing to chat and sell their stuff right then and there. There were postcards for sale in some of the studios, so it was definitely a known and accepted building of commerce, but it completely contrasted with any idea I had before of a place where art, commerce, and tourism flourished. This wasn’t the only building like this either. Amidst the abandoned buildings next to haut-couture boutiques and nice restaurants were other graffiti havens with artists and bar tenders at work.



Berlin; city of many layers, city of much history, pretty city of art and new architecture, contender for no. 1 city I’ve visited.