37 hours in Berlin

I just woke-up from a solid nights sleep in the six-person sleeping room of the train that is leisurely transporting us from Berlin to Amsterdam. This would have been fine if the train was actually moving, but it was not and we were briefly stuck at a station called Emmerich, which could be located anywhere in either Germany or the Netherlands. So, before we arrive into the city that is synonymous with excess, but holds a storied past that is much greater than its district of red lights, I decided to give a little recap of our 37 hours in Berlin, which were rather eventful.

We arrived into Berlin on Sunday, checked into our hostel, met some fellow travelers, got our laundry done, and crashed by about 12:30, which provided us with the energy we would need for our crash course of Berlin and it’s hectic past. In order to see as much as possible in the shortest amount of time, we rented bikes for 7.50 Euro and peddled our way north to the Berlin Wall Memorial. The memorial provided us with a lot of quality information about the creation of the wall in 1961 through its eventual destruction in 1989. When I say destruction, I mean it; there is not much left of the wall and the sections that are still up are scattered through out the city. Berlin was vastly different from every city we have visited, in that, most of it’s architecture is very modern, as it’s most beautiful and meaningful pieces of man’s creation had been either torn apart from the cold-war or destroyed through the Air-Raids of WW2.

From the memorial we weaved through the traffic of Berlin and headed for the Brandenderg gate and the park that encompasses its west side. There was some sort of rally by the taxi driver’s of Berlin in the park and as a result there were probably two thousand bright yellow Mercedes taxi’s and one Toyota Prius taxi lining the street that flows directly through the middle of the park. The end of the park landed us near a Dunkin Donuts and I decided that I wanted an Iced Coffee( it had been over a month and it was exceptional), this would be the turning point of the day. I order my savory treat and Jonathan went to order and realized that his wallet was missing. With only week left, one second of either lack of attention to a by-passing stranger or one peddle that dislodged the leather wallet, which holds the keys to our lives; the wallet was no longer in Jonathan’s possession. We peddled to every spot we had been over the past 3 hours and the end result was the cancellation of some credit cards, a call to his mom, and the inevitable wiring of money.

The over two hours of anguish, from 2:08-4:22 was not going to slow us down; we hopped right back on the bikes and continued our explorations. We picked up Jonathan’s money at a train station (This was only possible, due to Mrs. Moore, whom I am sure was not expecting to wake up on her Monday morning and wire money to her son backpacking through Europe.), ate some German food, and peddled to an outdoor memorial called the “Topography of Terror”, which is the former site of the SS and Gestapo Headquarters’ of the third Reich. The site itself was not much to see, but the information it provided was pretty heavy stuff. We were literally standing right where Adolf Hitler and Henrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, planned and executed their master plans of evil. The end of the memorial gave us a view of underground cells, which held hundreds of mentally challenged men and women that were experimented on, tortured, and murdered from 1933-1945.

The memorial was truly a landscape of horror and it will and did make a lost wallet seem very minuscule and irrelevant.

-Brendan