Brrrrrrrrrr - lin

A little over a week ago, almost two weeks ago now(!), we left for Berlin. The last 12 days have been a whirlwind. Thursday afternoon we left for Berlin and arrived home Sunday night. Monday morning Erin left again for Cambridge and returned with some friends Wednesday afternoon. She was home for less than 48 hours before we both left again Friday morning for Barcelona. We got home yesterday afternoon for good. Well, at least for this week. John leaves next Sunday for a week in California and Erin leaves in a couple weeks to fly to Munich; she'll meet John there for more adventures. But we're jumping ahead of ourselves.

Despite the freezing temperatures, heavy winds, and various types of precipitation, we really enjoyed Berlin! It is a much larger city than we had imagined. It is a shame most of it was destroyed in World War II, but that allows it to have many more open green spaces than most cities that just continue to be built up with more and more buildings through the years. While there are cranes, construction crews, and boarded-up windows everywhere you turn, there is also such a reminder of recent historical events around every corner. We were amazed and incredulous to be standing directly on top of Hitler's underground bunker where he spent his last days, to see the very train tracks where so many were carted off like cattle to concentration camps, and to be just feet away from the Berlin Wall. Thanks to our guided bike tour in English we learned more history, or should we say we were reminded again of all that history that somehow lodged into the recesses of our brains during many years of elementary, middle, and high school, and saw more sights than we would ever have been able to had we been walking around on our own. We highly recommend Fat Tire Bike Tours and Mike's Bike Tours if you're ever in a city over here in Europe.

Ahhh, the varying precipitation! Erin experienced snow flurries and light rain on Friday while John was cozy and secure in a small meeting room for 8 hours learning about really exciting accounting updates. Luckily during the heaviest snow, Erin and Annette were eating lunch (in a Schlotzsky's! yea for Schlotzsky's!) with a beautiful view of the city being covered in snow. Then Saturday during our bike tour, we witnessed hail followed by snow flurries. Again, we happened to be enjoying some potato soup, chili, and hot chocolate while trying to thaw out our frozen hands and feet in a biergarten when the sky decided to drop a lot of hail. Once back on the bikes, we only got rained on a bit. This is not to say the biking was by any means comfortable since we were so cold we were beginning to wonder what the signs of frostbite might be. It's funny how even the most uncomfortable situations are balanced out by the fact that you are seeing astounding historical sites and beautiful buildings and are learning interesting city facts!

We do not think it precipitated much on Sunday. We spent much of our afternoon at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum discovering all the ways people attempted to cross the border between East and West Berlin. It was a great museum. Everyone else thought so too; it was so packed that at times Erin was thankful she is not claustrophobic.

After Erin spent so much time walking around Berlin Friday with Annette, she decided the maps make things look deceptively closer than they are in reality. The rest of the weekend John and Erin traveled as much as possible by the U-bahn and the S-bahn. Erin read in her literature the difference between the two: the U-bahn is the underground rail system that sometimes travels above ground, not to be confused with the S-bahn, which is the aboveground rail system that sometimes travels below ground! We only suffered one unfortunate mishap. Erin knew from riding to the center of the city on Friday which U-bahn line to take from the hotel to get to the radio tower where the bike tour was supposed to begin Saturday morning. It seems the city decided to do work right in the middle of this line beginning Saturday morning. About five stops right in the middle of the line were inaccessible. When our train got to the last stop possible going toward the center of the city, an announcement was made, in German of course, and most of the people on the train got off...not everybody, just most. (We later found out that the only people left on the train were those who couldn't understand German!) After sitting on the stopped train for about 10 minutes, we finally started moving again...in the direction we had just come from! When we arrived at the first stop back, we decided to get off. Fortunately for us, just as we arrived in the station, another announcement was being made about the line in English! This is when we understood that this U-bahn would not be able to take us where we needed to go. With expert public transport map-reading skills we ascertained that we needed to go back almost to where we had started and take an S-bahn to the radio tower. We hesitated several times about which S-bahn to take as not all the stops were posted when a train arrived at the station, but we finally figured it out. By this time, of course, we were going to be very late for the bike tour. The brochure had said it starts at 10, but if you're late it's OK since they spend the first half an hour or so just talking at the meeting point. Well, making it by 10:30 was cutting it close! Who knew 45 minutes would not be enough time to travel just into the city center. What took 25 minutes on Friday took us over an hour on Saturday! We did make it to the bike tour meeting point just a few minutes before the group was about to set off. We think all we missed was a chance to chat with the other participants and have some coffee and tea.

With a more comprehensive knowledge of the public transit system and an expectation that temperatures are very cold in Berlin, we would definitely like to visit there again. Perhaps next time in the spring or summer when it might be, oh, 40 or 50 degrees farenheit.