For some reason, my wake up call was about 45 minutes late this morning. Because of this I was rather slow getting out of the hotel, only check-out around 10:45. After dropping my bags off at the main train station I made my way towards the famous Checkpoint Charlie. I took the S-Bahn to Anhalter Bahnhof and from there I walked towards the former Allied checkpoint as one would have walked heading from West to East Berlin. I actually could have walked a slightly shorter distance from Potsdamer Platz, but this would have meant approaching it from the other side.
As I neared I could tell as there were plenty of tourists shops selling all sorts of checkpoint and East German/Soviet memorabilia. I walked towards the former border line where a rebuilt checkpoint stands today. It is not the checkpoint building that existing in the later years of the cold war period, but of the original building built after the construction of the wall. Of course next to the former checkpoint building is one very famous sign that says You are leaving the American Sector in 4 different languages. Around the checkpoint there are also people dressed in various countries uniforms for tourists to take pictures with. There is also a guy who will stamp your passport or anything else with official, or what used to be official, GDR, Soviet, and various checkpoint stamps. I thought about getting mine stamped, but at 5EUR for a stamp and the fact that it technically invalidates your passport I decided against it. If I had more stamps in there, so that it could hide amongst the stamps, I probably would have done it.
I headed to the Checkpoint Charlie museum next, where I managed to get the student rate with my badly faded UCF ID. I spent a good amount of time here looking through all the exhibits of how people escaped across the wall and the history of the wall. There was also a lot of various general cold war exhibits as well. I wandered back outside and looked around the checkpoint area a bit more, even noting that across the checkpoint on the former East side, there was still huge empty lots that once included parts of the no-mans land between the two walls.
From here I walked around a bit before riding the S-Bahn over to Ostbahnhof, which was the main train station of East Berlin and of a united Berlin until a few years ago. From there I walked across the street and then a short walk until I reached the beginning of the East Side Galley which is a long stretch of the wall that has been painted and grafitied along the side facing into East Berlin. Before unification this side would have been free of any paint, but still its a bit of an experience. As your walking you get to a point where you see nothing but wall in front of you and wall behind you, and it almost gives you a sense of how it must have been when the wall was surrounding all of Berlin.
Once I reached the end, I grabbed a currywurst, which is apparently a Berlin specialty before heading on the S-Bahn to Alexanderplatz. Alexanderplatz was essentially the center of East Berlin. Here was the location of the Fernsehturm, a huge TV tower and observation deck that rises high above the city. Slightly farther down in its shadow is where the Palast der Republik is being demolished and was the home of the East German legislature/
I continued my walk, heading back towards the center of the city. I continued to wander until I sat sown eventually and pulled out my travel guide. Flipping through I discovered that museums in Berlin have free admission on Thursday nights 4 hours before closing. Now knowing this I headed to the Pergamon Museum which has the famed altar of Pergamon which was brought to Berlin by German archeologists and then reassembled inside the museum. The amazing part is that you can actually walk up the steps to the top as well. However, there is something even better: the Ishtar Gate. This includes much of the original Babylonian gate, including all of the mosaics. I will have to upload a picture when I get back home so one can see the enormity of this and how interesting it is.
I wandered a around for a bit while longer before slowly heading towards the train station. I had gotten there quite early for my 12:30am train, but I needed to get a hotel in Amsterdam booked, and took care of that right away. The rest of the time I surfed the net and just waited around until the train arrived. I noticed that the train was a mix. Apparently half of the train that was marketed as CityNightLine came from Prague while the other half came from Warsaw. I boarded my cabin and noticed I was the sixth person in the cabin and I had to step over the sleepy people to get to my seat. I stayed up for a while, and tried to sleep but it wasnt quite coming to me. However, at some point I must have passed out for a while as I noticed we lost two people somewhere. Eventually it was down to just two of us so I laid across my side of the cabin and went back to sleep. I thought the other person got off when I woke back up, but turns out she just moved to another cabin. By the time the train got to Amsterdam, there was hardly anyone left and this was the final destination. In my next entry Ill pick up on my first day in Amsterdam.