Day 5 – Berlin – September 2, 2012

One of the great things about this cruise is that it has catered to our preference to sleep late and eat breakfast whenever. That all came to a screeching halt today when we had to take the train to Berlin from the port town of Warnemunde at the ungodly hour of 6:45 AM, which meant the latest we could get up was 6:00 AM and no shower or breakfast. (OK, we could have gotten up at 5:30 as many crazy people did, but give us a break!)

We endured the three hour train ride to Berlin in a comfortable car with one cup of coffee and some granola bars I brought on the trip, dozing on the way and arriving neither bright-eyed nor bushy tailed! But with the efficiency of both the German tour company and the Princess organization we were immediately on our bus and being given historical background of Berlin even as we pulled out of the parking lot. Our guide, Karin, spoke excellent English with very little accent and was quite sterling with her commentary.

Our first stop was at one of the few sites where the Berlin Wall still exists and is now protected as an historical site. At the invitation of the government, artists (not of the graffiti type) were invited to paint murals, all very interesting. The mural that Karen and I are standing in front of for the picture is artistic, but many of the others are more symbolic, like the one that shows a Trabant (East German car of laughable qualtiy) crashing through the wall. Or the one of Russian Premier Brezhnev planting a kiss on the lips of East German premier Erich Honnegger! (That actually happened!)

At the Berlin Wall - Galleria Section

We learned many fascinating facts about the wall, too many to recount them all here, One interesting fact is how long the wall was, and its construction. I forget the numbers, but although we tend to think of the wall as being between East Berlin and West Berlin, but of course the wall actually went all the way around West Berlin, so that East Germans could not sneak into West Berlin from the countryside. Not only that, there were actually two parallel walls most of the way. A bit of trivia I bet you never heard is that some rabbits were trapped between the two walls and, rabbits doing what rabbits do, there were soon thousands of them between the walls! When the wall came down, their descendants spilled out into the city, many of them finding their way to the Tiergarten, a very large park near the Brandenberg Gate. (Hey Pioneer Ridge Book Club: I was in the Tiergarten! “The Garden of Beasts!”)

Lunch (let's call it mid-day dinner) was at Nolle, underneath the elevated train tracks. Roast beef, vegetables, two kinds of sausage, sauerkraut, two kinds of potatoes, lager beer, and the best apple strudel I've ever had, added to my already corpulent state from only four days on the ship.

Then it was onto our cruise on the River Schnee which passes through many of the best parts of Berlin for sightseeing purposes. I was a bit disappointed in the boat because it hat a roof structure which made getting a clear picture of a building difficult. But it was pleasant enough.

Back on the bus and on to the Holocaust Memorial, a city block full of crypt-like granite blocks with victims names on them. It seems apparent to me that the German people, by and large, are very remorseful about the atrocities of the Nazi era, even three generations or so later, and seem determined to keep the memory of what they did alive so it will never happen again. Our guide was quite open and frank about this terrible time in their history.

Holocaust Memorial

We passed through Checkpoint Charlie, the only point of entry into East Berlin after the wall was built, drove around the Victory Pillar, then stopped at the Reichstag for pictures. That is still the seat of government, even though it was severely damaged during the war, both by Allied bombing and by the Russians in the Battle of Berlin that ended the war. It has now been restored to its prewar condition, a magnificent building.

Checkpoint Charlie

Herr und Frau Drachsler auf die Reichstag

Back to the train for the return to Warnemunde. There was a pimiento cheese sandwich on white bread, a cheesecake with no flavor, a sausage stick (which for the first two bites I thought the plastic covering was part of the food...), a small apple, and an itty-bitty candy bar. I turned up my nose at this fare, but my mouth and stomach overrode my nose and I ate every bite.

I have mixed feelings about Germans, and I probably am 50% or more German (actually Austrian, but same race of people). They have produced the greatest engineers in the world and are incredibly efficient in everything they do. Yet they were for several centuries a warlike people with tendencies toward racism. I guess they had to hit bottom with Hitler and the Nazis to realize they had to change their ways and now are economically powerful but seem to be purged of militarily aggressive tendencies. Sehr gut!

Tomorrow a day at sea on our way to Tallinn, Estonia. We can sleep in!