Berlin; Wednesday, 30 July, 2008

Two things happened as we crossed the border.

Firstly the train picked up speed, and with it eventually gained back five of the lost minutes so that we were only a quarter of an hour late into Berlin. Secondly, the cloud bubbled up and we crossed from a Sunny Poland into a considerably greyer Germany.

I managed to make a quick change at Gesundbruunen station and 10 minutes after stepping off the train from Poznan I was arriving at the doors of my hotel for the night. If my stay in Poznan for the previous two evenings had been in dull luxury, tonight was going to be cheerful budgetness. I was staying in the Generator Hotel (as it was called by the booking agent) or to give it it’s correct name, the Generator Hostel.

However, despite the slightly tower-blockish appearance (being as it was a converted tower-block!), the reception staff were very friendly, and my room (a single en-suite, rather than a shared facilities dorm!) was small but very comfortable. I unloaded my stuff and then headed into the centre of the city.

I had a wander around the area of the new Hauptbahnhof which opened a couple of months after my last visit. When I was last in Berlin the whole area was a massive building site, right up to the Reichstag and the Brandenburg gate. Today it is park-land, riverside café’s and even a beach. It’s amazing how much it had changed in such a short period of time, and that’s not including the stunning structure that is the Main Station with it’s curving arched roof and cavernous interior (the trains go overhead at bridge height East-West through the city and in a fairly deep tunnel North-South.

I walked through the grounds of the Reichstag, past the Brandenburg Gate and on to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This is a gigantic sculpture on the ground level, with a museum underneath. The sculpture is 2000+ concrete blocks of varying heights laid out in columns and rows and underneath is a very moving museum telling some of the stories of those who suffered during the persecution of the Jews from 1933 to 1945.

After looking around the sculpture and museum I headed back to the Reichstag to go up the dome. In 2004 I had done it on a February evening, when it was difficult to see very much. In 2006 I had attempted to do it on my final day, but the queue had gotten the better of me. Today I was determined to visit so I joined the queue and was happily informed that current queuing time was 45 minutes. 20 minutes later I was inside the Reichstag!

With the skies starting to clear into a warm early evening glow, the views were spectacular, down the length of the Tiergarten and in the opposite direction down Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz. Having taken my fill of the views I wandered down to the bus stop and caught the bus round to the Zoo to have a quick bite to eat, before heading back to the hotel to drop stuff off and then head back out again to take some night-time photos of the monuments.