Berlin: Our first experience of Europe

A little bit of background

This post is part of the series on our first ever world wandering, a six-week trip to LA, London, Berlin, Europe (on a bus tour), and the UK (England, Scotland and Wales by car). The post has been written in retrospect, almost 30 years after the trip, from the journal I wrote at the time and from my memories. The first in the series is my post is on our LA stopover and the second is on our London taster. These posts give good background on how we got to Berlin. You can read about our other European experience on this trip on my tour post. The final post in the series is on our self-drive around England, Scotland, and Wales.

As with the whole series, and all my travel wanderings posts, I'm recording my experience of travelling rather than giving a list of travel recommendations. My travel wanderings read much like a journal.

I've added my reflections on what the experience of Berlin and our first ever European wanderings at the end of this post.

Our 1996 trip was our first ever experience outside of Australia and New Zealand. We did this trip in the days before there was easy access to information on the Internet and before the days of Google maps. I recall how wide-eyed we were, as we experienced so many firsts on the trip and of things we'd only read about in books or seen on TV and in film. There was no blogging back then! I also look back now and marvel at how much travel has changed and how much easier it is to both plan and execute.

Remember, too, that my photos were taken on an 'analog' camera and reflect the quality of the photos in the mid 1990s + their survival almost thirty years later. Anyway, read on for our Berlin adventure...

Arrival in Berlin

As noted in my London taster post, we had the chance to spend three days in Berlin before the start of our European tour as our flight package with Qantas and British Airways included return tickets from London to a selected capital city. We chose Berlin as I'd always wanted to travel to Germany. I'd learnt German at high school and Berlin wasn't on our tour itinerary. This was 1996, only a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Berlin had only been reinstated as the capital of Germany for six years. I'd missed the opportunity to see East Berlin during the Cold War years, but I was keen to experience the new Berlin and its unique history.

We arrived in Berlin around 6pm on Friday 5 July, after a short flight on a 757 (that seemed tiny to us!) and a somewhat bumpy journey. The green landscapes below us looked so lush! The flight was uneventful and we made it to Arrivals easily as we had no luggage to collect, having left our big suitcases in London. We flew into Tempelhof; interestingly, the airport closed in 2008 and has been redeveloped as a events and trade fairs venue.

It was a bit of a shock to land in a non-English speaking country after a week away from home in two English-speaking ones. I felt quite daunted by the prospect now that it was a reality. We were nervous about catching the bus to our hotel but a lovely English woman helped us as she must have overheard us talking to each other about directions.

Our hotel was called Kanthotel, on Kantstrasse. I had to do a bit of Google detective work, almost 30 years later, to discover that it is now a Best Western (photo below). The hotel is on a main road and near train stations. We had no trouble finding it in the end, our first confidence boost of the trip!

Photo of our hotel from the Best Western website.

We had booked the hotel thinking it was going to be a bit posh as, coming from Australia, it seemed expensive. This was our first experience of understanding the difference in standards across the globe. An Australian hotel would be a higher standard for the price. That said, our room was small but clean and in a good location. That's all we cared about. We'd had a light meal on the plane so didn't bother with dinner. I think we were just relieved to have made it to Berlin!

Day 1 in Berlin

We were up early on the first morning as we planned to travel to Oranienburg, in what used to be East Berlin, to visit Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum. It may sound odd, but visiting a former concentration camp was a bucket list item for me. I have had a long-held interest in the human side of war, especially the atrocities committed during the Second World War. I spent a dark period in my teenage years devouring books on the Holocaust. I was interested to see in reality what I had read about in so many books.

To fortify ourselves for the journey to the museum, we enjoyed the hotel's buffet breakfast. At the risk of sounding like bumpkins, this was a new experience for us. There were all kinds of breads, meats, cheese, fruit, yoghurts, cereals and hot food as well, so unlike Australian hotels at the time. We expected to be sharing the breakfast room with loads of other tourists but it was relatively empty despite being peak season. Perhaps we were just up too early?

Remembering that this was 1996, we had a set of printed instructions on how to get to Sachsenhausen that our travel agent had photocopied from her own copy of Let's go Germany. We set off, full of trepidation about getting to our destination. We took the correct train, although we couldn't work out the ticketing system (my high school German failing me) and ended up using the one ticket for our entire stay. There didn't seem to be any ticket machines for boarding and disembarking and no tapping on and tapping off like you do today. Anyway, we travelled about an hour north of the city, on an old rickety train, past grey, graffitied buildings, loads of construction, and remnants of boarded-up stations from the Cold War era.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was so odd to get off the train, walk about 20 minutes through a little town, turn down a suburban street and then find a concentration camp at the end of it. I somehow imagined the camp would be isolated and away from residential dwellings. The below photo is of the street we walked down to find the camp.

It's been a long time since we made the journey to Sachsenhausen, but I will never forget the experience. It was just as chilling and disturbing as I'd imagined it would be, made even more so by the cold, gloomy weather. We were also the only people there for most of our visit.

The camp was huge, with barbed wire fences, guard towers, labs where human experiments were carried out, and crematoria. There are several memorials to those murdered in the camp and of course the Arbeit macht frei (work will make you free) gate. Everything seemed well preserved, partly I imagine as Sachsenhausen is less well known than other camps. Again, this added to the disturbing nature of the experience. The camp visit left an indelible mark on us.

Looking at the current website, the Memorial and Museum has been significantly developed since our visit in 1996. There was not a museum as such when we visited, just a cluster of original buildings.

We headed back into Berlin and strolled up the K'damm (Kurfurstendamm), the main shopping street in Berlin. The avenue runs into Tauentzienstrasse where the sculpture in the below photo was erected in 1987. The sculpture - Berlin - represents a broken chain that symbolises the severed connections between West and East Berlin during the construction of the Berlin Wall. On the same street is the KaDaWe, the second largest department store in Europe after Harrods. The KaDeWe is a huge store that's been around for about 100 years. We had a wander around, but there was lots of stuff way out of our price range.

We had kebabs for lunch, something to be found everywhere in Berlin. Turkish cuisine was prevalent in the city at the time due to the huge Turkish influence from the gastarbiter (guest worker) program. This program admitted foreign workers to West Germany after World War Two to help rebuild the country's infrastructure. The kebabs were so delicious and nothing like what we'd had at home - full of flavours and spices, served with sauerkraut in a damper-type roll. Yum!

We had a poke around Bahnhof Zoo, or the Berlin Zoologischer Garten, a huge train station and the most important traffic junction in the former West Berlin. It's a mecca of shops and eateries now, but is probably more famous as a former drug and hustler scene. We kind of liked the eclectic mix of people and fashions we saw as we wandered around.

Our last stop for the day was the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (Gedachtniskirche), a Protestant church affiliated with the Evangelical Church of Berlin. The church, originally built in the 1890s, was bombed extensively during the Second World War. It's an imposing site - an old church sitting in the middle of a modern city with its structure damaged by bombs. Amazingly, there are stairs in the old church that lead to nowhere as the spire was blown off. The ground floor is now a peace memorial, nicknamed by Berliners as der hohle Zahn, the hollow tooth. There's a new part, built between 1959 and 1963, but it's the damaged old part that is the most moving experience.

We rested in the hotel from late afternoon and ventured out again in search of dinner. Even though our hotel was in quite a central location, we struggled to find something open. We ended up a Burger King, the equivalent of Hungry Jack's in Australia. I was still nervous about speaking German but we managed to order a meal deal each. The food tasted the same as any other burger chain but it was twice the price of what we paid in Australia at the time. Not very German, I know, but needs must and all that!

Day 2 in Berlin

We'd picked up a brochure in the hotel for English-speaking guided walks and we thought we'd give them a go on day 2. We turned up at Bahnhof Zoo where the tour started, and signed on, paying 10DM each. This is what you did back then - read through brochures in hotels and just chanced it, based on the information given.

The tour was amazingly comprehensive and our guide, Susanne, very knowledgeable. Susanne was Swiss but had lived all over the place and she was interesting and easy to listen to.

The tour took us around so many iconic places and walking gave us such a lovely feel for the city. We took the train twice during the tour but there was a lot of walking so it was exhausting. Absolutely worth it, though! The tour was really just a taster as we only spent a few minutes looking at a bunch of key places from the outside. It was still a great way to experience the city and Susanne's commentary helped us understand the significance of the sites we strolled past.

One of the most striking things we saw was the Berlin Cathedral, right across the road of the plain, drab Communist party building. The building was to be torn down eventually. This (rather bad quality) photo was taken from a 2006 article about the building's demolition. Its ugliness against the Cathedral is quite stark.

Here we've captured the cathedral's reflection in the old building. Not a bad shot considering we had a now-ancient camera at the time! Also, it's kind of cool that we saw the Communist Party building before it was torn down.

Below you can see the cathedral in all its magnificence. We didn't have time to go inside but it was enough to see it from the outside. The terrible photo taken on our now long-outdated camera doesn't do it justice at all!

Along with the cathedral and the old Communist party building, we walked down Unter den Linden, the boulevard in the Mitte district named after the linden trees that line the street, and around the lustgarten on Museum Island, once used for Nazi rallies.

We walked past the Nazi book burning memorial at Bebelplatz (ironically across the road from Humboldt University), the Brandenburg Gate, the Victory Column (from the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s and later added to by Hitler), the former SS headquarters, and the Tiergarten, one of the biggest and most well known parks in Berlin.

We saw the incredible construction all around Potsdamerplatz as the city moved forward after the fall of the iron curtain. At the time, Berlin was the largest construction site in the world. Berlin was designated as the capital again in 1990 but the seat of parliament did not transfer from Bonn until the year 2000. The Reichstag was under major construction to prepare for the transfer. What a time to be in Berlin!

A collection of shots from our tour wanderings.

The tour, although four hours long, was a bit of a whirlwind and I'd love to return to the city again one day to explore all the place we glimpsed (and more!) in more depth. We only had two days in Berlin but at least we got to wander around and take in some of the history and incredible changes happening in the mid 1990s. I will be forever grateful for that opportunity.

The tour ended at Checkpoint Charlie and at a section of the Berlin Wall. It was a real 'pinch me' moment for me as I couldn't quite believe I was standing in front of something so historically significant. We left the tour and explored the Checkpoint Charlie museum, fascinating for its displays of escape attempts told through photo essays and newspaper clippings.

Fortified by another kebab, we walked to Schloss Charlottenburg in the afternoon. The sun had come out and it was a lovely Sunday afternoon. Such a pretty part of the city!

The baroque palace is awesome but we were content just to wander around the gardens, taking in the afternoon sun with all the local families having picnics.

We headed back to the hotel later in the afternoon, after fuelling up on the most delicious chocolate ice cream I'd tasted to date. We were exhausted from all the walking, so we crashed and slept for several hours before waking up at 9pm briefly and then going back to sleep.

Day 3 in Berlin and our return to London

The weather turned cold and miserable the next day so we decided to have a lie in and late breakfast and rest before returning to London to embark on our 19-day bus tour of Europe. We had a long wait at the airport for the lunchtime flight but the people watching was fun! The airport was kind of depressing, though, especially on a bleak day. There was heavy security, or at least more than we were used to in Australian airports at the time.

There was another Tube strike in London when we arrived back, but we felt less daunted this time using the trains. We found the Tower Thistle without any dramas and collected our luggage that we had stored three days earlier. The hotel is just the Tower Hotel now, I think, but I'm sure you'll know it. The front of the hotel, where the cafes are located, is often featured in TV shows and films.

The below shots are taken from the hotel website and show the position of the hotel

on the riverbank near Tower Bridge and the café that sits adjacent to the river. To us, the hotel was very flash and we were excited to see the view from our room. We were fortunate to see the bridge lift up that evening to let a ship pass through. How cool is that? (For some sad and inexplicable reason I don't have a photo, just the very bad one of the view of the bridge from our room.)

We could have gone out and explored London a bit more but we needed a little down time in preparation for the tour. It was hard to believe it had only been a week since we'd left home. We'd seen and done so much in a short time and there was a whirlwind of experiences awaiting us on the tour. We were due down in the lobby at 5.30am the next morning to start the tour, so we were glad of the chance to rest, only going out to a nearby Safeways later for some dinner. This was exciting enough for us, being able to buy a prepared dinner at a supermarket. It seems odd to say this now, but at the time in Australia, you couldn't do that.

Read on for our adventures on a tour bus for 19 days with 40+ other people, our whirlwind European experience!

Our Berlin experience

I was absolutely thrilled to have had the opportunity to visit Berlin and to finally set foot in Europe. I have been a Europhile since I was a child, fascinated by the history, the architecture, and the landscapes of all the countries of Europe and the idea of Europe as a concept. I had learnt German at high school and had always been interested in Germany and its turbulent history. I don't think I fully appreciated at the time the significance of our visit in the mid 1990s, so soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I would love to return to Berlin one day soon and explore the city further as there's so much more I would like to experience. We saw a lot of things, but not in as much depth as I would have liked. Our first ever world wanderings were very much a taster and quite a whirlwind, experiencing lots of things in a short time. With the privilege of time, better earning capacity, and experience, I have learnt that depth is what I am after.