Recently a business trip of a couple of days took me over to another new German city; Berlin. I had never been there before – though the city is filled with a lot of history, it never was a particularly desirable travel destination in my mind.
And it still isn’t.
Not that there’s something specifically wrong with the city, but in my short stay I didn’t find anything very appealing either. At 4 million people, the city feels geographically even bigger than that – the distances are long and as one local told me, going anywhere takes one hour. The downtown is somewhat spread out and split among different “centers”, some of the on the rise and others on the decline. Below is some photographic material from the walks I had time for in the evenings. Click to enlarge. Unfortunately the weather didn’t really co-operate with cloudy skies and even rain, so in reality the city will likely look much brighter and nicer and not so gloomy as in these photos.
A beautiful old church had taken some hits (supposedly during WWII) and has since been replaced by a hideously ugly concrete hexagon – in the picture below left the bell tower is on the left, the actual new church is on the right but equally ugly. From the inside even the concrete bunker was nice, but I still prefer the look of the old one. The one below right is of some completely different church.
The Brandenburg Gate was quite neat. The surroundings have a similar feeling as much of Berlin; there’s perhaps even too much space. Like the road leading to the gate; a very wide road with even wider sidewalks with heavy buildings on the side but few people around creates a somewhat sad atmosphere.
The Holocaust memorial was really the only mandatory sight that I specifically went to see; it’s a memorial the size of a city block, constructed of various size blocks. It doesn’t look all that impressive when you first see it, but as you start walking among the deepening corridors and rising blocks of rock it’s pretty powerful:
Potsdamer Platz was the newest area of the city, resembling the CBD of any modern big city. There was some life even in the evenings but mostly in the form of restaurants and cinemas.
One thing that there are too many of in Berlin are taxis. The airport is pathetically small for a city of 4 million but there are always hundreds of taxis waiting for customers. I was told that they can wait for hours for a single ride – and then they get a customer like me who goes on a 5-kilometer ride. I would normally have taken the subway, but there was none to the airport.
I never really understood why there are so many taxis if there aren’t enough customers for them all.
Despite the trip having gone well, returning home rarely felt as good as it did now. Usually a stand arrival is an annoying thing (especially when the airport is literally empty so there really is no reason for such a thing) but it turns out it can be quite pleasant on evenings when the entire airport is bathed in the golden light of the setting sun and the temperature is +23C.
Not a bad homecoming at all.
