If you’ve been following the tale of my Eras Train Tour – London to Warsaw by train – you’ll know by now that I’m in Berlin. I was going to do a post per day following my eleven-day journey but a couple of things in Berlin demanded their own post so this is a roundup of everything else I did on Saturday. It was supposed to be the entire weekend but when it hit 2000 words before I’d got to the end of the first day, it seemed merciful to split it. So we’re back on the blog post a day train!
I arrived about 6.15pm on Friday after a long journey from London via Brussels and Cologne, an hour later than planned but a lot earlier than it could have been, given a late Eurostar and sabotage on the French rail network. I walked to my hotel, which is only two tram stops from the Hauptbahnhof, and then walked three-quarters of the way back to the nearest supermarket – or so I thought at the time; it transpired the next day that there was one literally just across the road.
On Saturday morning it was kind of grey and oppressively hot. I was ready to learn about Berlin’s public transport and where better to start than the U-Bahn station outside my hotel? I knew, because my dad had made sure, that the U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks are “open” – that is, you don’t need a ticket to enter although you do need to be in possession of a valid validated ticket. The tram stop outside didn’t have a ticket machine but the U-Bahn did. The trouble was, it didn’t work. Ok, fine, I’ll use the wifi in the station to download the app and buy a digital 24-hour ticket. That went fine right up until I came to pay for it when the system just refused to accept any form of payment. Just plain using the website on my phone had the same problem too. So I stomped down the road in a fury at my inability to get a ticket. Got to get moving. It’s a straight road to Friedrichstrasse, my first stop, might as well walk there.
Halfway there, I found another U-Bahn station and in a moment of inspiration, I dived into it. Its ticket machine worked! I was able to buy a 24-hour transport ticket! Now I could jump on any train, bus or tram that I fancied! And in that moment of inspiration, I stuck the ticket in the validation machine. From now on, my ticket was valid. I immediately kind of regretted it – might as well save it as long as possible, since I hadn’t had any plans to actually use any transport for at least a little while. But in hindsight, it didn’t really matter whether I validated it then or two hours later – I’d still need to buy a second 24-hour ticket on Sunday and what with my train to Poland departing on Monday morning, I wouldn’t need to buy a third unless I held off validating until the afternoon, which wasn’t going to happen. Anyway, since my ticket was validated, I might as well use it so I jumped on the next U-Bahn, rather than walking to Friedrichstrasse.
My reason for stopping here was kind of silly. Months ago, I bought a Lord of Misrule massage bar from Lush and only tried it out shortly before departing for Warsaw, at which point I immediately decided a solid moisturiser bar was exactly what I wanted to take with me, except I didn’t have a container for it. Lush products generally come in paper bags or cardboard boxes full of cornstarch noodles and neither were a good option for carrying across Europe. I needed to make a stop at a nearby Lush for a tin for the thing. Since there was a Lush at Friedrichstrasse, that’s what I did. Now we could get on with Berlin!
I took the U-Bahn one more stop to Unter Den Linden, the Parisian-style boulevard that leads up to Brandenburg Gate, which I persist in calling Brandenburg Tor because that’s a significant planet in Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, a reference I’ve been familiar with longer than I have been with the monument in Berlin. Sue me. As I walked down the boulevard towards the giant gate, I became aware of a lot of noise and then of festival-style fencing, blacked out, around it. I wasn’t going to get to walk through the gate. I wasn’t going to get near it. There was a narrow gap at the side and I went through, turned right, away from what was now definitely a festival and headed towards the Reichstag Building.
Again, Miss Uncultured Here, I think of “they weren’t allowed to film Mission: Impossible 3 here” before I think of “major Berlin landmark”. Nonetheless, I’d been quite excited to see the big glass dome on top of it and… quite disappointed with the reality. The Reichstag Building is a big stone building, quite an architectural sight in its own right and the famous dome didn’t really have any angle where you could get a really good look at it. It really felt like an afterthought plopped on top, which I suppose it technically is. I thought it would be bigger. I certainly thought it wouldn’t be obscured by the corners of the building it’s sitting on. I was tempted to go inside it. That’s the done thing, right? But it was hot and there was a queue through a portacabin which seemed to be the security check and I just knew I’d die if I had to wait in there. Maybe I just need to go back to Berlin in January. I walked past the Reichstag instead and went back to the U-Bahn.
Next up was Checkpoint Charlie. I don’t know if I’d entirely meant to go there but I’d seen it marked on the U-Bahn map earlier on, which I hadn’t expected. You don’t get “Eiffel Tower metro stop” in Paris, or “Houses of Parliament tube stop” in London. And yet here was Checkpoint Charlie, an easy run up from Unter Den Linden. So I did that. May as well cross it off. May as well cross off the trinity of Berlin disappointments.
Checkpoint Charlie feels like a theme park attraction. There’s the little hut, there’s a pile of sandbags, there’s replica signs up on the road about it. There’s grinning tourists having their photos taken behind the sandbags as if this is a Disney kingdom and there’s the idiot tourists who have no idea that this is a functioning city and a real road missing being hit by a car by about four inches. I can only assume at least a tourist a day really does get hit by a car here at Checkpoint Charlie.
To be honest, I had a bigger problem than crossing off the tourist stops. My bag was falling apart. I’d made it, out of bright yellow ripstop nylon, inspired by the Uniqlo half-round bag (but much bigger, it turned out). The first version had come apart at the seams. The second version had seemed better but it also had a rip in the seam which was growing by the second. If I was going to make any use of it, if I was going to have any kind of day bag that wasn’t my (also hand-made and holding up wonderfully) zip tote “personal item”, I needed to repair it and that meant I needed to find a needle and thread. Fortunately, there’s the sort of shop that looks exactly like it’ll sell that sort of thing right outside Checkpoint Charlie’s metro stop.
I went home after that, partly because I was hot and soaked in sweat, partly because I was hungry and partly because it was now taking both hands to hold my bag together. I sewed it up. I used contrasting bright red thread to try and make a feature out of my repair, because doing it discreetly wasn’t going to be an option, and I doubled the thread. It was meant to look like medical stitches, thick and bright red and a line of short parallel stitches and in that I succeeded but somehow it didn’t look like I hoped it would. All the same, it held up perfectly for the rest of the trip. Well, the seam on the other side of the top came apart that afternoon so I had to sew up both sides in the end but the stitches held!
After lunch, I went and tried to give Berlin a second try. U-Bahn to the Reichstag, walk all the way around, try to appreciate what little of it I can see, walk up to Brandenburg Gate and again, try to appreciate what little I can see. Go to Pride. Because I’d figured out what was going on around and under Brandenburg Gate. It was Berlin Pride, which they call Christopher Street Day, after the street the Stonewall Inn was on. There was a kind of Pride street party going on all afternoon and, it turned out later, a proper parade later on. I’ve never been to Pride. I’m the A in LGBTQIA+, which is why I don’t stop at the Q but on the other hand, many of the other letters seem to prefer that the A is Allies rather than Asexuals. I appreciate that “Allies” is sometimes a way of saying “closeted” but it seems unfair to use them to actively exclude the aces and so I generally don’t feel very welcome in those sorts of spaces. But there was Pride and since I’d stumbled upon it, I thought I’d try it out.
It was… joyful. There were people dressed up, there was deafening music from all angles and there were the usual array of stalls all the way down the long boulevard, all draped in rainbows, whether they usually are or not. If I’ve neglected to mention it, my yellow bag has a rainbow strap on it, because I bought the webbing when I made the Personal Item, my green and orange zipped tote bag for flights and what other colour or colour combination goes with both green and orange? They then accidentally sent me a second roll of it, so it’s the strap for my Personal Item, my yellow day bag and the harness for my bedding roll. I have a ton of this stuff. So I was at least a little decked out but I decided I was going to be brave and buy an ace pin badge, to declare my own colours publicly for the first time. Of course, a black, white, purple and grey pin worn on a black t-shirt isn’t as visible as I could be but for someone who generally isn’t open and proud about it, this was quite a big deal. And yes, Pride was joyful.
After that, I was hot and tired and my feet hurt and I thought it was about time to head home to grab my swimming things before going to Badeschiff. That’s already had its own post so you can go over there to read about my afternoon swimming in a floating pool moored on the side of the river. It’s worth saying that this was where I found out about the Pride parade though. With the S-Bahn being closed through the centre of the city, everyone was getting on the U-Bahn and I just couldn’t figure out why. To be honest, I still haven’t made sense of the route so many people were using. It took three legs to get to Badeschiff, I think – Bundestag to Alexanderplatz, Alexanderplatz to Kottbusser Tor, Kottbusser Tor to Schlesisches Tor. The second leg was particularly bad – I had someone standing on my foot, I was leaning against someone else and for support, all I could manage was one hand stretched out between several people to press the back wall of the carriage. When the train moved, we all fell against each other, for four excruciating and boiling stops. If anyone had collapsed from heat exhaustion… well, no one would have actually managed to collapse, there wasn’t space. Fortunately, at Kottbusser Tor, everyone was heading west rather than east and my last train was relatively quiet.
I enjoyed my swim and my experience of south-east central Berlin. Getting back was bad. I thought I’d run across to Warschauer Str., take the S-Bahn up to Friedrichstrasse and then two stops north to my hotel. I’d reckoned without the closed section right in the middle. It took two trains and a tram to get home, I think, and featured a lot of running up and down S-Bahn stations wailing out loud about “why can’t they just tell you what platform everything is on??”. Every platform tells you what’s leaving from there but if you want to know where to go next, you’ve got to go right out to the ticket hall for the nearest board that gives you a bit more info. Put one in the tunnel, I’m begging!
I think that was about it for Saturday. I got home, showered the cold water out of my hair, turned the air conditioning up, ate some bread and butter, ate a chocolate yoghurt-pudding-thing with a wooden fork and went to bed. Friday had been a really long day and although in many ways, Saturday had been kind of lazy, it was a hot and busy kind of lazy and that’s just as tiring as a proper busy day.