03.08.2011 – 03.08.2011  22 °C

Arrived late last night so decided this morning to get up early and go discover the city. Berlin is a pretty big city, but with a good map of the city and a subway ticket you’re all set!

Started down town at the Hopfbahn (main train station) and started walking towards the sites. Reichstag on your left, Brandenburg Gate on your right and the Tiergarten directly behind! I reckon I could do this tour guiding stuff! No in all serious-ness I had a couple of goals today and seeing some of the sites was actually a bonus in my travels. First stop was to try and find the Aussie embassy (no I’m not in trouble… stop stressing… I need to try and extend my EU visa and am trying to find out the best way)… most of the embassies are near the Brandenburg gate so I thought if I just went for a wander I’d find our flag and in I’d go…. It was a good plan except our embassy is on the other side of the river and a fair way from the gate! (I guess we can’t afford the real estate prices!!)

Second goal for the day was to find a book store and buy a map, road atlas and guide book for the rest of my Germany trip… Considering I was planning to leave this city in a couple of days and start driving I thought it might be an idea to work out where I was going and how I was going to get there and hopefully what sort of things I might see on my way! 50 Euro later I walked out of a bookshop with everything my little heart could desire… including the address and office hours of the AU embassy! (which by the way is only open 3 days a week for only two hours each of those days… what do our civil servants do for the rest of the time????????—maybe I should consider a career change to the foreign dept!)

Now that I had ticked off my two jobs I decided to go and do some more site seeing. So I wandered down Freidrichstrasse to see Check Point Charlie. There is still a really cheesy tourist attraction (that I still avidly took photos of!) at the point where Checkpoint Charlie used to exist… you can even get your passport stamped (if you pay 10 E and if you have your passport—neither of which I had on me). Right next to the check point is a museum dedicated to the cold war.

I was surprised to learn that the wall wasn’t built til 61… for some reason I thought it had gone up in the 50s! The two separate countries were officially announced in ’49 meaning that from this time onwards Berlin was split down the middle into two separate zones (originally there were 4 sectors- the American, British, French and Soviet- the three western sectors joined together before 49). At first this wasn’t overly noticeable but by ’53 a huge popular uprising occurred. Over 200,000 Berliners (both from the East and the West) took to the streets to complain about a new law that had been passed by the East German govt. This law meant that E German’s had to increase their work output without any change to their level of pay. This was the last common demonstration within E Germany because it ended by Soviet tanks and troops opening fire on the protesters. The number killed at this demonstration is unknown. From this time forward many E Germans made the move to the West. Over 2million E Germans had moved to the west by 61. Therefore the E German govt decided to erect a barb wired fence to stop people moving to the west. During one whole night the entirety of West Berlin was surrounded by troops and barbed wire- thus the first wall was installed.

Over the next 20 years the wall moved from a barbed wire fence right up to being a concrete wall with a 100m “no go” zone including trip wires, machine guns, dogs… The E German govt told the pop’n of E Germany it was to keep out the “fascists” but in actual fact it was to keep the E German population in E Germany.

There were some pretty amazing escapes that occurred in the early years of the wall… One guy built himself a hot air balloon and put his family and another family in his home grown balloon and sailed the whole family into W Germany! Another guy built his own submarine and got to Denmark! Another family made an escape to W Berlin by firing an arrow (with fishing wire connected) across the wall to his mate on the other side… his mate attached a rope to the fishing wire and they climbed hand over hand across the rope to W Berlin! One guy got more than 800 people across the border by putting them inside two specially made welding units… He would drive into the East each day with his welding gear, do his welding jobs and on the way home pick up a person or two and fit them into his welding boxes and then drive them over the border—his comment was that the cars were always checked but no-one ever thought to look inside the welding gear. One of the welders is still on display in the museum and it was actually quite roomy! The other “great escape” that I liked was a VW that had its bonnet modified so that someone could fit in under the hood but hidden by the spare tyre… not sure I could have fit in there but someone small could have!

Headed back to the digs after the museum with the plan to have an early night and get myself on a guided tour of the city for the next day.