Visiting Berlin is like doing Research with boring Results

Just a couple of months before I leave Brno, where I’ve spent six years during my studies, I’ve realized, that Berlin is just as long of a drive as my home town in eastern Slovakia. “Wait so I could have just gone to Germany instead of Slovakia the whole time?” were my thoughts exactly.

Plus, I started to learn german in November, right after I got home from a little trip to Vienna. Disappointed in myself, because I couldn't even get a point across in a language I’ve studied for four years in high school, I hopped into a language course.

Ready to test my speech (in)abilities I’ve got together with a friend and planned our trip. I was driving, he was sleeping. We were a team.

I never knew what to expect from Berlin. In fact, I’ve never quite gotten a grasp of German culture either, probably due to lack of experience. It could be, that talking about German culture as a whole is a mistake altogether. Nonetheless, I was new to this. I’ve visited Germany only two or three times before, and my expectations were unclear. All the videos I’ve found on Youtube were highly positive, and I remember that Berlin was a super popular tourist destination within my social bubble pre-pandemic.

From the very start of the trip, I was ready to counteract reviews online. Not to be forcefully negative, just to stay real. Here are two myths of which some I can debunk:

First, Dresden, which is on the way to Berlin, if you travel from the Czech Republic loves people visiting the city. So If you enter as a driver, you may never leave. The reason behind this is the constant red traffic light that makes you stop about every ten to fifteen seconds. It’s great for sightseeing, not great for the environment. However, I cannot confirm this myth for certain.

The one that I can clear out is, that Autobahns in Germany don’t have a speed limit. If you believe this, you have been misled - it’s similar to the bottomless cup at Subway. It sounds good on paper, but after you use it, you realize it’s just as good as a normal cup. The highways don’t have a speed limit that’s true, the catch is - it’s only during roughly a third of your drive. The rest? Driving speed is restricted to 130, 110 or even 80 kilometres per hour. The bright side is, that they are free.

Talking so much about driving, I should acknowledge the bottom line - it’s not good to drive anywhere. It’s bad for the climate, and bad for your nerves. However, if you’re not driving alone it costs just as much as a train ride and you can save hours on transfer time. On the other hand, it is a constant struggle for parking. For example in Berlin, I was super unsure about where free parking even was.

After we arrived at our hostel near the city centre, I decided to drive my car to a faraway part of town, but even then, I was afraid of getting towed. I’ve tried to search online, but couldn’t find a reliable source of information on my phone. To be honest, that’s a bit disappointing. Poorer European cities have a more clear system, even Brno, which has its own map telling you whether or not you are in the paid area and if you are, it allows you to pay for parking in the app. I’ve spent the rest of the trip thinking in the back of my mind, about whether or not I’m gonna find my car where I’ve parked it.

Anyway, we checked into our room, dropped off our baggage, then dropped off our car and were finally let to roam the streets free. This was Saturday afternoon. The weather was nice and warm, it was one of those first really warm spring days, where it makes you believe for a moment the summer has walked through the door, but as soon as the sun sets you realize, it barely just rang a bell.

We’ve taken the S-Bahn to Hallesches Tor to look for an interesting architecture in the apartment buildings. After we got off the train we thought we have travelled to an alternate universe. Everything looked so scatchy. There were some super high people around and we have started to feel that maybe this city was not as safe as everybody promised.

We waited for the beautifully yellow metro to arrive at the station, so we could photograph it and get on the move. The area of East Berlin which we were walking now was pretty badly hit by all the graffiti and some homeowners have apparently decided to counteract this cultural trend by applying professional murals to their facades. I have felt a bit at home in this part of town. Not just because of the communist architecture, some of it was actually pretty, but because I can imagine this would be exactly the type of city planning that would happen in Eastern Europe. Basically, every one of the apartments and other buildings was interesting and pretty on its own. They were built because somebody had money and wanted to build whatever they wanted.

However, non of the developers cared to look around and amount their vision to the face of the street and clearly, none of the local officials found this notion problematic enough to create a design guidebook for the area. As it turns out though, if you pile tens of unique buildings one on top of another, you won’t end up with a beautifully unique neighbourhood, but with a bunch of visual smog.

To be fair though, I realize the city of Berlin was completely destroyed during World War 2 and its subsequent division during the Cold war made it impossible to produce a cohesive city plan.

As we continued to explore the area - moving closer and closer to the centre, we ran into some interesting architecture like the Czech embassy or the Potsdamer Platz. This one was particularly interesting because it’s packed with modern architecture. For example this umbrella square.

We were lucky enough to catch a beautiful sunset in this area which helped us create some beautiful images. The light was so soft, yet bright and orange at the same time. Unfortunately, the security guy working in the area which we thought was public, decided he didn’t like us and proceeded to kick us out. He wasn’t there to discuss anything with us, just show us the way out :). He refused to speak English but thankfully I understood what he was saying: apparently we’ve looked too professional and he’s thought we were doing some commercial work there without a permit. He didn’t let us explain to him, that we were just tourists enjoying a good photo opportunity.

No worries, we’ve had more than enough time to collect tons of good material.

And thanks for kicking us out! At least we were just in time for the blue hour on the top of a hotel on Alexander Platz. A beautiful view in beautiful weather. I gotta say though, it was the centre of Berlin and still, there was trash everywhere on the ground. I’m sorry to complain, but I’m not holding on to a pink filter. For the love of God, at least make the most touristy places clean.

There wasn’t time to enjoy the view for too long however, it was Saturday evening before Labour day and we thought we needed to do some grocery shopping. We’ve rushed into Kaufland only to find out, that there isn’t much you can buy at a supermarket unless you have access to a kitchen which we didn’t. We grabbed a couple of snacks and headed out. Thankfully, the restaurants were open the next day. By the way - if you think Berlin must be super expensive of a city for two students from Eastern Europe, it’s not. The prices of most commodities you will need - mainly food are really comparable to the ones of bigger Slovak or Czech cities. Some items are even cheaper in the German Hauptstadt.

The next morning was quiet though. In order to explain why I will assess the pros and cons of our accommodation. First the pros - location and price (about 30e/person for a night). Cons - the part where the damn walls are paper thin and every drunk guest of the hostel will wake you up in the middle of the night by slamming doors shut. The same goes for crazy Berliners honking their car horns at midnight right under your window.

We are no quitters, however!

The morning was tough but we hopped out of our bed (we only had one :( ) and ran across the street to get coffee. I wanted to practice my German, but the lady stopped me after two words and suggested we speak in English. Rude, I thought, but okay. So I switched to English but as I’ve already had german sentences lined up in my head, I have spit out a mixture of weird English and german something in a way of “One lungo und espresso bitte.”

We’ve managed to check off the most touristy places like the Brandenburg Tor, Bundestag etc. in the morning, with only a few tourists on the ground. This made for a nice calm experience. I’ve liked the surrounding area of Bundestag and Kanzleramt a.k.a. the washing machine quite a bit apart from the endless presence of trash on the ground and in the river.

I wanted to take a selfie in front of the Der Spiegel office which was nearby, but the magazine didn’t seem to have any type of sign on the building. I took the selfie anyway, I’m just not gonna have any idea why I took it in a couple of months.

Next on the schedule was the holocaust memorial. I really liked how it fit into the landscape from some points of view. I think it represents the message it is supposed to carry very well. however many people clearly didn’t understand the purpose of this landmark and have decided to run around with their kids having fun. It’s fine, just a bit disrespectful in my opinion.

About time we got to the memorial a lot of loud noises started to spread from the area of the Brandenburg Tor. Because of my nature, I simply had to go and check it out. To my surprise, as I’d forgotten what holiday it was, there were hundreds of people with red flags listening to some guy on the podium. It turned out it was the annual workers union demonstration. I thought it was interesting how many young people were there with the Die Linke flags and I even saw an older dude with a communist flag.

After this escapade, we’ve decided to grab some lunch. Our options were limited because of the holiday and the tightness of our pockets but we’ve managed to find a cheap pizza place. This was probably the worst pizza I’ve ever eaten in my life and an employee even asked us, if we like it. I mean, he must have known the pizza was shit.

After lunch, we headed to a view at Potsdamer Platz, which gave us the opportunity to photograph a great bicycle demonstration, which was taking a ride through the city. Later, we headed out to photograph metro stations which we found interesting. Berlin has 9 underground lines and each of the stations is in some way unique. I don’t mean to be too critical, but I think that might be overkill because in effect not all were too esthetic. Although that might be just a thing of personal preference.

In my opinion, the approach to the design of metro stations adopted by the city of Prague is far more tasteful, because they have developed three unique, yet modest and timeless designs each for one of the lines. This way it’s much easier to create a typical look because it’s not just a collection of art but in fact a visual standard, which helps passengers with their orientation in the underground system.

The stations we’ve visited were fairly pretty though, although not extremely photogenic (which is not a critique, cities are meant to be built for everyday use and its citizens, not only for Instagram and many beautiful places you can visit just don’t look that cool framed). By the time we finished this tour of roughly four places, we were so exhausted we had to fight to stay awake during transfers. Metro must be one of the vehicles where humans are most susceptible to kick it back. There is no sun, it’s a fairly monotone vibrating ride, much less rough compared to a train or a bus and it’s mostly quiet there.

One could even, I don’t know, fall asleep for a second and miss the right stop. Which is incidentally what has happened to us. No worries though, we have found our way and got ourselves to a distant part of town which housed an underway which was completely covered in graffiti. It had these interesting orange pillars too.

Not only interesting architecture has occupied the place, however. There was one other exposition awaiting us and that was a drunk man sitting with his back against one of the pillars. The mission of his evening was apparently not just to drink all the beers, but to also pee on every single pillar there was. And as far as I could tell he was pretty successful at it.

We have sped up the process of photography and videography and everything because being in close proximity to this scatchy guy was the last thing that we wanted.

The good news was, that this mysterious place just happened to be by sheer coincidence near the Berlin international congress centre, which is incidentally a piece of architecture, which I’ve wished to see but thought I won’t get the chance. It’s this space ship looking building which has been now turned into a covid vaccination centre. I’ve decided to ask the security guard patrolling the perimeter of the building for assurance that it is okay to photograph it. Yet again, I’ve tried out my german. Upon my attempt, the scary-looking guy with one red eye asked me: Gavarish pa rusky? I’ve responded negatively, but admitted, that my native language is Slovak. By chance, this guy has a part of his family from Slovakia and started talking to me in Slovak, declining my chance to practice german. He agreed that I can take some photos.

In the evening, we’ve managed to head out to drink some beer. Ready to use one of my last chances to exercise the language, I prepared the order in my head in German and waited for the waitress to show up. She did, and she asked where were from, Slovakia, we’ve replied. It turned out, she was Polish and was very keen to speak our language with us, burying my Deutsche Träume. I later complained to my lecturer that apparently learning German is completely useless for me since clearly everyone on this planet simply understands Slovak.

We left our hostel early in the morning and headed to photograph escalators of the Berlin stock exchange. Later, we returned to the hostel for our baggage and enjoyed the morning sun on the terrace of a cafe nearby and took a bus to my car. It was still in its place, unharmed, unfined, thank God. We didn’t leave the city right away but decided to stop by a Le Corbusier building called Unité d'habitation, which is an exact copy of the building of this architect, who has kicked off the fame of béton brut, or brutalism in Marseille, France. We visited the Olympic stadium where Hitler hosted his Olympic games in 1936 too, as it was not far from the apartment building.

The drive back home was tough. First of all, we’ve barely got gas to make it across the border to the Czech Republic, so we can tank the cheaper gas and not the one in Germany for 2e/l. Second of all, we haven’t slept for two days, because of how loud our hostel was. Third, we have really made the most of Berlin and have pushed it to the limit of what we could bear. We’ve still decided to stop in Dresden on the way home, however.

As you might have been able to tell, neither of us really loved Berlin. On the other hand, Dresden was just fine. The prices were much higher, but despite the city being also floored during the war, they have decided to rebuild its historical centre of it and so it was still able to keep its soul. Plus, the narrow yellow trams are so cute.

In conclusion, it wasn’t a bad trip at all. Just because Berlin wasn’t our vibe doesn’t mean I regret going. I perceive it in a way as the kind of research that doesn’t yield extraordinary insights. Yeah, you’re not gonna win a prize for it, but you didn’t know what the results would be at the beginning. Now, at least, I will never regret that I didn’t manage to make my opinion about the city, although I will not recommend my friends repeat my trip.