Moving's a bitch

"He who would travel happily must travel light." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This quote has been hanging on my wall for the last couple of years and now it's mocking me as I struggle to fit three years of my life into a box, a suitcase, and a backpack. Anyone want to guess how many pairs of shoes I own in Germany? What about how many books? I'll give you a hint: it's (significantly) more books than pairs of shoes, and (significantly) more pairs of shoes than years of my life so far.

The last straw

I emptied my last box of Cheerios this morning. Time to go, I guess.

Apartment tour, part 3

Welcome to the latest, greatest, and last installment of the apartment tour. It's relatively unusual for a shared apartment in Germany to have a living room, so the kitchen, the bathroom, and my bedroom are pretty much it. There's a balcony too, but that's just where I keep my dead plants.

So why did I wait so long to show you the place where I spend most of my time? What's that you say? Maybe because this is the first time since I started writing that it's been clean enough for pictures? How dare you? How dare you come to my blog and say things like that?

Good night (and goodbye) Berlin

I like the Brandenburg Gate (like most landmarks) better after dark. Things lit up at night always make me feel like Christmas and it's easier to get pictures without people popping up in front of your camera like crasher squirrel.

This is, hands down, my favourite memorial in Berlin. It's on (or under, I guess) Bebelplatz, where in 1933 the Nazis burned over 20,000 books deemed "un-German". You look through this window into a room lined with empty bookshelves and, nearby, there's a plaque with the Heinrich Heine quote "Where they burn books, they will end by burning people". I must have taken pictures of this group for at least five minutes and there are several pictures where one of the group members is giving me the evil eye. But I was there first and anyway, I think the picture's better with people in it!

This is 1/3 of the Gendarmenmarkt, the "prettiest square in Berlin". The square is framed by an opera house and two former cathedrals (now museums) - the French Cathedral and the German Cathedral. The French Cathedral was built first and the German one (above) was built to "match". It was supposed to be the twin (in size and almost in design) of the French building, but then they made it one metre taller. The anti-French shenanigans never stop in Berlin!

And this is the Berlin Cathedral again, with the apparently indefatigable Fernsehturm still playing peekaboo. It's 11 pm, Fernsehturm! Go to bed!

Heaven on Earth

After you see the Fernsehturm and the Brandenburg Gate (or before - I'm not judging), you should probably head on over to Ritter Sport World.

You can buy Ritter Sport in the Schokoladen.

You can eat food and drink beverages made with Ritter Sport in the Schoko-café.

 

And you can learn things about Ritter Sport (like how they make it and why it's

called "Sport") in the little museum. So it's *cough* an educational trip.

Straight spyin'

While I'm not going to suggest that the Stasi* in East Germany was anything other than terrifying (because imagine not knowing if your neighbours, coworkers, or family members were spying on you and reporting back to an agency that could straight-up ruin your life), this formerly-classified document showing the many disguises of a Stasi agent is unintentionally hilarious.

Fun fact: Stasi files are now open to the public (within limits). If you lived in East Germany, you can go look up your file and find out what the Stasi knew about you. This represents the first time in history citizens have managed to force a secret police service to open their files, which is pretty cool when you think about it.

*short for Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security)

Berlin 101

The Brandenburg gate was finished in 1791 and topped with the figure of Victory in her chariot. But when Napoleon conquered Berlin in the 19th century, Victory (and her chariot) were shipped off to Paris. Of course, the Prussians got the statue (and Berlin) back eventually and put her back on top of the gate. And then, just to show the French who's boss, they renamed the square in front of the Brandenburg Gate "Paris Place", so that they would always have Victory over Paris. And people say Germans don't have a sense of humour!

This is the Reichstag building, which houses the German parliament (Bundestag). The Reichstag fire in 1933 served as Hitler's excuse for assuming emergency powers (which he kept until his suicide in 1945). It's been refurbished with a new glass dome where you can look down and see parliament in session. A symbol of transparency and so on...

But lest you think there's nothing you'd like better than frying up a few Bratwürste while watching the sun set over the Reichstag:

It's VERBOTEN. I wonder what the Alberta Legislature's stance on grilling is?

This is the Fernsehturm (TV tower), which was built to make the West Berliners insanely jealous of East Berlin's technological prowess. The first time I was in Berlin, I decided against taking the elevator up the tower and I've been regretting it ever since. So this time I manned up, paid the twelve Euros and waited the two hours. And then I stayed up there until I felt like I'd got my money's worth (three hours).

This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The name's a little unwieldy, but the monument's quite impressive. It's a little hard to tell from the picture, but the ground rises and falls between the blocks, which are all the same size but different heights. You can walk between the blocks, but the aisles are narrow and you have to walk single file. It's quite cold in there, even when it's hot outside, and it's really easy to lose your companions because the monument covers an entire city block and the chances that your paths will converge is minimal. The general consensus seems to be that it's supposed to give you some idea of how the Jews felt (isolated and terrified) and that its sheer size is supposed to make it hard to ignore. 

This is the Berlin Cathedral (with the Fernsehturm playing peekaboo). The cathedral is old by Canadian standards (completed in 1905), but it has no business looking quite as old as it does - it was deliberately "aged" to fit in with the older buildings around it.

Berlin licence plate game

Being on holiday is supposed to get you out of your boring, everyday routine, and it certainly shakes things up in the licence plate game (an important part of your everyday routine, I'm sure). There are only so many funny licence plates that start with N, but B opens up a whole new world of three-to-five-letter words!

This car knows it's August, but thinks it feels more like November. And yet they keep talking about global warming!

And this van wants you to know it'll be back in just a second. Don't go away! It still wants to chat! It just needs to grab something to eat!

Punpoint Charlie

I visited Checkpoint Charlie the first time I was in Berlin, and I wouldn't have gone back this time except that it was really close to my hostel. Even though some world-changing things happened there, there's really nothing to do there unless you want to pay 20 Euros to visit the "Wall Museum" or 10 Euros for a fake-Russian, fake-fur hat or 5 Euros to get your picture taken with an actor dressed as an East German border guard. No? Me neither. But Checkpoint Charlie is also, apparently, Pun Central. I mean, check out this currywurst stand. Checkpoint Curry!

Unfortunately my favourite, Snackpoint Charlie (a much better pun, as I'm sure we can all agree), seems to have gone out of business since the last time I was in Berlin. It's been replaced by Kalter Krieg (Cold War), which is an ice cream shop, obviously. I mean, what else were they supposed to call it?

But back to currywurst. Currywurst is a Berlin invention and culinary specialty. It's a sausage (Wurst), cut up and doused in curry-flavoured ketchup. That's it. That's all. I opted to try my first Berlin currywurst at this stand, which despite coming in last in the pun competition, dominated the field in the letting-me-try-the-potato-salad-before-committing-to-buying-it event.

 

And in case you were wondering, both the potato salad and the currywurst gave a strong performance in the "being delicious" category.

On the homestretch

I left Danzig in the dead of night.

Okay, so I left at 6.30 am, but I needed a reason to post one more night picture of Danzig. So, "dead of night" = 6.30 am. Tell your friends! Seven hours later, I was in Berlin.

Danzig shipyards

Since I was at the shipyard gate already (and since I have an as-yet-unexplained fondness for shipyards), I decided to venture a little further.

 

The Danzig shipyards have fallen on hard times (almost 90% job loss), with the result that there are a lot of old, abandoned buildings. A couple of them have been turned into kind-of-neat-but-definitely-weird art galleries.

Foreground: shredded-magazine bales which can be compressed into shredded-magazine bricks. Background: Stalinist machine to produce the perfect worker, reproduced from contemporary sources (with some creative gap-filling, I'd guess).

This is a moveable chapel designed for people who want to marry buildings (have y'all seen that documentary about the woman who married the Eiffel Tower?) - it can be pushed up against the corner of the building and provides a "quiet, contemplative" atmosphere for the ceremony. 

Other buildings have just been boarded up and surrounded by meaningless signs like the one below. I mean, it might say "private property", but it's not like I can read Polish. Pretty ambiguous, I'd say.

Anyway, check out what you get to see if you ignore the signs!

 Yeah!

Solidarnosc

In 1980, while Poland was still under communist rule, Danzig's shipyard workers went on strike. The Solidarity trade union was formed and the concessions they won were the beginning of the end for communism in Europe. This is the shipyard gate in 1980, when thousands of people waited outside for news of the strikes.

And this is the shipyard gate in 2012. On the right you can see the two boards where the shipyard workers wrote their list of demands. Most of them were the sorts of things that every worker everywhere should be entitled to (and they were, in large part, granted), but the one that made me laugh was three years of paid maternity leave. "And we're still waiting."

 

Of course, it wasn't an easy path from the strikes of 1980 to the fall of communism in Europe. The communist regime struck back with a wave of pretty vicious oppression in 1981 and things definitely got worse before they got better. Members of the resistance started wearing electrical resistors as a sign of their opposition to the regime. Cool, yes?

An aside: While I was in Danzig, the hero of the shipyard strikes and former president of Poland, Lech Walesa, publicly endorsed Mitt Romney. You were doing so well, dude! What happened?

Danzig through life

How do I like thee, Danzig? Let me count the ways:

I like your riverfront, especially at night, when the strollers have strolled home.

I like your graffiti, even if some of it is a little whiny.

I like your abandoned warehouses, even if I don't get to explore them because I don't fancy getting arrested in a country where I can't explain why they shouldn't arrest me.

 I like your rowhouses and I like imagining I live on all six floors of this one. 

I like how much these punks are enjoying this organ grinder and his parrot.

I like your impromptu art galleries.

I like this guy using an iPad as a camera (or at least I like laughing at him).

 I like how none of the buildings in your market square really "match",

but they still look awesome together.

And I like the fact that you can buy individual pickles in your supermarkets.

Westerplatte - where World War II began

By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Danzig (formerly a part of the German Empire) became the Free City of Danzig ("a semi-autonomous city-state" - Wikipedia). Poland had the right to use parts of the port and to represent the Free City in dealings with the outside world, but the UN didn't want to just go ahead and give it to Poland because the population was 95% German. Sound complicated? It was. And also, nobody was happy. Germany really wanted Danzig back and the Poles complained that everyone in Danzig was mean to them even though the UN said they were allowed to be there.

Fast-forward to 1939: the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein anchors at the Polish harbour of Westerplatte (just a few kilometres north of Danzig) on a "courtesy visit", but by this time the Poles know that it's only a matter of time until the Germans attack, so they've secretly been fortifying Westerplatte with guardhouses and extra troops. Sure enough, on the 1st of September, German troops fire on Westerplatte and World War II begins. Long history short, the "Defenders of Westerplatte", who were supposed to be able to hold out for 12 hours (long enough for reinforcements to arrive), held out for seven days before they surrendered.

That's why they got this very sixties monument from the communists, who tried to leverage this story of Polish heroism into support for their regime.

On my second day in Danzig, I took a boat up the river to Westerplatte and wandered through the forest for a couple of hours. There's not a lot left, but there's quite a good outdoor exhibit and you can walk through the barracks, which gives you an idea of the damage that Westerplatte sustained.

A last note: the German commander who accepted the eventual surrender was so impressed by the Polish defense that he allowed the Polish commander to keep his ceremonial sabre in captivity, which is apparently a sign of soldierly respect. It's also the kind of story that makes me cry.