Berlin

Mood: Exasperated, yet still happy
Theme Song: "It Can't Rain All The Time" - Jane Siebel

It's been a while since I've written, and for that I must apologise. I've gotten busy, and distracted, and it seems the older I get the shorter my attention span becomes, making it a real challenge to sit down and actually write a coherent sentence that is non work-related.

I think the one truth I'm discovering is that no matter where I go in my varied travels, my expectation of what the place will be like and the reality are two very different things. I'm not always disappointed (i.e. Nice, which was FABULOUS), but sometimes it all feels a bit anticlimactic. Berlin falls a bit into the latter category.



I am a child of the 80s. I grew up half in love with Ricky (aka "Ric") Schroeder from Silver Spoons (speaking of which, where is he now?), wanting hair like Blair on The Facts of Life, a firm believer in the powers of ColecoVision and convinced that evil communists were just one bad day away from nuking us all. For the young folk reading this, the 80s didn't pulsate with the tension that coloured, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis. We didn't have drills at school where were crawled under our desk to practice for a nuclear attack (Note to 1960s Educators: in a battle between wood and nuclear energy, I'm pretty sure the wood would lose). It was more of a basic understood principle that the commies were out to take over the world. It is hard to explain today what that time was like. In some ways, it was business as usual - the Reagan years were prosperous for America as a whole. But there was also the immense shadow of the USSR looming over everything. I knew about the Star Wars plan. I was aware of what DEFCON meant. Everytime there was a skirmish across the globe, I was afraid that this would be the moment when someone finally launched a missile. The idea of the Iron Curtain was very real, and very scary. Berlin was a perfect example - the images of the West were shown in stark contrast to those of the East.


Because of all this, Berlin has always loomed large in my mind. It is the city of intrigue, spies, Cold War secrets and fear. The Wall itself has always been larger than life in my mind - I mean, surely it had to be massive - to divide a city and to serve as the gate between the free world and the communist world, right?

The reality of the city is far different than I expected. I think perhaps that I visited about 10 years too late for indulging my cold war fantasies. While there are still some visible differences between East and West, they are not that pronounced - and I think in another 10 years, one would be hard pressed to tell the difference at all.

Our hotel was in an area called "Mitte" - which I thought was West Berlin until I was told otherwise. I guess I need to get out more, but I was terribly thrilled to be staying on the "commie side" of the city. The hotel was nice, but there were flaws - scuff marks on the walls, intermittent A/C, a random odor of cabbage from time to time. I am not sure if these were due to the hotel not being managed properly or due to the fact that we were on the Eastern side. I'm sure you can all guess which option the uber-American in me chose.

I explored the city over the course of a drizzly Thursday evening and an even wetter Friday. I visited the Brandenburg Gate, The Reichstag, the Bellevue Schloss, the Radio Tower, the Berliner Dom, Checkpoint Charlie, Museum Island and both the new and old train station. I even visited the world famous Ka De We department store on the Kurfürstendamm. I wandered down Freiderichstrasse. I ate bratwurst. And you know what? My takeaway is that Berlin is interesting to visit from an historical perspective, but the city did not wow me in any way.

Maybe it was because it was raining. Or because I was traveling alone, or because I didn't go out at night - but I just wasn't that impressed. Would I go back? Yes, if I brought a friend - but only to experience the city's supposedly amazing nightlife. Would I be sad if I never went back again? Not really.

Which makes me wonder - is all this travel making me jaded? Next entry I shall write on Oslo and Copenhagen - one of which I liked much, much more than the other. Care to take a guess?

Federman out.