East or West

Some days ago, as my parents were spending a few days with me in Frankfurt, we decided to spend a long weekend in Berlin, Germany's capital. Overall, that was my third time there, after a first visit like six years ago amidst the snow in Easter and a second short visit to my friend Julia last September.

Berlin is, when compared with other big European capitals like Rome, Paris or London, a modern city. Most of its buildings come only from the XIXth century (or even more recently, after the destruction caused by the Second World War). The profile of the city is dramatically defined by the end of Second World War and the Berlin Wall, which was built in 1961 to divide East and West Berlin. A red scar goes through the city centre showing where the wall stood in the past (by the way, in the picture the left part was East Berlin).

Most of the historical buildings stayed in the Eastern part of the city, where they were mixed with the typical communist architecture, like we can witness in the Alexanderplatz, where, in a couple of hundreds of meters we have the TV tower, the old Town Hall, the statue of Marx and Engels and the cathedral, just at the beginning of Unter den Linden. Close to this area, we find the cosy Nikolaiviertel, which survived, by miracle, the communist impulse for reconstruction.

Unter den Linden was supposed to be the equivalent to Champs Elysées in Paris and, some years later, I think it is coming closer to it. The walk from Alexanderplatz is extremely nice and it ends in the Brandeburger Tor, another landmark of the city. Special attention can be paid to the embassies of Russia, USA, France and UK, all of them within walking distance from each other. These were busy place during the Cold War, weren't they? A bit to the south, we have the modern Postdamer Platz, a good example of how to fill an empty space when one has a lot of money.Museums in Berlin also deserve a visit, although some of them are not very German in their content. Anyway, just think that if Germans had not taken these monuments to Berlin, they would be destroyed by now (or under some roads or something evern worse). Pergamon Museum is a must, as it is the whole Island of the Museums, now that Nefertiti is back to her home in the Neues Museum.

Berlin is also famous for its inhabitants. The city has a lot of faces and it is not strange to see punkies, gothics and similar dark tribes around Alexanderplatz, young and ambitious intellectuals towards Prenzlauer Berg, rich Russians around Gendarmenmarkt or the "usual suspects" around the station at Zoologischer Garten. And, needless to say, many more which we did not meet in just our three days there.Unfortunately, this time we shared wall in our hotel with another typical visitor of Berlin: a man listening to disco music and smoking in his room the whole weekend. It was not a nice experience to share the wall with him, but fortunately that is not our main memory from Berlin.