From the Berlin Wall to Belgian Waffles

Our fearless Dr. Peters (fondly referred to now as Frau Peters thanks to a certain tour guide in Berlin) led our group of 21 students on a week-long field trip to Berlin and Brussels last week, aided by Dr. Wattles and his wife Hagiko. We all arrived in Berlin on Sunday evening and checked into our hostel on Rosenstrasse--deep in the heart of former East Berlin. I hadn't traveled previously that weekend, because the French railroad workers' strike stymied my attempt to go to Lyon. Berlin immediately struck me with its cold, a rude change from the snatches of spring we had been having in Geneva. Also, the hostel was possibly the nicest I've ever stayed at. Our rooms had five-foot tall windows looking over a courtyard--actually, they strongly reminded me of the windows in the beginning of the movie Taken, but I remember liking those windows, too.

Monday was dedicated to an extensive bus tour of Berlin. It is a very impressive city. If it weren't for the occasional bombed-out cathedral or statue that has been left as a reminder of WWII or the few remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall, you could easily forget the many upheavals it experienced in the last century. I saw a photograph of the Reichstag (the Parliament building) at the end of WWII and couldn't stop from saying, "Oh my God," out loud. It was a shell of a building completely surrounded by devastation, and now, it is a beautiful area. Lots of very interesting buildings have popped up in the gaps left by the fall of the wall, especially in Potsdamer Platz.

Everywhere the wall was, however, there is a line marking the spot, running down streets and up sidewalks. Sometimes it is a metal line and sometimes a line of paired bricks, but it is an interesting experience to be walking along and then, all of a sudden, you've stepped over the wall into West Berlin. Cars park on it, half in the west and half in the east.

Seeing the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Brandenburg Gate was momentous to me, as I did a four month long research project on the Berlin Wall in 8th grade with 3 other girls. All the books I read and photographs I had seen started coming back as we wandered around the city. When we stopped at one of the Berlin Wall sections by a new museum under construction, I reached my hand through the fence and touched it!

One afternoon after we had coffee and cake at the much-lauded longest dessert bar in the WORLD by the state opera house--a "very German" thing to do in the afternoon, said Frau Peters--we had some free time. I used it to go back to the Brandenburg Gate and walk through it. From 1961 to 1989, no one walked through it--it was in the no man's land between the Berlin Wall and the second wall inside East German territory. And we just strolled through.

One of my favorite adventures was visiting the Reichstag dome at night. Since, as I said, the building was just a shell of rubble after the war, the Germans rebuilt the dome out of glass, giving the standard Western seat of government building a nice twist. We had to wait in line for an hour but made it in the last crush of people, just before the security guards closed the doors. (Frau Peters said she orchestrated this on purpose to make it more exciting.) After an elevator ride to the top floor, two winding walkways led up to the center of the dome, and all around gives a beautiful view of Berlin at night.

We also visited the US Mission to Germany and the German Foreign Office. The US diplomats were...very diplomatic. The Germans were a bit more interesting. I asked the man giving us the briefing about Germany's relationship with Russia, just to see what he would say. He started with, "Our relationship with Russia is...er...very complex," and went on from there, which was more frank than I had expected!

Leaving Berlin on Wednesday afternoon--just when it was really starting to get warm--we spent the night in Weimar, which is 4.5 kilometers away from the concentration camp Buchenwald. Weimar is quaint and very nice but you can't help shivering when you think about what happened 4.5 kilometers away. We ate a very German meal and then mostly tried to sleep to ward off the sickness which was beginning to infect certain ones among our group.

Buchenwald was chilling and depressing and desolate. It was a concentration camp, not an extermination camp, so the level of horror is a bit different, but still. There is nothing to write but sadness and cruelty. The Soviets used the concentration camps in East Germany after the war as detention centers for those accused of espionage and collaborating with the Nazis, so they were still horrible places for several years after the end of the war. Once they had finished that, they razed most of the buildings, only leaving the gatehouse, the jail, the crematory, the execution room, and some sort of administrative building inside the camp walls. All the bunkhouses are completely gone.

The next part of the trip took an unexpected turn, because Eyjafjallajokull had just started erupting. Weimar to Frankfurt Airport was fine, but when we got on our train out of Frankfurt Airport, anarchy reined. A Japanese tourist group had camped out in our seats and completely refused to move. They pretended not to speak English although everyone was quite certain the guide spoke plenty (unfortunately Dr. Wattles and Hagiko had left us in Weimar because Hagiko was feeling ill, or else Hagiko would have reamed them all out in Japanese), and they didn't understand any of the other languages of our group--French, German, Spanish, Bosnian, and Cantonese. Much more unforgivable, though, were the Europeans sitting in the other half of our reserved seats. They at least knew that if someone has a reservation and you are sitting in their seat, you get up and move. No question. Dr. Peters was very stressed and it was not the most pleasant three hour train ride, since we ended up standing for half of it, but we made it to Brussels alive and celebrated with the finest Belgian beer.

Friday was spent in Brussels briefings--NATO and the Council of the EU. The Council of the EU was even more diplomatic than the Americans had been, but NATO was hands-down the best briefing I've ever attended in my life. Two very engaging, very honest speakers and new and interesting subject matter. I almost want to go work at NATO now. They let us wander around the building during our coffee break, but sadly I did not stumble into any top-secret rooms. I liked the cafeteria--one because it had 32 cent soup which is unheard of and two because there were signs saying "No discussion of classified subjects in this area."

Most people vanished quickly on Friday evening to Amsterdam and Paris, but a few of us stayed in Brussels for the night. We took dear Frau Peters out with us to eat waffles and chocolate (I got white chocolate and a lot of marzipan), then sat in a brewery for beer and fries. All very Belgian and a nice way to unwind after traveling in our horde of 24 people. Because I was starting to cave into the illness that half our group had already succumbed to, I didn't stay out late Friday night but was in bed by 11 pm...I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but it was wonderful.

I spent Saturday on my own, because no one else was staying in Brussels for the weekend. I felt it would have been a shame to only see the inside of diplomatic buildings, though, and I'm glad I stayed. It was delightful to wander around by myself after a week of horde-travel. I bought ice cream and looked in shop windows and peeked down any street that piqued my fancy. I found a bookstore in the Prince's Gallery and bought a Belgian French book as a souvenir then found out later that the bookstore is actually a very famous one. Why, I cannot say. I saw the Manneken Pis--it was the unveiling of his new costume, a first soldier of the realm or something like that, so there were all sorts of military men standing around drinking wine out of plastic cups. The fountain had been rigged with wine rather than water, and they all thought it was very funny.

For the afternoon, I went to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts and wandered about. Good thing I speak French, because it was that or Flemish on every painting. I carried on with the French practice in the evening at a film called "Les Aventures Extraordinares d'Adèle Blanc-Sec," which involved mummies, hatching dragons, 1911 Paris, and gruesome uses of hatpins.

The trains back to Geneva on Sunday were quite full, and I heard lots of stories of people I met on the train making various odysseys. I thought the bus from London to Brussels then spending the night in the train station because no hotels had any rooms left sounded particularly painful...I am quite used to train travel right now--I counted it up the other day, and I think I'm at approximately 53 separate trains so far--but this has been a reminder to a great many people of how far apart places really are.

Photos of Berlin.
Photos of Brussels.

Photos of my life in Geneva, updated today.

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