Catching Up… Again

Hello! Sorry again for the break between posts, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. I left Bangkok back at the end of January and set out on a group cycling tour of Cambodia and Vietnam for two weeks. That finished up last week in Ho Chi Min City (Saigon), in the south of Vietnam. I hung out there for a couple of extra days, before heading to my current location in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, in the northern part of the country. Right now, I’m laid up in bed with a bit of cold and taking some respite from the hectic streets outside, so I figured I’d try to get back on the blogging train.

When I left off last time, I was on my way to Berlin from Hamburg, way back in mid-November. So I’ll pick it up from there, but I’m going to just try to hit the highlights in bullet points so I can get things closer to real time.

Berlin!

• I have very fond memories of my time in Berlin, it’s a tremendous city that offers a ton of diversity. Artsy and cool, historical and sombre, vibrant and lively but quiet corners exist if you seek them out. The city is enormous and I feel like I only managed to see a small bit of it, but it’s definitely one that I would like to return to to see more. It’s the first city where I chose to extend my stay beyond my original booking.
• I met some cool people at my first hostel. Most were younger folk visiting the city to take in some of the very active party city in Berlin. I even went out for dinner and drinks with a young Brit in town for the weekend, helping him kill time before his mates arrived for a night of clubbing. My original plan was just for a drink or two before calling it a night. But, at 2am I found myself stumbling back from the first club that they hit up (thankfully just across the street from the hostel) with about 8 or 9 drinks in me. While they continued partying, I had a memorable night of my own curled up in a shower stall, puking into the drain for a good couple hours. Life lesson for the mid-thirties social drinker, don’t try to keep up with a group of twenty-five year old Londoners working in the finance sector, that way lies ruin.
• Berlin has a tremendous collection of neo-classical, neo-renaissance and baroque buildings in its historical centre. This is something that I wasn’t really expecting and was a pleasant surprise. The walk from Museum Island (Museumsinsel) down to the Brandenburg Gate, on to the Reichstag and the Tiergarten beyond is incredible. I can’t really think of another comparable city containing such a sustained stretch of fantastic architecture.
• In contrast to the previous point, the city wears its scars as openly as its opulence. The sombre memorials of the holocaust dead are stark reminders of the atrocities of the recent past. And even more recently, the rift of the Berlin Wall is prominent in the areas of the city that it divided. Though only small sections of the wall are still standing, reminders of the separation between East and West are easily found, including multiple museums, informational placards, steel posts representing the path of the wall, and entire buildings plastered with photos and remembrances of those times.
• I visited a couple of museums, but both were with a little bit of a bust. The Bode Museum houses a huge collection of sculpture and coins from across Europe from the past millenia. The museum building itself is incredibly beautiful and ornate, but the collection gets repetitive pretty quickly, largely made up of religious pieces, altars and the like. And I could only stand to see so many iterations of Christ on the cross before losing interest. My other museum visit was to the DDR musuem, which purports to be a interactive experience of life in East Germany during the Cold War. The museum is relatively small and well overcrowded for its small size. The displays offer an interesting insight into life in East Germany, but the informational placards were long reads and relatively dry content. The interactive sections including a re-creation of a typical East German apartment, a prison cell for enemies of the state, and a Trabant (famous East German car) driving simulator were cute, but not really worth the price of admission.
• As I mentioned, I stayed in Berlin a little longer than I originally booked. My second hostel was one recommended by Rosa and her mother, the Shipotel, a floating hotel on the River Spree located immediately behind the East Side Gallery. This turned out to be an excellent recommendation. The Shipotel, despite being a little on the old side and literally being a boat, was a very cozy, comfortable place to stay, with stunning views of the riverside and the sunrise. I had an entire dorm room to myself for the length of my stay, and in fact, I was the only person on that entire half of the hotel. The location was a little tricky, being a bit in the middle of nowhere despite being surrounded by city and having a massive arena/event-centre and mall just down the road. But, this was made up for by the proximity of the East Side Gallery, the long section of the Berlin Wall left standing and covered in commissioned paintings, from artists around the world, espousing peace and unity.
• It was my birthday while I was in Berlin. I spent the day wandering through the Grunewald. A massive forest on the western edge of the city. I spent a good five hours going through the forest and barely encountered another person. It was just me, the birds and trees stretching for kilometeres in any direction. It was one of my favorite birthdays in recent memory. It was the type of forest that I had always wanted to walk through, completely different to the pine and fir mountain forests near Calgary. Mainly deciduous trees, covered with inches of fallen leaves, gently rolling hills obscuring the path in any direction. It was a true delight.
• Berlin was cold during my visit. Cold in a way that I was not prepared for. Even though the temperature only dropped to around 2° for most of my time, the clear skies, wind and humidity cut right through my puffer jacket and fleece. After a week and a bit of the cold, I had had enough of it and began to formulate my plan to warmer, more hospitable climes.

What’s Next?

Despite wanting to immediately escape the cold, I decide to tough it out a couple weeks longer to see a few more cities before heading to Greece to warm up. From Berlin, I had a couple of quick stops in Leipzig and Dresden before leaving Germany for Czechia, so we’ll hit those cities in my next post.