Bite size Berlin

You may have noticed that the last blog only mentioned days 1,2 and 4 in Leipzig. This is because on day three we took the train to Berlin for the day, well the afternoon really!

The fast train would have take two hours each way, but the cost was prohibitive, so we chose the much cheaper and slower option, which involved changing trains half way, taking three hours. We would arrive in Berlin at lunchtime and catch an evening train back, returning to Leipzig quite late. The first difficulty we encountered was that German trains, despite having a wheelchair symbol on certain doors, are not very accessible. The symbol obviously denotes the area in the carriage where a space may be found to travel in a wheelchair, but there is still a large step into the carriage. Fortunately fellow passengers were willing to help lift Racheal in her chair each time which we were grateful for. The second, and more serious problem, was that on arriving at the station where we were due to change trains we found the lifts between platforms were not working. After speaking to the lady in the ticket office we found our only option was to wait an hour for the next train to go one stop further along the line where we could change to the Berlin train without even needing to change platforms. If only the ticket office in Leipzig told us to change there.

So by the time we arrived in Berlin, it was nearly 2 pm and the light was already starting to fade. We had carefully planned what we wanted to see, knowing that we wouldn’t have a a lot of time. This definitely paid off. We first made our way to the Berlin Wall Visitor Centre where we watched a short film about the history of the wall, looked at the exhibition and went up to the viewing platform where you can look down on a short section of the wall which has been preserved. A photograph showed a church, on the East German side of the wall, being destroyed as late as 1985, simply because it obscured the soldiers’ view.

We walked through the memorial garden and down to the river by which time it was almost dark and the main buildings were illuminated. From the river, it wasn’t far to the Brandenburg gate, the Jewish memorial, the homosexual memorial and the Reichstag building. The memorials were a particularly chilling reminder of the brutality of the communist regime.

Although we didn’t have long in Berlin, we did manage to see the things that we had particularly chosen to see. The city wasn’t very well lit, and we agreed that we didn’t feel comfortable to stay any longer, so we made our way back to the railway station where we found somewhere to eat a meal before boarding the return train.

This journey was much smoother because we now knew which station was the best to change trains. We arrived back in the, now familiar and well lit, city of Leipzig around 10pm, and caught the tram back to the youth hostel tired but satisfied with what we had achieved.