Marathon Day - Berlin

Monday, August 6 2012

Berlin

It was a good thing we had a day at sea on Sunday to rest up. Monday was a marathon.

The port, Warnemunde, is a 3-hour train ride to Berlin. Our meeting time for our excursions (“recommended for first time visitors to Berlin") was 6:50 a.m. The train station was maybe 100 yards from the ship. Once we found seats (sitting across a table from a family from California), it was a few minutes before the train left the station.

In stark contrast to the grumpy Russians, our German train hosts were exceedingly cheerful and helpful. They handed out snack bags that contained a sandwich, orange drink, and (most importantly, chocolate). Little did we know this would be our only interaction with German chocolate.

The train zipped along through the German countryside. I was asleep for most of it. As we approached Berlin, our host showed us the map of Germany, indicating that we had been traveling through what had been East Germany.

Once we arrived at the Berlin train station, our car was met by Markus, our local guide. He escorted us up the escalators (no, you were not allowed to take the stairs – if you tried, you would scooted back to the escalator) to the bus.

There was something about Markus that was vaguely familiar, but it was hard to pin down. Until he said something like, “You vill see that Berlin is a bee-YUUUUUU-tee-vul city”, whereupon a brain cell made the connection to the MC in “Cabaret” (“even zee boys here are bee-YUUUU-tee-vul”). I was pretty much done at that point (“Money make zee verld go around, zee verld go around, zee verld go around…” spinning endlessly in my head for the rest of the day).

So, why do people come to Berlin? To see the Berlin wall?

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Or maybe the Reichstag?

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No. Of course not.

People go to Berlin to see where Michael Jackson dangled his then baby son from a balcony:

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Oy.

And incidentally, the Brandenburg gate is right there. Maybe people go to see that instead? One would hope so.

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The whole day was a mad dash through Berlin. Quite a challenge considering the traffic, particularly snarled because of all the construction absolutely every where.

For lunch we stopped at a huge restaurant, with a German band playing endlessly in the background. Even though the train host had asked for any dietary preferences or needs – and we had stated that we need something not-pork and not-seafood – it didn’t look like that information had been transmitted. The only option was vegetarian – looked like mac-n-cheese to us. Tasted fine. The train-host explained that the pasta was “shpeitze”, typical of northern Germany. Still sounds like mac-n-cheese with the “mac” being some other kind of pasta.

After lunch we drove quite a distance to the WW II Allies museum. Which was actually tiny, old, and pretty sad. The time spent getting to and from this little museum could have been better spent.

At some point, Markus showed us the street with the cabaret clubs – in particular the one that inspired the “Kit Kat Club” in “Cabaret”. Whereupon he started singing songs from the show.  All righty then!

Markus was entertaining, but it was very odd the way he couldn’t seem to answer rather straightforward questions. For example, he said many times that there were always TWO walls, with a dead man zone in between. If you go back and look at the photo of the wall above, you’ll see there’s only one wall. The next logical question would be – where’s the other wall? He did not know. It obvious had been torn down, but wouldn’t you think he would know where it used to be?

At the end of the 6 hour bus ride, it was obvious that we would have to come back to Berlin someday. Unlike some of the other stops where a taste was good enough, for Berlin it was not.

We had virtually no time to shop. We did notice that we did NOT see chocolate shops anywhere, nor did we see chocolate in the few stores we did manage to look at.

On the train ride back we received a snack bag – fresh apricots, another sandwich, a bag of peanuts and salami sticks. We traded our salami sticks for more peanuts with the family from California. The three hours zipped by, because we had a great conversation with them about crazy stuff that we had experienced on previous cruises.

We got back to the ship around 8:00-ish. We dashed back on board ship thinking that all-aboard time was 8:30. However, it was actually 9:30. If we had remembered that, we might have walked into Warnemunde to see if we could find some chocolate.

We did go to dinner, but it was super late by the time we were finished. I was done for the day.

Tomorrow: Hamburg