Berlin: ICE Trains and Beer Festivals

Fair warning, even though this was a short trip to Berlin, this will probably be a very long and detailed post. On Monday, I found a flier at the gym advertising the Berlin International Beer Festival this weekend. Since we've never been to Berlin, we figured this may be the best time to make a trip over to the east. The next day, we booked train tickets and a hotel. So, this was definitely a more spontaneous trip than we usually take. Aside from my trip via ICE train to Nuremberg to visit Greg when he was at training, this was our first long distance train adventure. There were a lot of bumps in the road along the way, but we made it there and had a pretty awesome time on our mini vacation.

As I've mentioned in my previous post about the train experience, it takes a little while to learn the train system in Germany. It's not nearly as user friendly as the UK, in my opinion. Bahn.de is really the best way to navigate through it and figure out your route, although buying the tickets in person at the train station can save you money. I will say, it's not cheap. Our trip via ICE train to and from Berlin was more expensive than driving. It also may take longer than driving depending on where you are going. However, it's a pretty relaxing way to travel so it can be worth the cost if you just can't stand driving. Greg didn't want to take the Jeep to Berlin, so the train was really our only option.

Because I bought the tickets more than 3 days in advance, I was able to buy them at the "special" price which saved us 50%. The only down side with the discounted price is that you must take the trains listed on your ticket. If you change your plans, they cannot be refunded. If you miss the train, you have to buy a whole new ticket. Don't buy a savings fare ticket unless you're certain you'll be able to take those exact trains.

Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Full disclosure, this was stolen
from Berlin.de. I didn't take this picture!

Unfortunately for us, on Friday night, while we were sitting in an S-Bahn train, there was a medical emergency on an ICE track somewhere far away from us. This created a domino effect for the ICE lines and almost all the trains were significantly delayed. Our first train was delayed 40 minutes. While sitting on the train before our first stop, an announcement in German mentioned that if you were planning to make a connection in Hannover to the train bound for Berlin, you needed to get off 2 stops sooner and re-route because the train would not arrive in Hannover in time. Greg went to track someone down to translate into English. At the same time, the Deutsh Bahn app on my phone was telling me that our planned connection was delayed for at least an hour and rerouting would be useless because every ICE train in Germany was running behind. After a very long debate about what we should do, we ended up missing the stop we would have needed to take in order to reroute, so we were forced to continue as originally planned. When we got off the train 40 minutes late in Hannover, a sign on the platform indicated we still had at least 30 minutes to wait until our train to Berlin would arrive. The whole hauptbahnhof was full of pissed off travelers.

This brat.

We finally arrived in Berlin at 2 AM, exactly 2 hours later than was originally planned. Augustus, who joined us on this trip, was ready to run circles around us after sleeping in his carrier for all that time. Small dogs can ride for free on the trains if they are in a carrier. Larger dogs supposedly cost the price of a young child and have to wear a muzzle. (Although, I've heard that this is rarely enforced.) Thankfully, our hotel was right outside of the Berlin hauptbahnhof so we pretty much fell asleep within 15 minutes of getting off the train. Augustus was too excited to sleep.

The following morning, we ate the usual German breakfast of cold cuts, cheese and bread at our hotel before exploring the city. Our hotel room came with free passes to use unlimited public transportation in Berlin. Public transportation in Germany is generally based on an honor system. Even ICE trains are inconsistent with checking tickets. If you do get caught without a ticket, though, the fine can be extreme and is expected to be paid on the spot. A man behind us on our ICE train home was without a ticket and had to pay for the fare upfront to the woman checking. On S-Bahn and U-Bahn trains, we've only ever been asked once to show our ticket. In Berlin, we didn't even see any of the "ticket police" on the trains or in the bahnhofs. But, we had our free tickets handy just in case!

Public transportation in Berlin is not as easy to navigate as London or Paris. When you're looking at the rail map, you first have to determine if the line you need to get on is a U-Bahn or an S-Bahn. U-Bahn trains have a U before the line number (U1,U2, ect) and S-Bahns have an S (S1, S2, ect). The difficult part is that the color coding system makes no sense so some lines use the same colors. (IE: both an S-Bahn and a U-Bahn route going opposite directions may both use the color red.) Once you've determined which line you need to get on, you have to actually be able to find it. Signs in the station will not immediately tell you which line departs from which platform. They will have giant signs that point "S" or "U" which are in no way color coded or indicative of which platforms you're trying to reach. Eventually when you finally make it to the platform, it will say somewhere on the wall which route leaves from that platform. If you're lucky, they'll group together all of the S-Bahns and U-Bahns. If you're unlucky, you'll get onto a train and find out one stop later that their doing work on the lines for the next 6 stops so the train isn't going to run anymore. They don't announce things, like at all.

Luckily, U55 goes straight from the Berlin hauptbahnhof to Brandenburg Tor. It's basically a line specifically for tourists because it only runs between those 2 places. You could easily walk there by crossing the river and going through part of the Tiergartens. We didn't because we're lazy.

The Brandenburg Gate is not very impressive compared to all of the other awesome things we've seen in Europe, but the crowd that formed around it was pretty entertaining. Some PETA protesters got in yelling match with a group of 60 year old drunk Englishmen. The politzei watched laughing and eating ice cream. The American Embassy, which backs up to the Brandenburg Gate, was the only one with a posted guard in the area.

PETA protesters. Behind them is the embassy.

We walked through the Tiergartens for a moment before heading to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. We wondered through the memorial for a while before finding the line leading to the underground museum. The museum, like many in Berlin, is free. You can rent an audio guide for 4 euro. We didn't because we didn't really plan to spend too long of a time in there. Plus, there are plenty of things posted to read. It got harder and harder towards the end of the exhibit. They have one room that tells the stories of several different families in Europe and what happened to them throughout the 30s and 40s. Another room is pitch black with the name of a person projected onto the walls while it tells their story in German and English. The room immediately after that tells the stories of people from the various concentration camps. You can pick a phone up from the wall and listen to them talk about their experiences. I got kind of choked up and was ready to leave. On the way out, they have computers with a huge database of names of individuals killed during the 30s and 40s. You can search by name, city and date ranges. When I tested it out, it pulled up a page of individuals with the last name Brickman. Greg had a pretty difficult time with that and was ready to leave, so we went to the LEGO store to cheer him up.

I didn't take pictures of the Berlin LEGO store, but it's the biggest in Europe. One of the employees told us that it's the second largest next to one in Orlando, FL. It was three stories and extremely packed. The employee we spoke with knew some of the employees from our local store by name which, sadly, we also knew.

When we walked out of the train station in front of LEGO, we could see in the distance what looked like the remains of a church partially destroyed. Remember, our visit to Berlin was extremely last minute. I also spent all of last week traveling for work, so we didn't exactly do much research about what to see in Berlin. I read something about Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, but skipped over it. When you live in Europe, you see enough giant churches to not care to see another one ever again. However, we immediately gravitated to it once we realized half the steeple was missing and you could see into the bell tower from afar. We had to check that out.

Sure enough, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was mostly destroyed in WWII. The Germans decided not to rebuilt it and leave it as is to provide a reminder of the destruction of war. There is a newly renovated chapel located just outside of the church and a little exhibit inside the still standing portion. It's unfortunate that it was bombed, because the inside is probably the most beautiful church we have ever seen. It's a mosaic from floor to ceiling. Each little stone was painstakingly chosen and affixed into place to create a giant, living piece of art. It would have been amazing to see it prior to the war.

The new chapel next door. It's hard to see from the picture, but
the whole room was lit up with blue colored light from the windows.

Pieces of mosaic found in the rubble after the bombing.

Our next stop was the Berlin Wall Memorial on our way to the International Beer Fest. At a train station near Potsdam Platz and the last remaining section of the "Dead Zone," a display was set up of several intact portions of the Berlin Wall. We didn't find out until a friend told us later, but this was most likely in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall being removed. (By the way, am I that old already?) I really wanted to see the actually memorial, though, so Greg agreed to the minor detour. It's pretty cool how Berlin has managed to turn all of these infamous places into beautifully preserved parks for tourists and locals to both enjoy. It's crazy to think we were surrounded by all of these people laughing and taking pictures and lounging in the grass in a spot where it was once punishable by death to stand. I told Greg that it's weird to imagine that in our parent's life time, Berlin was a place where people may be afraid to go, whereas Afghanistan was still a tourist spot. 40 years later and the opposite couldn't be more true.

Exhibit by the bahnhof

Some left over graffiti

You can see the start of the festival on the left.

As a fitting ending to the day, we ended up walking from Alexander Platz down to Karl-Marx-Allee where the International Beer Festival was being held. Before I talk about the festival, I have to address the craziness that is Karl-Marx-Allee. If you're like me and know very little about Berlin history, Karl-Marx-Allee was previously Stalin Allee and, according to a German sitting next to us at the festival, was a "gift" from the USSR to the people of East Germany. It was designed and completed in the 60's and is the perfect model of what you would imagine every former Soviet nation looks like. If you've ever cared to look up what Pripyat, Ukraine looked like before Chernobyl, Karl-Marx-Allee could be Pripyat's exact replica. It was completely symmetrical on both sides of the street the entire way down. All of the buildings had stone engraved on the facades with pictures of people working. Greg commented that all of the buildings looked exactly like the ones in the former Soviet countries he's ended up in along his journeys to and from the Middle East. It was a great spot to have a giant festival.

No peeing!

The International Beer Festival was easily the biggest and most multi-cultural festival we've attended. We walked for 2 hours and never found the end of it. (To be fair, if you've never been to a festival in Germany, you aren't really walking but more shuffling around giant crowds of people ramming into each other.) Everyone had these awesome mini beer mugs painted with the festival symbol that they were getting refilled at each station. Supposedly, there were 2,000 different types of beers to try. We made it to 3. At one station, a young British man accidentally cut in front of us in line and was so profusely apologetic about being rude that he bought us drinks. Because the cost of your beer includes the deposit for the glass at German festivals, we actually made money off of him. When we returned our glasses, we got the deposit as well. Our whole day only cost us 1 Euro. I actually feel kind of bad about that.

The festival was pretty awesome. Everyone in Berlin was very friendly and, in their usual fashion, the Germans were dressed in wild costumes and drunk by the time 5pm rolled around. As the sun started to set, it started to rain so we decided to head back to the hotel, but not before stopping at Dunkin Donuts at the hauptbahnhof. Yes, Dunkin Donuts. For some reason in Berlin, there is like a Dunkin Donuts on every corner. You would think it was Waffle House or something. I'm not even a huge fan of donuts, but you have to take decent American food when you can get it. Why don't we have Dunkin in our town yet?

Sun setting on the Soviet buildings and the
 back side of the International Beer Festival.

The next morning, we started our adventure back home which was not nearly as eventful as our trip to Berlin. Our second ICE connection from Leipzig actually went all the way to our town. In Frankfurt, instead of getting off the ICE train and running to catch the S-Bahn in under 3 minutes, we just stayed on the ICE line and went directly home. No one probably cared because our train was almost empty after it pulled out of the Frankfurt hauptbahnhof anyway. The walk back home from the station was pretty exhausting, though.

We had a really awesome trip, even if it was short. Berlin is pretty nice and definitely cleaner than most European cities. Besides London, this may be the most fun we've had since coming to Germany. I think we have the most fun when we don't really make a plan or have particular expectations of what we want to do. There are still plenty of things we didn't see, though, like all of the Tiergartens, the art museums or Checkpoint Charlie. We actually decided not to go to Checkpoint Charlie because I heard from others that there wasn't much to see. I would have liked to see more of the street art, though. Some friends invited us to go with them to Berlin again later this year for the 25 anniversary celebration in November. I was also hoping to visit Normandy around that time as well, so I'm not sure what we'll end up doing. We have a lot of fun times ahead of us!

Stolen from Greg's Facebook.