Have I mentioned how much I LOVE the train systems I've been using while abroad? They are just so neat! Winnipeg has enough people for a train system, but the layout of our city is not conducive to this. Shame.
It has been fun having German foods that I'm used to having back home due to my German heritage. There was bockwurst in my kartoffel (potato) soup, I had bratwurst on a bun, and I got a REAL, authentic European wiener from a deli to snack on (Ellice Meat Market style, if you know what I mean).
Now for the serious part: I did a free walking tour of Berlin, and it is steeped in WW2 + aftermath history. I knew bits and pieces of this history beforehand, but to have someone logically connect the dots for me was great. I saw the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, and I stood in the parking lot above Hitler's bunker. I saw remnants of the Berlin wall and imagined a city split in half over night. The next day, I went to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, which is just outside Berlin. I foolishly anticipated it to be light fare because it wasn't an outright extermination camp such as Auschwitz, but I was dead wrong. The horrors and backbreaking labour that the men and women at this camp went through is not something I'd have been capable of, which means I would have been beaten every time I wasn't able to comply, which would have made me even more unable to work, which would have resulted in more beatings, etc. I would have been dead in a week, no doubt about it. The words on the gate, "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" (work will set you free) told a cruel truth--allow yourself to be worked to the bone, and you will find freedom in your inevitable death. Awful stuff.
So I'm in Cologne now, which was a 4.5 hour train ride west from Berlin. When I got out of the train station, I was greeted by the Dom. That thing is just crazy. Also, there were about 50 Polizei (police) in the square, and about 10 police vans. Seeing the antsy crowd around, I asked a few people what was going on. Turns out, there is a soccer game on tonight, so I guess there needs to be a heavy police presence for these psychotic European 'football' fans. A true Euro experience, that's for sure!
I was watching 'Cities of the Underworld' awile ago and they focused on Berlin. One of the most interesting things that they covered was that Berlin did not have any hills in the city prior to WWII. All the hills that you see are the result of rubble and wartime devastation being collected into one place or another and being covered over. Neat. They say also that there is a mammoth fortress partially exposed in the side of a hill that you can see from one of the rails. Not that the hill was there to begin with, they just tried to bury the fortress.
ReplyDelete