Our second-class couchette could not have been more impressive given the class we were travelling. The carriage was brand new, with aircon that worked, sockets to plug in phones, pleasant staff, and even a questionnaire in German asking us to comment on the quality of the service, rating each part on a scale of 1 to 5.Berlin-Zoo station turned out to be rather disappointing, considering our train had come all the way from Holland and chosen this particular place to stop. No tourist information kiosks were obvious, but there was a guy waiting outside who delivered his pitch. We decided to go there – it was reasonably cheap, included breakfast, and the room was nice.

Journey 3: Amsterdam to Berlin
1 leg, 650km, 10 hr 23 min. Average speed: 65kph
Origin/Destination	Departs	Arrives	Carrier	My Rating
Amsterdam Centraal Berlin Zoo	20:13	06:36	DB NachtZug

Berlin was very much my kind of place. We had a shaky start with the bare station and the ‘World of Sex’ that I spotted (actually it was hard to miss) on the way to the hotel. Despite this, the guy at the hotel was stereotypically German to such an extent that it was difficult to suppress laughter as he showed us around. When we suggested that we would like to have breakfast today and forfeit breakfast the following day, I could tell that the break from accepted procedure was causing him some trouble. After we’d eaten he came in with a map and a pen, sat down and launched into a suggested itinerary. “We are here” – stabs map with pen – “you take bus number 100 from here” – stabs again – “goes past seven major attractions here, here, here, here, here, here and HERE”. The map was in pieces, and the pen wasn’t looking so good by this point either. I thought about asking whether we could take a walking tour or about getting to specific monuments directly, but it seemed that it would probably be best just to wander around ourselves.

So we took the U-Bahn. The ticket machine was excellent, and I expected nothing less – I could find the ticket I needed in seconds, and the line to take was equally obvious. Once we got to the centre of town we decide to go to the TV Tower. Doesn’t sound like the most appealing destination in Berlin but like the Manequin Pis in Brussels it was just somewhere that everyone goes. Unlike the Manequin Pis it is actually worth visiting.

Unlike a lot of the stuff I’ve written in this journal, I think I can say this almost entirely unchallenged: the TV tower is incredibly ugly. It’s very much like an oversized golf ball impaled on a traffic cone. It was built by the soviets just to the east of the wall, as a symbol of the greatness of soviet engineering, and as a means of broadcasting propaganda, but is now one of Berlin’s biggest money-spinners as a tourist attraction.

We disagreed on how to cover the last mile. Sunil and John wanted to wait for a bus from the U-Bahn station, while Chris and I wanted to walk. So we split up and raced. Walking there wasn’t difficult, since the tower is the tallest thing in the city so you can see it from virtually everywhere within a few miles. We walked through a modern residential district, where huge white tower blocks managed to look elegant with bright blue and yellow stripes down the side.

The four of us arrived at the tower at the same time, though I think Chris and I would have won had there not been a construction site in the way. We went up to the observation level and got some great views of the city, though it was slightly hazy for the cameras to get good pictures. I managed to identify the Brandenburg gate and walked a couple of times around reading the informational posters about buildings that were visible.

We ate lunch at the revolving restaurant one floor above, and had a row about where to go next, with Prague, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Budapest and Bucharest being considered.

Although the wall was almost entirely destroyed, a small section (1.6km long) has been preserved and classified as a museum, called the ‘East Side Gallery’. We walked the length of the preserved section, checking out the artwork on the west side. The wall had been divided into sections with a single artist decorating a area of four of five square metres. On the east side the whole thing was simply covered in random graffiti. The reason for this is that the West side of the wall has always been accessible to the public – West Berliners could take a stroll along the pavement right next to it if they wanted. On the east side by contrast there was not a single mark, because East Berliners were not allowed any where near it. Initially barbed wire, later watchtowers went up, and at the most vicious, the East Berlin authorities installed automatic guns. Only since the wall came down have people been able to get close to the surface of the east side, and so the graffiti is somewhat random.

At the end of the wall’s preserved length, there was a shop selling all sorts of Wall memorabilia, books, posters and even bits of the wall. You have to wonder whether these chunks of wall are still genuine or whether they simply pick them up off the ground. It’s been twelve years after all – I wouldn’t be surprised if this shop has sold the whole volume of the wall several times over. Or maybe I’m just being cynical. I just bought a poster anyway.

Probably the most interesting thing I learned today was the answer to a question that had been burning in my mind for some time – why didn’t people just go round it? The answer is that the wall did not simply run north south, but actually encircled the whole of West Berlin. Technically then it was West Berliners that were trapped, not the Easterners, though the number and creativity of escape attempts shows exactly how much some people wanted to be trapped on the West side rather than enjoy their supposed freedom in the East.

Hungry for more info on life with the Wall, we went to checkpoint Charlie, the famous border post between the Soviet and American sectors of Berlin. The museum was huge, and contained many fascinating accounts of daring escapes, plus a section on human rights in general. Some of the escape methods devised by Eastern escapees defied belief – a hot air balloon, a car with half an engine to make space for a person, people hidden in washing machines, people digging tunnels. My personal favourite was the story of a man who built a mini submarine using a trabant engine and various bits of scrap. It towed him through the water at about 3kph. When he reached the West, the design was bought and patented by a big company that started to mass produce a version with a plastic shell that was smaller, lighter and faster.

Checkpoint Charlie itself had been reconstructed on it’s original site, complete with sandbags and big warning sign “You are leaving the American sector”. Getting to it was not easy though because cars now whiz past it unobstructed on both sides.

We all went back to the hostel needing a shower (the museum was not air conditioned), and then had dinner. Sunil, Chris and I took a late excursion back to town to see the Brandenburg gate, but where it should be there was a big mass of scaffolding with a picture of the gate on it. That can’t be it, we thought, because we saw the gate, minus any scaffolding, from the TV tower. But eventually we had to accept that from a distance the cloth covered scaffolding did look just like the gate itself, and even the Deutsch Telecom advert that was also on the painted version seemed to vanish when viewed from far away.

Basically it was a clever cover up (literally speaking), so we walked over to the Reichstag to at least make the evening’s outing worthwhile. We got some good pictures before returning late on the night bus.

Walking around Berlin late at night was a refreshing way to end a very busy day, though I was surprised that we were able to get so close to the Reichstag without seeing any security at all, or in fact, anyone. Even at this time of night Westminster would still be a buzz of activity, and you’d never get anywhere near parliament itself.