I slept well, but I soon discovered my bowels weren’t behaving again. I told Alex as much and we devised that the milk products I’d had in his creamy and egg-yolky salmon pasta had sent me backwards the first time and Juja’s creamy and egg-yolky avocado pasta from the night before had done the same. Back to toast! Despite this, the skies were blue and I felt well enough to venture out of the house. After the usual breakfast ritual that I clearly wasn’t making the most of, I got ready and Alex, preoccupied with other things said he would catch up with me in the city somewhere so I stepped out on my own.
I bought a day ticket at the train station, resolving to take it easy and walk as little as possible for the sake of my health. Wow, was it cold. I struggled to comprehend how I’d survived in double negative temperatures back in the van when now at just below zero I am having problems. I managed to navigate the entirety of the train system to get across the city to Bernauer Street where a section of the Berlin Wall still stands along with a memorial. This was brilliant. This section of the wall is very well documented because of the number of photographs that happened to be taken during the time of the wall from both the east and the west side. They show this with huge prints plastered onto the sides of buildings showing escapes during the nearly thirty years the wall stood. I wandered amongst the other tourists on frosty ground that crunched beneath my feet, reading the tales of the wall going up, the early days, the methods of escape and finally the end of the wall. It was a brilliant outdoor museum that stretched along a long length of where the wall once stood, there was audio, English text and many, many photographs. Despite my distraction in talking to Mum and Dad while walking through the exhibits, I enjoyed the whole thing, except for the cold.
I was happy to retreat to the nearby train station and trade cold for that urine smell you often get in train stations. I took a few trains to get back in to the city and came out at the Brandenburger Tor, a large arch way that stands at the end of a main street. This is where Berlin hosts its new year celebrations and it was obvious they were preparing for a huge event. I squirmed through the tourists milling about and navigated the maze of temporary fencing that had been set up for the night. I was feeling hungry (at least my tummy thought it needed food) and would have liked a bathroom so I tried a few cafes despite the amount of people crammed inside each one. Declining to pay 50c to pee and not wanting to wait in line for a pastry, I delayed my needs and walked on.
At the German Parliament building, I read a sign outside about how World War II is still ongoing and Germany isn’t really an independent country. Not really understanding what that was about, I took a photo of the grandiose building and walked off, taking a peek at the queue for the glass dome atop the parliament building and deciding very happily that wasn’t something I needed to line up for.
The direction I chose to walk turned out to be a bad one because temporary fencing blocked the streets I’d wanted to take. Not wanting to turn around, because that’s the opposite of progress, I carried on until the fencing ended. My plan of minimal walking wasn’t really working out. Back on open roads, I resolved to catch a bus, anywhere. I wasn’t walking any further. The number 100 tourist bus stop was conveniently right in front of me so I made for that. After being joined by a number of people and seeing others walk off while checking their watches, I soon figured out that the 100 bus was not running today, probably because of all the closed roads. I looked into other buses at that stop and decided I could take the 187 and get to a train station. I just needed to be somewhere warm. I probably waited a total of 20 minutes when finally a 187 came into view and I gladly slid into what felt like a heated seat near the back.
My tummy definitely needed food now so I got off at Nollendorfplatz when I saw a Kebap shop, which was Alex’s recommendation for Berlin food. When I checked it out, they had a free bathroom so I was winning. For 4EUR I got a huge giros with chicken and salad that in hindsight was way to greasy for my sensitive stomach. I went to the bathroom twice while I was in the shop to make the most of it and after nearly an hour of sit down time that I thoroughly needed, I caught a train towards Hitler’s Bunker. Having done no research, I was disappointed to find it was nothing more than a sign on the street. Disappointed, I visited the nearby Jewish Memorial, which is a huge square covered in concrete blocks of different shape and height. I would have liked to understand what each of the blocks signified, but the queue to get into the underground visitor’s centre below the installation was long and was near-closing. I made do with wandering through the narrow pathways the blocks made, doing my best to avoid running into people. Of course there were idiots that climbed on top of the blocks, shouting that they were on top of the world, not having the insight to remember that they were in a place of remembrance. The crowds were starting to grow, ready for the night’s celebrations so I was happy to get on another train to the east side of the city for my last stop.
The East Side Gallery is an original section of the Berlin wall that was graffiti’d in the 90s with all sorts of artwork. I walked the length of the wall, which was actually transplanted from one side of the river to the other, in the fading light. I was disappointed to see a lot of the graffiti art had been graffiti’d, so some of the meaning was lost and a large section of the wall has fencing in front of it to stop people further graffiti-ing the graffiti and taking pieces of the wall. Still, there were some really interesting panels of paint.
By the time I’d walked the length of the “gallery”, I was done. It was a 45 minute train journey back which I managed to decipher without mistake. The train system really is brilliant, it is so straightforward and I never had to wait more than three minutes for a train. Just as Alex sent me a message to ask if I was ok, I walked through the door. He’d been shopping for our new year’s dinner so hadn’t ended up joining me. I collapsed onto the couch and found out that we were in no rush to head to the house party that was just around the corner, so I had a couple of hours to relax.
I thoroughly enjoyed the two hours I spent on the lounge, watching German TV and enjoying Oma’s company. We watched a traditional German short film called “Dinner For One”, first a modern remake in German, then it came on in its original black and white form and in English. I joked with Alex that all of a sudden I could understand the TV, I could understand German! It was a funny skit about a woman who spends Christmas alone with her butler who makes impressions of her imaginary guests.
I had a shower to reset myself for a late night and Alex followed suit. By the time we walked out the door, groceries and fireworks in hand, we all looked pretty swish. I hadn’t really believed Alex when he said you could buy fireworks for new year and set them off without restriction, but oh how naive I was. I must have been carrying at least half a dozen rockets.
Alex’s mates’ place was a short walk around the corner but we were happy to be welcomed inside their very warm apartment. We would be having a relaxed house party with Stephanie and Brian (married German/American couple) and Jennifer. Wine was poured and after having a tour of the small but beautiful apartment and turning off the Harry Potter lego game Jen and Brian were playing, we started the night out getting to know each other. This was the first time I wasn’t the only non-German speaker in the room with Brian for support and everyone was fluent in English, so we had a lot of stories we could swap.
For dinner, Stephanie had done a lot of prep work cutting ingredients and we all cooked bits and pieces of meat and vegetables on a Raclette, a small hot plate with miniature frying pans beneath it, that sat in the middle of the table. A German thing apparently, it was great. I didn’t each much since my tummy was grumbling again, but that just meant I talked more. After dinner, we went downstairs to do a fireworks trial run. Alex was just so excited to set something on fire he couldn’t contain himself until midnight. Honestly, I think he was excited to see me set off a rocket for the first time more than anything else. We managed to save the rockets for midnight and the floor sparklers and dynamite bangers worked out well enough. I couldn’t believe this was allowed!
Back inside, we continued our endless conversations about all sorts of stuff until midnight crept up on us! Stephanie presented chocolate mousse for dessert which everyone enjoyed except me. I’d learnt my lesson, I wasn’t doing any milk products for at least two weeks. With a few minutes to spare until the next year came around, we armed ourselves with lighters, all the fireworks we had and some wine bottles to launch the rockets and we were down the stairs to bring in the new year. I’d asked before heading down if there was a public place we should go to, like a neighbourhood park, where other people would be doing the same thing. Everyone laughed, we didn’t need to go anywhere they said, everyone will be in the streets. They weren’t kidding. While fireworks had been going off all night like bombs during an air raid, if you didn’t know it was the new year by midnight, the symphony of fire in the sky made it obvious. We all cheers’d each other with glasses of champagne and shouted “Happy New Year” and the two couples amongst us had their new year’s kiss. And then, chaos. Fireworks from every angle were set off at every angle along the entire street, including the ones we contributed. Compared to the rest of the street, we’d gone conservative. People had fireworks that spewed fountains of sparks, others that set themselves in sequence, others that spun around in random directions. I couldn’t believe it!
My eyes were wide to the sky as I tried to keep track of the flying projectiles all around and the noise was overwhelming! There was whistling, banging, shouts of joy, cries of surprise but thankfully no screams of pain. As if to justify the madness, Alex explained that the tradition comes from the need to scare all the ghosts out of the city. Well it they weren’t scared away by the mountain of noise, they would have choked on the cloud of smoke that covered the entire street like a thick fog. Buses and cars were still driving down the street! I’ve never experienced anything like it and I was so happy to have had the experience with such great people. While the volume of fireworks petered away, it continued perpetually. After about half and hour outside, we retreated to the warmth of the apartment, a year after we’d left it.
No one was feeling the lateness of the night, we only felt the freshness of the new year so we partied on in our relaxed way. Brian cracked out a board game called Catan and after a short perusing of the rules, we got a game going between him, Jen and me. The others played spectator and talked. It was a good game with a lot of strategy and trading for resources, easy enough to understand even though the instructions were in German and we needed help from time to time.
Sabrina was the first to cave, she retreated to Stephanie’s bed and we played on for probably another hour. I was surprised to find it was 2:30am by the time Alex started looking restless. After thinking about going home in two separate parties, we all called it quits with me very far ahead in the game, but with no end in sight, so I was the technical winner. Hugs all round to say goodbye and wishes for good fortune in the new year, Sabrina, Alex, Jen and I ventured home.
We walked along streets of absolute destruction. Firework remnants were littered everywhere, some piled neatly near the kerb for the morning’s cleaners, but most sporadically arranged across tarmac and cobblestone. We said goodbye to Jen who lived very close to Alex’s grandparents, then snuck in very quietly to our digs. Happy new year indeed.
Berlin Wall Fact: Bernauer Street is home to the most successful escape tunnel of the wall era. It took six months to build, stretched between an abandoned courtyard on the east side to an abandoned bakery on the west side and they managed to smuggle 57 people into the west before they were discovered.
German Fact: Instead of the traditional green man at pedestrian crossings, they have the Ampelmannchen, a little guy with a more enthusiastic walk and a cute hat. It is a design from East Berlin that survived the re-unification of Germany.
