I am once again in an excellent (or at least very good) hostel, which is a plus, but one minus is that the excellent Wi-Fi connection here has distracted me from my writing. Having fallen upon some interesting videos on Youtube (which counted as being useful in some way, as they were in Russian), I decided against starting to write until 10:00 PM; though I do not feel all too tired, I do not like to go to bed late when staying in hostels, as I would not want to wake up my roommates (if they are in), and I will need to get up early tomorrow - that is, not delay all morning - as I have a big day ahead of me. I saw a tiny chunk of Berlin today and plan to see almost the entire historic center of Berlin tomorrow, Potsdam the day after tomorrow, and a small section of Berlin the day after, on the day on which I will fly to Amsterdam (in the evening), perhaps following a period of rest at the hostel. While one wants to see as much new stuff as possible when travelling, I expect to have seen everything that I came to see by the early afternoon, if not lunchtime, on Wednesday, and resting a bit before my flight might lead me to spend my time more profitably in Holland - one never knows. I feel a bit of regret at returning to Holland, as I have already seen it before, but I would not be surprised if one could see a country from a different perspective when returning to it (though I hope to do so, in most cases, in future; Austria is one exception to this rule) later on, especially if one sees new cities, as I plan to do. I had so little idea of what to do when I first came to Europe that I feel a little that my trip in 2010 was wasted, though one always falls while learning to walk, to so speak.
I have gotten off-track, though: I wanted to say that I would write this post as quickly as I could, not censoring myself as I wrote or thinking for too long over each new point that I wanted to make, as I want to finish this quickly and take a shower. I am sorry if it turns out a little more disjointedly than usual; at the very least, its being disjointed would reflect my current state of mind. Leipzig's central train station was woefully understaffed, to the extent that I waited for twenty-five minutes without getting any service before deciding to buy a ticket myself from a ticket machine, sacrificing any chance of getting the kind of good deal that railway staff often give one by finding one regional passes and clever routes that keep the cost of one's ticket down. I have been disappointed in general by the cost of rail travel in Eastern Germany; perhaps it is no greater than that of rail travel in the rest of Germany, and I am merely travelling longer distances than I was before; whatever the cost, I feel as though it were bankrupting me, though it will fall sharply now that I am more or less staying in one place for the next few days. Staying in Berlin is actually a little more expensive than staying in any other country that I have visited, as one cannot possibly get around the city without using the subway, which costs 2.40 Euros for a one-way ticket. The subway here is much quieter, cleaner, and cooler (though it is not fully air-conditioned; that would entail a giant waste of energy) than that of Moscow, though its signage is worse. I feel ashamed to trump anything in Russia over its equivalent in Germany, but I have to admit that it is easier to find one's way around the Moscow subway than it is to get around the Berlin subway.
I did not see too much on the way from Leipzig to Berlin except for my book, a huge number of windmills, and a mother's comforting her toddler by handing him an iPhone, which he began to manipulate with a look of unbroken composure and concentration. Jane Austen has turned out to be a good author who disliked the social pretensions of the people around her and saw that Britons in the early-19th century were fixated on class distinctions. When I arrived in Berlin, I stepped out of the train into a futuristic, five-storey train station that was clean, full of shops, and full of signs. The only flaw to the train station that I could find was that there was no sign within it pointing to the bus station, though that was easy enough to find (after time wasted looking in the wrong place for it) if one stepped outside and looked for nearby buses that did not have the word "tour" on them. I was intimated as soon as I stepped outside of the train station. There was an electric display showing which buses were going to leave next, and I missed mine. Another bus going towards my hostel left only eight minutes after the first and took me through a very affluent-looking section of town, full of high-rises and steel-and-glass offices. I immediately noticed, looking out of the window, that Berlin went in, to speak anthropomorphically, for massive monuments, like Vienna. This I found curious, as it cannot have been Germany's capital for very long - the country only became a country, in the common sense of the word, about 150 years ago (before which it was a collection of separate states), meaning that Berlin cannot have been groomed for the role of capital city for very long. My theory now is that the city's large monuments merely correspond with its large size, and not with regality, but I have to first describe the city to tell you why.
It is hard to find a place at which to start in describing Berlin - it is the most incredible city that I have ever seen. It has extremely wide boulevards and a huge number of trees for such a car-friendly town. It is full of cyclists and people with even more tattoos, piercings, dreadlocks, and weirdly-colored hair than citizens of the rest of the country (if that is even possible). Cigarette smoke has replaced the air here. It is full of cafes and bars. It is full of monuments, so many that one could not put them all on a map: one bumps into them unexpectedly as one walks, just as one walks past stop signs in an ordinary city. The cyclists here are, unlikely those of Dresden and (especially) Leipzig, completely uninterested in killing people: they ride at a reasonable pace, and when pedestrians get in their way, they ring their bells instead of trying to impale them. Berlin is a city of irrepressible vitality where people accept each other as they are, life is enjoyed, and people consciously try to build a better future for themselves. It is a city full of immigrants and the most German of all Germans, people who are freer and happier than in any other city that I have visited here (even Dresden, where people seemed exceptionally friendly). It is a city full of bums, nutcases, and tourists. Every square inch of available space is covered in graffiti here, so much so that a few tourists from Detroit, a fellow traveler told me, got seriously scared when they first went outside here, as they took the graffiti for gang symbols. It is a city of unequalled variety, one in which one could spend whole years without growing bored. It is a little like a grander, more modern, wealthier Warsaw, a city in which past and present have fused together and prance hand-in-hand into the future. I am tired of this paragraph, but I have more to say.
The most impressive thing about Berlin, as it has been in many cities that I have visited, is its history. I am specifically thinking of its memory of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall, as those are the only two memorials that I have seen in the tiny part of the city that I visited today. The Holocaust memorial that I saw today was in one of the subway stations, and someone had stopped to read it: Berliners do not forget their past. The memorial to the Berlin Wall that I saw was phenomenal. It was an open museum located where the wall used to be. There were photos of the Berlin Wall at various points of its existence (including its destruction) on the sides of buildings located where it used to be, and there was even a faux fence, a series of poles set a foot or so apart from one another, set up to make one feel as though the people and objects sitting on the other side of the fence were separated by a real wall. The Berlin Wall display, which covered three full city blocks, included many plaques explicating, in German and English, the history of the Berlin Wall; it was accompanied by an audio recording, which included a reading of the names of people killed for trying to escape from East Germany into West Germany, whose death was honored with a single, wooden, meter-high cross. The whole area had an eerie, very gloomy feel to it, reminding one that the Berlin Wall was something real to the people living here, not just a symbol of Soviet oppression. (Before I forget, I should point out that, while the touristy parts of town are very busy, one can step out of them into side streets that are empty besides a few locals going about their business. The multifarious layers of this city are enrapturing!) The fact that this display is open to anyone who wants to visit it and that it is located right next to a park and ordinary apartment buildings just goes to show how intricately history is interlinked with life in Berlin.
I could go on and on about Berlin, I should think, but I have one more germane point to make. Part of Germany's infinite superiority over Russia, which I bring up so much because I love parts of Russian culture but hate the country and its government as a whole, is exemplified in the Germans' capacity both to remember historical wrongdoing (committed both by and against them) and to take steps to prevent its recurrence. One thing that shocked and enraged me about Russia when I first visited it was my discovery of its leaders' devotion to empty rhetoric. It is plain to anyone with half of a brain that Stalin repressed and killed tens of millions of people and was one of the most horrid political leaders in human history; it is at least as apparent that the Soviet Union's controlling East Germany for forty-four years was both immoral and incompetent (as exemplified by people's wanting to leave East Germany for the West). Nonetheless, if one were to ask a Russian about this (especially one involved in politics), he would say something like, "Politics was different then." If one were to corner him and ask simply if it was right for the Soviet Union to occupy East Germany (ignoring Eastern Europe; Russians almost unilaterally think that Russia's occupation of Eastern Europe was beneficial to all parties), he would repeat himself in different words, saying that the political climate of the second half of the twentieth century was different from what it is now and required different policies. Russians will never admit to having made a mistake: while they privately grumble about their presidents, and the smartest (or most temerarious, or what have you) among them even openly oppose them, they have good things to say about all of their past leaders except for Gorbachev, who is universally viewed as a traitor and a coward. Stalin is said to have ruled Russia with an iron fist; Khruschev is said to have continued stolidly with Stalin's policies; Brushev is said to have guided the country into the late-20th century; Yeltsin is said to have helped to establish a new, capitalistic order in the country (despite the fact that he did nothing but drink and give power to bandits, who robbed the people blind); Putin is going to be praised for having introduced 21st-century politics, whatever that means, to Russia, despite the fact that his sole actions in government are to steal money; and so on. It infuriates me that cannot admit to the mistakes of their leaders and would never admit to historical mistakes, turning instead to fine, empty phrases to avoid addressing the country's mistakes head-on. Germany does not do this, and it is now one of the most advanced countries in the whole world, having risen from rubble at the end of World War II, at which point it cannot have been in a better position than Russia (besides having the economic support, if I am not mistaken, of the USA). Until Russians learn to see politics level-headedly and describe political actions with words that mean something, they will never hold their government responsible for anything, and their country will remain in the dirt. Germans demand change and fight for it, while Russians drink vodka and praise the people who steal their last crust of bread from them. That is the difference - or one of the many differences - between these two countries.
So much for politics! I am going to see vastly more of Berlin tomorrow and will surely have more to say about it. When I arrived in Berlin, I did not actually want to get off of the train: I would have liked to have remain reading on the train for hours; I may have been tired. I feel recharged at this point, or at least sufficiently irked to have seen relatively little today that I will push myself to see as much as possible tomorrow before enjoying two relaxed days (as Potsdam, it turns out, does not take a whole day to see). One of my few remaining notes is that, for all that I hated Leipzig, I saw a few pairs of lesbians there. While this may not sound so significant, I think that any city in which homosexuals feel comfortable enough to outwardly show affection to one another must be doing something right. I forgot to mention that I had a doner (or shawarma, or whatever - a Turkish wrap) and that I may have gotten sick of pastries. I recently went on a three-day purge of baked goods, having eaten them each morning in Dresden, and, when I ate one today, I discovered that I had (temporarily - I am sure that it will come back by around Christmas time, if not far sooner) lost my taste or them. The pastry that I bought tasted just like all of the others that I had bought in Germany and did not surprise or pleasure me in any way; I have eaten so many pastries on this trip that, at this point, I just want to eat some normal food. I will have the chance to do that over the next few days (and beyond, as I will be staying with people and, therefore, eat everyday food), as I have some spaghetti and mixed vegetables from my stay in Leipzig (where I could not cook, as my hostel had no kitchen), I have enough food for a perfectly-normal lunch tomorrow, and I expect to have a relaxed enough couple of days on Tuesday and Wednesday to take the time to have lunch in a café, which I have not been able to do until now because I have been too busy seeing sights each day to sit down for a relaxed lunch (As the Russians say, do your work and then relax; one has to see all of a city's sights before sitting down to eat!). There are plenty of cheap cafes in Berlin, though I was unable to try any of them tonight, as I could not find the German beerhouse that this hostel's employees recommended to me, and, since I was told that the Turkish wraps here were especially good, I decided to have one for dinner. While I was told that the huge number of Turkish immigrants in Berlin made the city's Turkish wraps here especially good, I discovered that a Turkish wrap tastes like a Turkish wrap; the only difference between Turkish wraps here and in Hungary is that the ones in Hungary give one food poisoning, while the ones here merely give one mild heartburn. I have decided to avoid Turkish wraps, as I had been doing until today for fear of getting sick again, for the next several months, it not longer. In fact, I am going to avoid unhealthy food in general, as I already know what it tastes like and have plenty of it (and very high-quality junk food, at that) over the course of this trip; I have nothing more to discover in that area for the time being. My final note about Berlin is that it is full of music and that people get together on Sundays for giant, fair-like meetings at an open market full of live musical performances. While it would be naïve to say that people here are all connected in some inexpressible, intangible way, they nonetheless love to get together somewhat spontaneously for the sake of enjoying one another's company and being in a crowd. It turns out that I am drawn to cultures that encourage such meetings and consider people social creatures, as I consider the culture here much more amenable than that of Vancouver, where everyone is as alone as in a solitary cell.
I have only one more point - or, rather, two. First, I would have liked to write or to make my points in some sort of order, but I did not have time for that and am in a rush to send this email, take a shower, and go to bed. My final point is that I was going to write about my future travel plans despite yesterday's promise not to do so, as they are fairly interesting. In short, I am interested in seeing the rest of medieval Europe (Scandinavia, Denmark, Belgium, France, England, Spain, and Portugal), Southern Europe, almost all of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, and parts of Southern Asia. Medieval Europe interests me for its allowing one to see how people used to live, the Mediterranean for the richness of the cultures that have developed around it, and Southern Asia partly for its natural beauty and partly for its foreignness. It turns out that some of the best Roman ruins in the world are located in Muslim countries, which would not bother me except that the Arab world is presently going berserk. My plan is to visit Tunisia for a few days next year as long as it stays politically stable and to leave other Arab countries off for a couple of years; if things do not get any better, I will have to leave some monumental Roman ruins unexplored (for the time being). That more or less sums up what I had to say. I wish that I were better at scheduling my time so that I could say what I had to say and still go to bed early!
This is the model for many of Berlin's side streets.
