On Friday as I ran around doing errands in the morning (buying train tickets to Chemnitz so I can visit my friend Stefanie, buying credit for my cell phone, etc.) I noticed while waiting for the S-Bahn at Friedrichstraße that there was a really great view of the Reichstag from the platform; only it was blocked by two other platforms that the regional trains use. So, instead of just getting on the train, I went back down the stairs, walked through the station to get to the far platform, climbed up the stairs, and took this lovely photo.
Saturday was a fun day. I started off by meeting Emily Bruce and her roommate Melissa at U-Bhf Eberswalderstraße and we rode the U2 to Alexanderplatz, where we switched to the 100 bus and got off at the Lustgarten, which is really not a garden of lust like I once thought, but rather the lawn in front of the Altes Museum (which holds old artifacts including the bust of Nefertiti) and the Berlin cathedral. From there we walked to the Old National Gallery, then over the Spree to an outdoor market, which had mostly artwork, some of which was really good, but the rest of it was total kitsch. We walked back to Unter den Linden, the tree-lined boulevard that makes up the heart of old Berlin, and came upon the German Historical Museum and a monument to the fallen soldiers of war. We then crossed Unter den Linden to Bebelplatz (across the street from Humboldt University), where there was a book burning in 1933. There is a monument in the middle of the open square, which is built underground, and it has a glass opening so pedestrians can get a view of the empty bookshelves, symbolizing the missing books. Also on Bebelplatz are the German Opera and St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, where I snapped the following picture of this pigeon while waiting for my two companions outside. Isn’t he cute?
After that we took the 100 bus all the way to S+U-Bhf Zoologischer Garten, passing the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Bundeskanzleramt (which looks like a washing machine), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (“House of World Cultures” which looks like a pregnant oyster—not my own opinion, but it said so in Emily’s guidebook), the Siegessäule, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche along the way. We headed to the only café I ever go to in that area, Café Hardenberg, and I had apple strudel and literally a bowl of coffee, which is what I always get there (normally I’m not so unadventurous, but this apple strudel is really good).
After lunch it was almost time for me to go on the tour of Oberschöneweide, which I had signed up for at the Goethe Institut. So I took the S-Bahn to Hackescher Markt, while Emily and Melissa were going to head back to our neighborhood to check out the market at Kollwitzplatz. Going into the tour, I had no idea where Oberschöneweide even was. It’s actually one station closer to Berlin than Adlershof, which is where one of my psychology classes was held when I spent my junior year of college here. What does that mean? It was far away. I got to talk with a woman from my class who was also on the trip, though. She’s from central Itally, near Assisi, and she has a Humboldt Stipendium to do research at the Archaeology Museum.
After switching trains several times and a short trip on the tram, we got off right before a bridge going over the Spree. From there, our tour guide Matthias explained that Oberschöneweide got it’s name from the Weide trees growing on the banks of the river. I had no idea what a Weide was, even when he pointed them out, but it turns out they are willows (they look different than the ones in the USA). So Oberschöneweide literally means Upper Beautiful Willows. Unfortunately that is where the beauty stopped. Oberschöneweide was mainly an industrial area for years, only now the buildings are mostly empty.
As we crossed the bridge we ended up on Edisonstraße. Edison as in Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb filament. At an international fair, he sold the rights to produce it to a German, whose company eventually mutated into AEG, which along with Siemens was the most important producer of electric products in Germany.
We then walked along Wilhelminenstraße, which in itself was interesting. The right hand side of the street was completely industrial, while the left hand side was residential. The next place we came to was an “industrial” park, which was a real park, but that had remnants of a loading dock where goods could be transported from the river to the railroad or from the factories to the river. Here Matthias told us that at some point the Spree was connected to the Oder River by means of a canal, which went all the way to Silesia (an area of Poland, I think?), where they would send coal down river to Oberschöneweide, which was home to the a coal power plant, the first to produce three phase current, seen in the following picture:
Next door to this was a factory that produced electricity’s best friend—power cables. The last place we saw was part of the shut down cable factory, which now houses a college of technology and business, which is the newest college in Berlin. We were supposed to go to a café after that, but it mostly had just outdoor seating, and as you can see from the photos, it was pretty gray and had just started to rain. It was also only 13 degrees Celsius on the thermometer when I got back to my apartment, so it was pretty cold out too!
On Sunday I had brunch with Lilo and she told me that as a student at a university in the GDR they had to work in a randomly selected factory in Oberschoeneweide during their summer break, as a way of paying back the state for their education--she said it was like Dicken's descriptions of England from 100 years earlier... pretty crazy!
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