A Bike ride (and marathon) in Berlin - Part 1 - Pre-marathon

Berlin was an amazing few days, mostly focused on the marathon but we got a lot of good sightseeing and also a great feel for the city thanks to our amazing tour guide, the wonderful Christiane!  We arrived on Thursday night, and of course our first lesson was what train station is Berlin Central Station.  It’s not Ostbanhof, which is the station we arrived at.  Meanwhile, Christiane was waiting with Berliners (those jelly donuts) for us at the real Berlin Central Station, Hauptbanhof.  Once we figured this out after lots of back and forth like “I’m at the Europlatz” and us saying “We don’t see Europlatz” and her saying “I have no idea where you are from that photo” we realized we just needed to take an uber to our hotel.  

We arrived at Adina hotel and checked in and then went to Messe for the race check in. So many people! There were great themed activities at the expo like this guy won a free entry into the marathon for handing this stein for over 6 minutes.

Once we wrapped that up we headed out for dinner, Christiane’s favorite German treat - Knödel!  Knödel is basically a boiled bread/potato ball that is served with sauce.  2 of them were pretty filling - I got a cheese and a bacon one. Then we got this delicious mushroom sauce that we put on them and some salad.  It was wonderful!  They even had a dessert Knödel, which was also delicious.  We spent most of the dinner talking about how to say Knödel which was a complete disaster:  “say it like this”… “That’s what I’m saying”… “no that’s definitely not what you’re saying”.  Our waitress here was actually a nice German waitress so that was refreshing. 

Friday was our day to tour the City.  We met Christiane at an e-bike rental shop in the morning and we headed on our way.  Biking was an AWESOME way to see the City.  We had all been to Berlin before so we were not exactly museum hopping, but we biked through a lot of the neighborhoods of the City.  We started at Brandenburg Gate because that was where the marathon was going to end so we needed to scope it out. 

From there we went by the TV Tower and Red City Hall, the Holocaust memorial, and by a lot of the government buildings in that area.

Holocaust memorial

our awesome tour guide

TV Tower

Red City Hall

Famous clock

We learned about the history of Berlin and Germany and I will provide a super basic summary here: 

During World War II the Allies (US, UK, France) banded together with the USSR to defeat Hitler - so kind of like a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” type deal.  Once the war was ended Germany was divided into West Germany (occupied by the allies) and East Germany occupied by the USSR.  Berlin had the same consequence though it was in East Germany - The City was split in two, and West Berlin was controlled by the Allies and East Berlin was controlled by the Soviets. Generally in the socialist economy of East Germany/Berlin, there was more control by the government over the people, and there was more oppression, so people kept trying to leave East Germany. Then the Soviets didn’t like that so they put up the wall and started to have more strict control.  It was much harder to travel from East Germany out into West Germany, same with Berlin.  Christiane told us stories about how she went to East Berlin for a track and field event when she was growing up and it just seemed so weird and bleak. 

There was a lot of pressure to rebuild housing really quickly after the war on both sides, so we saw a lot of modular housing from this era.  The Soviets built these grand housing blocks that were really impressive to symbolize how great it was living in East Berlin, and we drove down Karl Marx Allee which gave us a taste of this. Once the wall came down in 1989 and Germany became it’s own country again, that integration happened, but you can see the architecture of the City show its history pretty clearly. Once cool story Christiane told us was about a World Cup game she was outside of in Rome in 1990.  She said there was so much energy for this game (it was Argentina vs Germany and Argentina had just eliminated Italy) and it was the first time that she saw people wave the German flag, and she was shocked, that country pride wasn’t a thing for her growing up.  It was a formative moment for her to be able to be outwardly proud to be German, cool story coming from a country where so many Americans are overtly and outwardly proud of their American-ness

This building is modular housing but in West Berlin

We went to all sorts of different neighborhoods in Berlin, of course very few of which I could spell or pronounce. The hip new spot is a part of East Berlin that has streets lined with bars and it’s of nightlife.  Of course we saw the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie.

We went to Mitte, her neighborhood which is also very hip and becoming more and more expensive.  We went into a building with an old courtyard that had a cool artsy vibe, and then a comparable courtyard building that was much more refined, and had obviously been recently renovated. 

A cool art

One of the coolest places we went was Templehof - the military airport that has since been closed.  It is now a park but also a homage to brutalist architecture, an airport that had many lives.  It was so cool to ride a bike down the runway, and then have a beer at the other end.  

Our day ended in Mitte at an awesome pizza restaurant that had this epic pistachio and burrata pizza.  Pistachio flavor is very big here in everything. Followed by an ice cream for dessert (also a very big European thing to do), and we called this day a wrap!