I had planned not to waste too much Berlin time and visit the laundromat when we arrived. That didn’t happen. I also slept in a bit so it was about 9am before we headed down the road to complete our domestic chores. We were a bit smarter this time – a google search and reccie completed before we packed up the bags to go down.  Chores done, it was time to head out and explore Berlin. We decided to walk rather than use the U-Bahn so we could look at the neighbourhoods on our way and explore a little bit.

We wandered north on Oderberger Strasse to Eberswalde Strasse and walked down towards the Berlin Wall Memorial. On the way we passed a Christmas tree sales yard and vowed to return for our Christmas tree. From here we kept wandering until we reached the memorial – one of five or so wall sites that I didn’t visit last time I came. Berlin does an open air museum really well and this one is no exception. As you walk up to the remaining part of the wall at this location, you notice a row of 3 metre high rusted metal poles uniformly forming a fence. If you didn’t know better it might just look like an artful edge to the setback new housing development behind. What it actually is of course is a marker of where the wall once stood. There were explanations of what happened here at various points along the memorial, including recordings (with translations) of the people who lived here when the wall was built and when it came down, The curious thing here was that when the border was put in place, the fronts of some buildings were in the east when their back door was in the East. And people just escaped from one side to the other. The wall itself came later as East Germany lost its brains and brawn to the west. As you walk further along the memorial, with all the other foreign tourists, you come across the part of the wall that is still standing and realise just how wide the death strip in the middle was and how much of a slice of the middle of Berlin the fortification occupied. It is also an eerie feeling standing there in the middle of what was effectively no man’s land and realizing how many desperate people died trying to cross it, many of them in my lifetime. There was one really poignant photo of a young bride and her new husband waving across the wall to her parents on the other side. There have been many tales over the years of how families and friends were cut off from one another when the border went up in the middle of the night.

I have long been interested in this time in history, of the division between east and west during the cold war and the theory, attitudes and practice of communism throughout the world. Partly because the rise of communism marked one of the most divergent political philosophies of modern times but mostly because this – the divide between east and west (Communism and not rather than Asian and European culture – and the cold war existed and ended in my lifetime. I remember clearly when the wall came down. I remember Reagan’s comments a few years before and I remember the Russian attempts and failure to bring their country into the wider world without revolution. I watch keenly to see if China can turn itself into a fully democratized nation without a revolution. I watched these events from afar, having never been to Germany while the wall was here and while I knew Germans who had emigrated to Australia, their memories and what they were fleeing like so many other Europeans who called Australia home in the 1950s and early 60s were the devastating impact of the war and the lack of opportunity. Five years or so after the wall came down, I met some younger Germans who had been here at the time. It was fascinating to hear them talk about the impact it had.

The other thoughts I had rattling around in my brain were those of my mother when she visited here in 1964. As part of her round the world adventure, she and my grandmother visited Russia and East Germany at a time where there was intense security on the border here. Just recently my mother’s letters to my father during her trip came into my possession. Although clearly coloured by the time they were written, the letters gave a pretty clear indication of the hardship and desperation of East Berliners at the time. I imagined what my mother would have seen when she drove through these streets in 1964. Prenzlauer Berg wouldn’t have been littered with hipster boutiques the way it is now, that’s for sure. And the wall would have been a stark grey uniformly neat barrier not adorned with political murals and pondered over by tourists with cameras gracing their necks. (Mayonnaise – The Smashing Pumpkins – maybe not this song but The smashing Pumpkins generally has a real winter feel about to me – perfect for listening in an old Berlin apartment in December)

The next item on our agenda was a far more uplifting slice of history. Last time I had come to Berlin, I had attempted to find The Ramones Museum with the aid of an address and the neighbourhood map in the Lonely Planet pocket guide. I searched for ages, convinced it was no longer there. This time I was determined and I had saved the location in the GPS in my phone. I’m not sure where I was last time because when we rounded the corner suggested by the GPS, there it was in all its glory, completely unmissable. And the boutique across the road from where I thought it was last time had disappeared. In consolation I had procured a rather nice jacket and woolen hat from said boutique on my last visit.

If you are a Ramones fan or even just a fan of music more generally, particularly the period in time on the lower east side of NYC that gave birth to some of the giants of my music collection today (and the almighty CBGBs), do not miss this coffee shop come museum. Out the front is a coffee shop adorned with rare posters not just of The Ramones but The Clash, as well as photos of and messages from artists and bands the world over who have stopped by to visit. But it’s out the back where the real magic is. I think we paid about eight Euros for entry and a coffee but it was well worth i8t.

You had the sense you were walking through someone’s personal scrapbook of Ramones memorabilia. All too often in these kinds of museums the walls are full of things belonging to band members, or items used on stage like guitars. This was not that kind of museum. Almost every item is something that could have been collected by a fan – rare pressings of albums, merchandise including a Frisbee and the Hey Ho shorts I have stashed somewhere at home in my it will fit me again one day drawer (probably should just bite the bullet and frame them like the ones here). These are interspersed with posters and tickets from shows all over the world, including quite a few in Australia and some stellar lineups like the New Years Eve Show in NYC in the 80s with the then relatively unknown Beastie Boys supporting (dream bill) and yellowed newspaper clippings about The Ramones which really did look like they had been sticky taped into a scrap book. The only items that don’t look like they could have been collected in this way are the photographs donated by one of the band’s early managers, who also took pics for some of their most iconic album covers. We had a hot chocolate in the café and wandered around taking it in before bidding the Ramones museum goodbye and headed through Museum Island to one of Berlin’s most well known and heavily tourist trafficked streets – Unter den Linden. (Sheena is a Punk Rocker – The Ramones – one of my favourites and mentioned in the exhibition)

We walked up to the Brandenburg Gate where we were surrounded by statue buskers, horse drawn carriages, tour buses, people selling DDR memorabilia, a wedding party having their photo taken  and even a stretch hummer. That was when we decided we probably should have some lunch. We stopped in what was clearly a tourist café but it wasn’t too unreasonable – I had potato soup and Dan a Bratwurst. Revived we set off back down Unter den Linden to the handicrafts Christmas Market on the edge of Museum Island. It is probably a much more impressive market when there isn’t a building site (yes I mean a huge big hole in the ground building site) in the middle of it. From here we followed the trail of Christmas markets to Alexanderplatz (home of Berlin’s TV Tower) and started buying up goodies for Christmas. Germans celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve so we weren’t really sure how easy it would be to get supplies on the 24^th, especially considering this Christmas Market had a sign up saying it was closed. We grabbed some sugared nuts, some Schinken (best described as Parma Ham or prosciutto) and some cheese – some sort of Ementhal cheese I think. We then headed to the nearest supermarket to supplement out Christmas Market deli purchases.

From here we took a long walk back – by now it was about 5pm – and I insisted that we go back to the Christmas tree sales yard to get a tree just in case they weren’t open Christmas Eve.  Amazingly they were still open when we got there about 6pm. Germans really are fussy about their Christmas trees. The people in front of us looked like they had been there for an hour trying to pick the perfect Christmas tree from a yard of about two or three thousand. We walked in, chose a small one with a stand that looked a little lopsided, handed over our 20 Euros and took it home. I am sure the people who were there when we arrived, were probably still there when we left.

Christmas tree safely stashed in the apartment, we contemplated dinner. About half an hour later I just suddenly crashed and left Dan to wander the streets in search of a takeaway hamburger for his dinner.

Christmas themed activities – 18  War museums and model shops – 2.5 (I’m counting the Berlin Wall museum) Design experiences – 2