Day 2 - museums and old spies

After a comfortable sleep in a huge bed, we headed off to the metro station via a beautiful coffee stop. We are close to the metro, which is handy.

The first stop of our day was to Checkpoint Charlie. This was the main gateway between the two Berlins from 1961-1990. It was the third of such checkpoints to be opened and was therefore named after the third letter in the NATO phonetic alphabet. The area around the checkpoint was rather tacky, with lots of fast food places and souvenir (junk) shops. The checkpoint itself was good to see though.

After a few photos we entered the Mauermuseum - which tells you lots of history around the Cold War and the wall. It was information overload after a while, so much to read! The best parts were to stories of ingenious escape attempts from East to West - women smuggled in elaborate suitcase or car boot inventions. Not forgetting two families that made their own hot air balloon!

We headed to the metro again and took the S bahn (like a light railway) and the U bahn (underground) to Hauptbahhof. We walked for 15 minutes and arrived at the Hamburger Bahnhof. This was originally a railway station, then a railway museum and now a musuem for modern art.

We had come specifically to see an installation in their main hall (a bit like the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, where the exhibits change, though the museum has a permanent collection too). It was by a Spanish artist called Eva Fabregas and titled ‘Devouring Lovers’.

The hall is huge and light filled and the sculptures looked like they were molten lava, pouring along the floor and around the rafters of the roof. They look to be made from stretchy material, a bit like tights with huge exercise balls stuffed inside. Every now and again the balls would vibrate and the structures shake. It was actually beautiful.

We spent another hour wandering around the permanent exhibition - a mixture of great art and some head scratching as to what some of them were or represented.

We then set off for the main station in Berlin. It is absolutely vast. Escalators transferring people in their droves from train to metro to street. We ate some delicious noodles in the station and then took a train to Grunewald Station. The end of the line to the south west of the city. Noting a beer Keller that might require a visit later, we headed off on foot into a beautiful pine and oak forest, which was turning a dramatic orange in the autumn and followed a trail for around 35 minutes, up up to … a disused US listening station called Teufelsberg.

In the early 20th century this area was covered in bogs and mud, but that all changed when the Nazis came to power. Part of Hitler’s vision – work began on the construction of a university faculty for military technology, but it was never completed, and destroyed during the war. After the war, trucks brought rubble from the rest of the bombed city to the site and it soon piled up to become the highest point in West Berlin. The dumping stopped in 1972, trees were planted to make the man-made hill more attractive, and a ski slope was built complete with a ski lift, a ski jump and a toboggan run. [we’re not sure if those are still there]

The Americans soon recognised the usefulness of the artificial hill. From the 1950s onwards, antennae and radar domes were erected on its two hilltops for espionage and intercepting communications. Huge dishes were built for intercepting, listening to and jamming radio signals from the Eastern Bloc. The field station was used by the American forces until the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Teufelsberg now houses a large street art exhibition with over 400 works. New works by international artists are added every month. The art is mainly wonderful, sometimes disturbing, often angry. We climbed up to the top of one set of domes and the views across Berlin were far reaching due to the beautiful clear day. The domes are covered in graffiti, very tatty, but also rather nice.

We retraced our steps through the woods to the station and stopped to reward ourselves with a nice cold beer before getting back on the train.

We took a detour on the way back to the hotel via a beautiful open street called Kurfürstendamm. It is the most “famous and elegant boulevard in Berlin”. Very much like Paris. It was now dark and we waited for a bus, but German time let us down and we gave up and went to the tube again to get back to the hotel. Weary bodies but we enjoyed a jam packed day.