I went to Germany in spring 2005 with two really REALLY good friends, one Venezuelan and another one Colombian. We found this big promotion with train tickets that we couldn’t let go, 9.95euros (to go and return) from Brussels to a little town in the frontier between Germany and Belgium.
We left the house really early; around 6am we were already catching the metro to go to central station in Brussels. Around 7am we were already boarding the train, completely exited, it was going to be the first time that we were going to have a ’backpacker’ experience, or kind of. From the little town in Germany, ‘Aachen’, to Berlin we did 18hrs of trip. The thing was that in Germany they have this ticket, that I’m pretty sure is called ‘Niedersachsen-Ticket’ that you can buy with another 5people that cost you 30euros and can take you to where ever you want to go in Germany, the only condition is that you can only use slow and old trains, not the fast and new ones.
We got to Berlin at 10pm, completely tired of changing trains all day long, and looking forward to go to sleep. Almost all my best friends, including my cousin, from Venezuela were doing their exchange student year in Germany, so they putted us in contact with a friend of them that lived in Berlin and that did an exchange student year in Venezuela. We called him and he, Manolis, explained us how to get to his place. He gave us some dinner and then we went to bed.
We spent 4days in Berlin, and I really have to say that I have traveled around many countries and I have seen many cities, but Berlin definitively is one of my favorites.
The contrast between the east and the west part of the city is amazing and at the same time ridiculous. The ‘Branderburger Tor’ was AWESOME, especially when you see all around postcards with old pictures of the city when they had all the Nazi problems and the wall, and you compare to what it is now there.
It is amazing the way Germany overcame all the problems that they had in the past in such a short time. It’s like if nothing ever happened, but at the same time you can find museums, concentration camps, part of the wall, monuments, etc. that remind us that even though everything seems to be perfect and beautiful now, it was hard for them to overcome the Nazi experience, and that they won’t try to forget it, they just seemed to have learned the consequences of it.
1 comment:
Enjoying your travelblog!
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