An incident free trip back to Dublin doesn’t make for an interesting blog post. We had spent the day meeting a few friends and wandering around the parts of the city. People make places and I have to say our experience of Berliners and others who live there was very positive. The staff at the hotel were friendly and not in a way that suggested that they had acquired their friendliness from a training manual. All of them spoke impeccable  English which again I feel puts us to shame. The people I spoke to were also incredible welcoming. Peter is a Berliner who spent time in rural Cork in the 80’s and it turned out we had mutual friends from Patrick St in Cork City and Clonakilty. A small world indeed. Benjamin is from Berlin but spent some time in Canada and who imparted some very wise advice to me which I will keep to myself. I spoke to another man whose name I can’t remember. He is a musician who was dreading the thought of having to play the piano at a New Years Day church service for rich Berliners many of whom would still be drunk from the night before and who would not want to listen to his beautiful playing but it payed the rent.  As I say people make places. We found the transport system very easy and efficient. I guess efficiency is one of those national stereotypes that Germans in general have to labour under but the fact was that the trains and buses ran on time although my friend Gordon tells me that there is one bus that runs from Moabit to Zehlendorf, the 101 which is always late and is a reassurance that there is humanity there. As we were waiting in the hotel lobby for the taxi back to Schönefeld Airport the citizens of Berlin were heading to the  Brandenburg Gate ready for the big New Years celebratory fireworks display which we thankfully missed. One million people turned up apparently. I’m not a lover of fireworks or loud bangs of any kind. Coming from here loud bangs of that kind will always be associated with something else. The Aer Lingus flight left half full and on time and not even the kids running up and down the aisle were too annoying. They were twin boys of about four or five years of age and they were having great fun playing with the cabin crew whose patience had to be admired and again that patience didn’t come out of a training manual. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive  back to Coalisland. I was tired by the trip and I never sleep well out of my own bed. It’s only a two hour spin along a soulless motorway these days. It use to be at least three hours up through places like Julianstown, Balbriggan, Drogheda  Dunleer and Dundalk. But now you fly past these places on the new M1. Quick but dull would sum it up on our very own Autobahn. Anyway that has been our trip to Berlin. Many happy memories and an experience I hope to repeat soon. I’ve included a few more people photos.

How’s this for stating the obvious, Berlin is Huge! A four day visit around Christmas was never going to be anything but a toe in the water. We packed as much into as we could but you’d need a life time to get to know and appreciate this town. As a result of our exploits today I am knackered. I have to admit it wasn’t all galleries and museums today. It was mostly Cathedrals and not the ones built for the glory and honour of what ever God people believe in. Rather it was the Cathedrals to the great God shopping. Massive temples dedicated to the global brand names that flash their neon signs worldwide. Back to stating the plain obvious again but shopping looks and feels the same the world over and practised in bigger and bigger buildings. Berlin will throw up the surprise and there is a place called Hackescher Markt which had a very unique feel about it. As I was saying I am exhausted by this trip so I’m going to make the pictures do the talking. These are a few of the images that I grabbed in the past few days.  This is the view I have from our hotel room. The massive building on the left is the Foreign Affairs Building. This is the Mitte district of Berlin which was part of the Russian controlled sector.  When I’m in any city I always try to take a number of candid shots of people as we travel around. Where possible I talk to the subjects and let them know I’ve taken their picture and most people are fine about it. Anyway here are a few people I met in Berlin today.

Had the Berlin Wall survived until next year 2011, I would have shared a 50th anniversary with it. It was built in 1961 the year I was born and is the iconic symbol of the Cold War and the divide between East and West. As it happens the Wall fell in 1989 (another momentous year for me again a whole other blog!)  We walked along the remnants  of it today on Niederkirchnerstraße on our way to a remarkable museum “The Topography of Terror” It’s  an outdoor museum  located in Niederkirchnerstraße formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, on the site of buildings which during the Nazi regimefrom 1933 to 1945 were the headquarters of the Gestapo and theSS, the principal instruments of repression during the Nazi era. The second world war had finished 16 years before I was born and by the time I became even vaguely aware that it had happened well over 2o years had past. I became aware of the second world war via movies and comics, not great sources  of information. My one direct connection with that war was our  good neighbour Johnny Mullen, a veteran of the evacuation form Dunkirk. Johnny looked and carried himself like a soldier. Straight back with the newspaper tucked under his arm like a swagger stick and his boots polished to a mirror shine. He strode up the road to “the Island” brickyard where he worked like he was on parade and at a quick march. But for me the second world war was  dim and distant history the stuff of celluloid and black and white Commando Comics. The visit today to the “Topography of Terror” museum made it very real for me. The exhibition of photographs and documents that charts the rise of the Nazis Party and more particularly the SS and Gestapo was chilling made all the more powerful by the fact that we were standing on the site where they organised the systematic extermination of the Jews and others. It is remarkable to be in a city were both the second world war and the cold war still have such an impact. Flicking through the glossy books that make a pictorial comparison  between Berlin now and how it was only 20, 50, 70 years ago and see the changes brought about in that relatively short period of time is remarkable. If any people on earth could talk with more authority about change it has to be the Berliners.

Two photos i took today among many were of a photo in the Topography of Terror Museum of a man refusing to join in the salute to Hitler on a visit to a ship yard before the war. The Second photo is whats left of the 50 year old Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall

Hello Everyone

This is my first attempt at blogging so cut me some slack. I’m not a writer. I stumbled through a degree in “Peace and Conflict Studies”  at the university of Ulster at Magee in Derry 20years ago regurgitating the lectures in very poor essays none of which I would care to read today( I didn’t care to read them then). Stumbled and indeed staggered through is a very apt description of what happened at Magee as I was drunk for most of the three years I spent there plus the year I spent in Chicago on placement. I don’t drink today. Thats a whole other blog.  I haven’t been required to write very much for the various jobs I done in the 20 years since Magee. As I say my not a writer.    2011 will mark my 50th year and as a new departure to mark that momentous event I’ve decided to dive head first into the blogosphere and see what happens. Thanks in no small way to the encouragement of Malachi O’D and all at Blog Standard. Blog Standard is an initiative by the Writer in Residence at Queen’s University, Belfast Malachi O’Doherty
who’s aim is to foster discussion among bloggers, podcasters and all sorts of creative internet and new media activists. Not sure I see myself as a “new media activist” but what the hell.  I’ve called this first blog Berlin because thats where I’m writing this. My wife Kierna and I have for the past number of years taken ourselves away for a few days over the Christmas holidays. The week between Christmas Day and New Years Day I have always found unbearably  tedious at home so we try a get away for that week. Rome a couple of times, Warsaw, last year Venice and now Berlin. A bit of forward planning and It can be done cheaply enough. Furthermore, I currently  work for a project that is funded by the EU under a Peace III initiative. Before going to Rome I had never been to mainland Europe so I rationalised that if Europe was paying my wages the least I could do was try and find out a bit about the place at first hand. Encouraged by the recommendations of friends who had either been to Berlin or as in Gordon’s case actually live here for a part of the year we decided to take the budget flight from Dublin and see what all the talk was about. We got into the JF (after Kennedy) Arcotel Hotel in the Mitte district of Berlin at 11.20 last night. The taxi ride from the airport was an adventure in several feet of snow and ice. The driver didn’t seem to notice the conditions and drove like a man possessed or convinced that Allah would look after him in this life and the next no matter what the roads were like. The Hotel is grand with the unusual feature of having what appears to be a replica of JFK’s rocking chair in every room. There is good internet connection which is as important as running water these days (or is that just me?) I won’t bore you with too much weather talk, but first impressions are that our German friends can cope with a good fall of snow much better that we can. I don’t expect they’ll be faced with water shortages any time soon as the result of the thaw and I doubt if there is the Berlin version of the Stephen Nolan Radio  show where the citizens ring in to complain about the weather. It’s probably a cliché but this city has history oozing out of every brick and I am looking forward to the discovery. More Tomorrow.