Norwegian Getaway Review: Part 6 – Berlinfeatured
I had mixed feelings about visiting Germany.
There’s so much history and I always get super excited to walk on the sites of major historical events. Like really excited. In a totally nerdy way. But on the other hand, so many terrible things have happened in Germany that shaped the history of our family, that visiting just felt a little…heavy. My historical imagination can run a little strong sometimes. Ultimately, though, I couldn’t judge a country for the actions of leaders of their past – I certainly wouldn’t want people to miss experiencing the beauty that lays within our United States because of the decisions our leaders have made. So I went into Germany with an open mind and a hopeful heart.
The Norwegian Getaway was scheduled to dock in Warnemünde around 7:30 am, so we had an early morning wake up to get ready for our tour. We grabbed a quick breakfast up at the Garden Café (which, if it wasn’t at capacity, must have been close because finding a table indoors was just about impossible) before trying to figure out how to get off the ship.
The Getaway has gangways on both the forward and the aft of the ship, and no one (including the crew) knew which one (or if both) would be used since this was the first time the ship was docking in Warnemünde. We tried to wait it out with others on deck 5 (since everyone would disembark on deck 4), but eventually, they cleared it out and sent everyone up to the public areas on deck 6 and above. All clear to disembark didn’t come until around 7:45 am, after the ship had been cleared by local authorities and both the forward and aft gangways opened.
For the past 13 years that we’ve been cruising, we’ve only ever booked shore excursions through the ship. That extra protection of having the ship waiting for us loomed large, especially on European itineraries where the destination city was hours away from the port. But we’ve come to realize that excursions offered through the cruise line bring limited options (especially on this Baltics itinerary) and we’d get better options and much better value booking privately. Stephanie found SPB Tours on TripAdvisor, where they have a pristine rating and thousands of reviews, so we took a chance and booked a tour of Berlin through SPB. The tour cost us $105 a person where a comparable tour offered through the ship was more than $300, and we received an additional discount for also booking our St. Petersburg tours through them.
After we exited the passenger terminal, we made our way to the parking lot per the directions SPB had sent us and found a large SPB sign with our driver, Norbert, who was waiting to check us in. We were directed to a large, comfortable bus while the rest of our tour group checked in – there were around 24 people in all – before beginning the drive to Berlin.
Berlin is a three hour drive away from Warnemünde, and Norbert informed us that our tour guide would meet us at our first stop inside the city. He passed out some pamphlets and maps and explained that we had a three hour drive ahead, but that we’d be making a stop around two thirds of the way to our destination. Three hours sounds like a lot one way. It is a lot. I can fly to New York from Chicago and back home again in less time than it takes to drive to Berlin from Warnemünde. But the drive passes quickly in a sea of golden flowers outside the window and zippy cars on the autobahn. The time didn’t matter anyways — just about everyone on the bus was asleep by the time we pulled onto the autobahn.
Norbert pulled off the highway into a gas station for a ten minute break when we were about 45 minutes away from Berlin so we could grab a snack inside the McDonald’s, use the facilities (a €0.50 charge), get Euros from the ATM or buy snacks in the convenience store. It was too early to explore the offerings of a German Mickey D’s, but I withdrew some extra Euros from the ATM and stocked up on some essentials (read: two shots of Underberg and a bag of Haribo gummies) before we hopped back on the bus to complete the final leg of the drive.
The landscape outside of our windows shifted from green and yellow farmland to urban cityscapes and we knew we were close. Our first stop was the Olympic Stadium, where we were met by our tour guide for the day, Heather, as well as one of the owners of SBP Tours who wanted to personally greet and welcome us to Berlin and assure us we were in capable hands for the day with his best guide. And it wasn’t a joke – Heather is probably one of the best tour guides we’ve ever had. She’s an American expat from Pennsylvania who moved to Germany when she was studying abroad in college and fell in love with the city, opting to move there and continue her education abroad and has been living there ever since. Her love for the country and its historical significance in the world resonated through every factoid and story she told us and in the way she approached sharing the history of the city. She made sure we had plenty of time to take pictures at every stop (always important for me!) and was just such a pleasure to spend the day with.
So our tour began at the Olympiastadion Berlin, home of the 1936 Summer Olympics. Located in the former West Berlin, the stadium held a record attendance of 100,000, but nowadays, because of laws and regulations around arena capacity, holds just under 75,000 and is currently used for sporting matches (mostly soccer).
We hopped back on the bus for a tour of the former West Berlin, driving through the affluent neighborhood of Charlottenburg, past the palace built as a summer home for the Prussian Queen Sophie Charlotte, the zoo and the Berlin Victory Column on our way to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was the second formal stop on our tour, a protestant church on the Kufürstendamm that was built sometime in the 1890s. A bombing raid damaged the church in the early 1940s, but instead of repairing or leveling the old church, it was preserved as a memorial and a new church was built adjacent to it, with gorgeous blue stained glass windows that Heather urged us to go see in person.
Heather gave us a half hour of free time to explore the Breitscheidplatz, to visit the church or the small makeshift memorial nearby in tribute to the victims of the Christmas Market attack last winter (when a truck was driven into a crowd of people visiting the market – the most popular one in the area – killing 12 and injuring 56), visit a nearby currency exchange to ensure we had Euros for our visit, shop in a nearby mall or visit the Starbucks down the street.
We started with a walk through the church and a visit to the memorial before hitting up the souvenir store to pick up some momentos and spending the rest of our time sitting in the square, observing the goings on around us. Berlin is probably one of the more modern European cities we’ve visited and the Breitscheidplatz could have been State Street in Chicago or Herald Square in New York – just a ton of shopping and chain restaurants (to the likes of Forever 21, H&M, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts and even KFC).
The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was our last stop in West Berlin. From there, we began our drive into the former East Berlin and stopped for our first walking tour, right outside of the Reichstag, where Heather stopped us to show us pictures of what the Reichstag looked like before World War 2 and after, so we could compare it to how it looks today.
From there, we walked to the Brandenburg Gate, one of the distinguished symbols of freedom and unity in Berlin. Victoria, the Goddess of Victory, stands prominently on the top of the gate – fitting in that when the Berlin Wall fell, the Brandenburg Gate became a symbol of victory for a newly unified Berlin. As we approached the gate, Heather pointed out a path of bricks laid into the ground – marking where the Berlin Wall once stood. She also pointed out where the outer wall stood and where the inner wall stood, and the “death strip” that ran between them. I was only four when the Berlin Wall fell so I don’t have any real connection to the memory, but my historical imagination was running strong as we crossed the street, walking along ground that has bore witness to so much, and has so much significance in the western world.
We crossed through the Brandenburg Gate, where we had five minutes to take pictures before meeting in front of the US Embassy building. More interesting to me than the US Embassy was the Hotel Adlon just beyond the embassy and the Academy of Arts – preferred hotel of the rich and famous, and cemented in pop culture history as the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled his son Blanket off the balcony.
Our next stop was at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The memorial was inaugurated to mark the 60-year anniversary of the end of World War II, and is comprised of a series of concrete columns lined up in tight, neat rows, the heights of the columns shifting up and down, but not in any distinguishable pattern. Heather told us that everyone has a different interpretation of what the memorial represents, and that she wouldn’t tell us until later on so that we could interpret it in the moment on our own. Before we split off, she dropped this factoid: there have been numerous controversies around the memorial, but the biggest one involves the manufacturer of a special anti-graffiti paint that coats the concrete slabs of the memorial. As construction of the memorial was underway, it was uncovered that this company once owned another company that manufactured gas used in the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration camp. In some measure of restitution, the company decided they would donate any paint needed for the upkeep and maintenance of this memorial. That’s some pretty heavy stuff.
Our group came back together after walking through the memorial, and Heather asked us what we thought it symbolized. Everyone had a different idea, and not having a clear answer was slightly unsettling – but I think that’s probably part of the point.
We had a short walk to our next stop, the site of Hitler’s Bunker. The bunker served as home and headquarters to Hilter and the Reich Chancellery, and was the site where Hitler and his wife committed suicide as his power drew to a close. The Soviets blew up the bunker in the years following the war as they tried to erase any signs of Nazi Germany, but the final vestiges of it weren’t gone until the late 1980s. Nowadays, you could walk or drive past it and completely miss it, and that was by design – residential condos were built on the grounds and a parking lot now sits on the site where the bunker once stood. It’s as if it never existed, which is exactly what was intended in building over it. In the mid-2000’s, an infographic was put up depicting what the land once looked like, but other than that, any and all signs of Hilter and the bunker have been destroyed and removed.
Norbert picked us up at the bunker site and drove us to the restaurant where we’d be having lunch, a place called Deponie, which Heather said was one of her favorites. Deponie was underneath some train tracks and had a familiar, dive bar kind of vibe that reminded me of some of the German restaurants we’ve visited up in Milwaukee. Heather had passed around a menu earlier while we were on the bus so she could put our orders in ahead of time and have the food ready for us. An entire room of the restaurant had been reserved for our small group and we sat at tables that had baskets of soft, crusty bread already waiting, as a parade of servers began doling out German delicacies. Most of the group ordered the currywurst, a local delicacy, but Mom and I both opted for the bratwurst plate (€9.50), which came out piping hot, served with boiled potatoes and sauerkraut. Stephanie still wasn’t feeling great, so she just ordered a slice of Apple Strudel (€4.50). The bratwurst was seriously amazing (which was totally expected given that we were in Germany and brats are kind of their thing, but to be fair, we have some great brats just across the state border in Wisconsin!) and the bite I snuck of Stephanie’s strudel was pretty tasty, too.
Once we were satiated off German sausage and pickled cabbage, we set out to burn it all off with a walking tour of Museum Island. On the way, we walked through the Mitte district and past the residence of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Apparently, while she has an official residence within the German Chancellery, she chooses to live in a condominium in an inconspicuous building that would give no tells to the power of the office held by one of its residents if not for the two policemen that stand guard outside.
We continued our walk along the Spree river to Museum Island, which isn’t actually it’s own island, but rather a cluster of museums on the tip of Spree Island. Five museums call the island home: the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Neues Museum, the Altes Museum, the Bode Museum and the Pergamon Museum. We didn’t get to go inside any of the museums, but we did stop a nifty little tactile model of the museum campus while Heather told us about the different works and artifacts on display within each museum.
The next stop on our walking tour of Museum Island was the Berliner Dom, or the Berlin Cathedral. The cathedral dates back to the mid-1450s, but it’s taken different designs, styles and affiliations across the centuries. Heather pulled out her binder of photos to show us the before and after pictures from World War II, when a bomb was dropped through the dome. It took more than 30 years before the dome was reconstructed, but it stands in its beautiful glory today. We didn’t have a chance to go inside and just admired the cathedral from the outside, but we weren’t alone – on such a beautiful spring day, many of the locals were enjoying the warm weather with a good book or a game of Frisbee.
Our tour continued on towards Unter den Linden, a boulevard that joins many of the landmarks of Berlin. The street is named after the dense lime trees that line the sidewalks and runs from the Brandenburg Gate all the way to the City Palace. Our first stop along Unter den Linden was the Zeughaus, or the old arsenal building, which was built in the late 1600s and is the oldest landmark building on the street. Oh, and it’s a nice shade of millennial pink. You can’t miss it.
Heather stopped us in a shady spot under the trees to pull out her binder again and show us pictures of the next landmark, the Neue Wache (or the New Guardhouse). Heather wasn’t sure how close we could get to the building, so she wanted to show us a picture of a famous sculpture that sits at the front of the building, Kollwitz’s Mother with her Dead Son, which serves as a memorial to the victims of war. The Neue Wache was closed as we walked by, but we got a quick glimpse of the statue through the iron gate as we walked by.
Just a few blocks down, we made another stop, this time outside the gates of Humboldt University, where Heather wanted to show us not a list of distinguished alumnae and professors (not that the list isn’t notable because Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and more than 40 Nobel Prize winners are on it!), but to urge us to look down at the ground and the tiles that line the entrance to the main gate. The tiles each memorialized a person who died in the Holocaust, but Heather was quick to point out that the tiles pointedly did not mention the date of their death, but rather the date they were murdered, and how the verbiage was an intentional political statement.
We continued on to Bebelplatz, the most beautiful square in Berlin, but more notably, the site where on an evening in 1933, more than 20,000 books by authors who did not uphold Nazi ideologies were burned by the German Student Union. The Memorial to the Nazi Book Burnings was one of my favorite sites in Berlin: a glass window in the ground, looking down on an empty room with white walls and large empty bookcases – with enough space to hold the 20,000 books that were destroyed. On a clear day, the bright rays of the sun make it hard to see, so many people will pour water on top of the glass to get a better view.
Norbert pulled the bus around and drove us to our next stop: the Gendarmenmarkt, another gorgeous square in Berlin, and home to the identical French and German cathedrals (as Heather told it, the French cathedral was there first and the German cathedral was built because the Germans wanted an equally gorgeous cathedral).
We had already done and seen so much in Berlin, but we still had two major sites left: the Topografie des Terrors and Checkpoint Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie was a crossing point from West Berlin into East Berlin during the Cold War. Disappointingly, we didn’t get the chance to get off the bus at Checkpoint Charlie – we’d have to settle for driving through it.
The last stop on our tour was at the Topografie des Terrors, an indoor/outdoor museum where a portion of the Berlin Wall still stands. Heather led us in, gave us a quick overview and then set us free for a little free time to explore the wall, the outdoor museum or use the facilities at the indoor museum. We started with a walk along the remnants of the wall and quickly made our way over to the outdoor museum, which features excavated portions of the Gestapo headquarters.
After our 20 minute stop at the Topografie des Terrors, we said our goodbyes to Heather, as she would be staying behind in Berlin as we began our drive back to Warnemünde with Norbert.
The three hour drive back passed almost as quickly as the ride there – mostly because we all slept for most of the ride. We stopped about halfway back at another gas station to stretch and stock up on some snacks and finally made it back to Warnemünde just after 8:30 pm ahead of our 10:00 pm back onboard time. We passed quickly through the terminal, where servers were waiting with trays of water, iced tea and hot chocolate to hydrate us while we waited in line to re-board.
We dropped our bags back at the room and freshened up quickly before heading down to the Tropicana for dinner. The Getaway has three main dining rooms (Savor, Taste and the Tropicana), all of which have the same menus. The Tropicana is the largest of the three, with a cool 1920s speakeasy vibe and live music. Live music is underrated these days on cruise ships, isn’t it? We really loved it. It helped distract us from the slow service we received, but to be fair, the dining room was packed with most tours coming in towards the tail end of dinner hours. We had different experiences with our meals: I enjoyed mine, but I ordered some of the rotating items. Stephanie thought everything was bland, but she mainly ordered from the always available items.
Bread Basket
Loaded Corn on the Cob
French Onion Soup
Boston and Red Leaf Lettuce Salad
Mozzarella and Plum Tomatoes
Rotisserie Chicken
Grilled New York Strip Steak
Baby Back Pork Ribs and Southern-Fried Chicken
We skipped dessert because dinner service took nearly two hours, opting to head back to our balcony for sailaway. I don’t know if it was a holiday in Warnemünde, or if they had a special celebration to mark the Getaway’s first visit to the port, but there were dozens of people gathered at the dock to see us off and even fireworks (which we couldn’t see because they were on the other side of the ship!).
Once we were out in open waters, we headed out again to walk around the ship. We were too tired to do much of anything so we just walked around, still trying to familiarize ourselves with the ship, before returning to the cabin and enjoying the warm night on our balcony.
