Day #12: Berlin!

Well, I'm not good at suspense (and let's be honest, you'd skip to the end anyway to peak; I know I would), so I'll go ahead and tell you that I made it safely to Berlin.

When I left you at the end of yesterday's episode, I found out that both my Plan A and Plan B for getting to Berlin were fully booked. Leaving me unsure of how I was going to get to the German capital.

I decided the best course of action was to get to Copenhagen, the source of my bottleneck. Not only was it a transportation hub, it was also a familiar city so I was somewhat familiar with its layout and (more importantly) its train station.

As I sat on the train to Malmö from Stockholm, the thought occurred to me, if Malmö/Copenhagen was the problem for me, if I were able to just get to Hamburg (a north German town famous for, well, you know...), they had hourly trains to Berlin. Based upon that, I started look at train connections from other, more western, Danish towns. It turns out, that if I could make it to Odense, the biggest town on the island west of Copenhagen, I could catch a train to Fredericia, which is on the main penisula of Denmark. From Fredericia, there was a train to Hamburg, and from Hamburg I could get to Berlin. The only drawback? To make it all work, I'd have to take the first train from Copenhagen to Odense, and that left at 6am. (grumble, grumble, grumble).

So after 5 hours of sleep at the hostel (which was neatly cut in half at 2am by the drunken entrance of, what I believe from what I could recollect in my half-awake state, part of an American minor league baseball team), I headed to the train station and caught the train to Odense. When I made it to Fredericia without incident, I noticed on the departure board that there was a train going to Berlin. I quickly made my way to the information desk and reserved a seat. Praise the Lord! My time of arrival in Berlin? 2:27pm. Which is the exact same time it would have been had I been able to get on the straight from Copenhagen train. And when we arrived, that train had not yet come in. So my piecemeal way was faster. Ha. How's that for working out?

That left me time to wander a little around East Germany after I checked in at my hostel. I was able to visit the highly conceptual Jewish Museum in south Berlin. It is devoted to the history of the German jews, with a heavy emphasis on the Holocaust. While for the most part, the unconventional architecture of the building interested me more than the displays, there was one case that stuck with me. It displayed a little stuffed monkey, that's all. The placard next to the display case told the story that a father had given the monkey to his son right before they were separated into different concentration camps. That was the last time he saw his son and both his wife and son were murdered in the camps. Simply heartbreaking.