Berlin (Go Go Trabi)

We rolled into Berlin at the beginning of a sweltering holiday weekend, so to save some cash, we stayed in a suite at a cheap hotel on the south side of Schöneberg. No problem staying away from the action of Mitte and the Tiergarten, though - Berlin's transit is efficient and prompt.

In our five full days in the city, we saw a couple touristy sites or museums each day. I am not the type to pack my days with lists of 'must-dos,' especially as the city was in the thralls of a heatwave.

Berlin is massive - so even taking the subway system from place to place, we ended up walking for hours through the centre, with its massive buildings and its scars from decades of turbulence, left as a reminder.

The longest remaining portion of the famous Berlin Wall now forms the East Side Gallery - a stretch along the river that is covered in murals and graffiti. In other parts of the city, notably heading west from Checkpoint Charlie, the line of the wall is denoted by a double row of bricks that slices through streets and through neighbourhoods. In East Germany, the wall was backed by a wide kill-zone and then by a smaller interior wall, all guarded by watchtowers and spotlights. So there were, at the collapse of East Germany, large portions of the city centre that were veritable wastelands - entirely undeveloped. For us this was most shocking in Potsdammer Platz. Empty at the breach of the wall, it's now a commercial hub full of modern glass buildings.

Here are the highlights of the touristy stuff, for me:

We did a tour of a ruined Nazi flaktower, dug out of the rubble by the Berlin Underworld society. Definitely recommended. The building itself is massive, hidden under a pile of its own rubble that is now a park. The tour explores the safe sections of the building, and is an interesting foray into the city's war-time mentality.

Checkpoint Charlie, the famous gateway between the two Berlins, takes just a moment to see, but the associated museum, Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, would take days to thoroughly explore. It's a scattered, but fantastic collection of information and exhibitions on the Cold War and on the wall itself. Especially interesting were the stories of escapees (and the tragedy of the would-be escapees). The ingenuity and variety of escape methods is astonishing: people shoved themselves into car compartments, tunneled; one man lowered his son over the wall with a pulley.

The DDR museum is smaller, and displays the strange quirks of life in East Germany. Also excellent, and cheap.

And on the subject of East German life: Trabi Safari will give you a guided tour of East Berlin while you drive your very own Trabant, or Trabi: the East German shitbox. Ahem. Car. East German car.

A Trabi in its natural state - broken.

The cars form a convoy and rattle around the streets spewing fumes bad enough to make me lightheaded after an hour and a half of Trabi fun. The tour itself was decent and really demonstrated the physical divide of the city during the war years. But the highlight was obviously driving the Trabis. We both got to drive, and both managed to get it into fourth gear, which is super fast for a Trabi. And ours didn't break down - our tour leader's car did. Ten minutes into the tour. Apparently this is pretty normal.

Lastly, the zoo. The Berlin Zoo is the oldest zoo in Europe. It's tiny compared to the Toronto zoo, far more compact, but still with lots to see. We spent a great half-day wandering around, enjoying the nature after four days of war history.

Recently, we spent a day with a woman who spent ten years living in Berlin, moving away only a few years ago. She told us that, having lived in the city through its second decade of reunification, the city has transformed itself again - but not for the better. The first decade was full of creativity and excitement and the energy of a city forging a new identity - rising from the ashes, if you will permit me the cliché.

But the past few years have seen Berlin commercializing itself. The unique quirks of a city struggling to unite the experience of both east and west are being smoothed into a western, cosmopolitan city. The public spaces that she loved, left empty by the wall, are now filling with condos and office buildings. The rent is high, because the city is now a desirable place to be, but the jobs are not following suit.

So for us, visiting for the first time, the city was incredibly interesting. It has a history and a resilient character that we found captivating. But here is the question: now that commercialism has harnessed the creative energy, can Berlin retain its unique flair, or is it set to become another European city with an exploited soul and a faded hipster vibe?

S.