Why are we here?
A long weekend in Berlin for their 40th annual Marathon. The Marathon Expo was down at the old Templehof Airport, a marvel of Nazi architecture. It has all the stark design and excessive size you would expect.
We grabbed a decent breakfast at the hotel fairly early, as we’d got to get ourselves off to the Expo, for collection of numbers, purchasing of unnecessary running equipment, and things like that. It was also Kas’s birthday. Happy birthday to you, etc!
Templehof Airport is on the south side of the city centre. It was a par two or three by S-Bahn and U-Bahn from where we were staying so it took a while. Kas wanted to be there fairly early to beat the rush of people trying to collect their stuff. Fair enough. So it was an early start.
Expo Time
We arrived there on a beautiful morning and joined what could probably be described as a throng of people. I wonder how many people are needed to constitute a throng? Does it depend solely on how much noise they’re making? Anyway, we had to wait for the doors to open. When they did open there was, quite frankly, a faster start than there was going to be on the morning of the race.
And Templehof being what it is, we also had some considerable distance to cover before reaching any bits of actual “Expo”, and then the number collection point was at the very furthest end. I was glad I didn’t have a marathon to run the following day.
Anyway, shopping in a crowd of runners for things I don’t need isn’t my idea of a fun morning. I agreed with Kas to meet her back at the entrance in “a couple of hours” while I went off caching. Once I’d found the end of my ball of string and followed it back to the entrance, that is. Except the ball of string trick didn’t work. I wasn’t allowed to leave through the same rooms I’d entered by (in case I got trampled by the throng, presumably). So I had to leave via a different route. This new route took me a bit further along some of the old airport infrastructure.
For the first but not last time of the weekend I marveled at the monstrous scale of the architecture at Templehof. It really is a huge building but, in my opinion, not a very pretty one. It’s not very nice to look at, even if it is big. In fact I think that was the point. Such things were designed and built to look and be permanent rather than pretty. One feature of 1930s airports is that the planes weren’t big and they hadn’t invented the air bridge. So there’s a massive canopy roof that the planes used to park right underneath. Presumably that’s so passengers could embark and disembark without getting wet or sunburnt.
A Bit of Tupperware Hunting
I eventually managed to find my way back to the door where we’d come in. From there, I was able to follow a more or less clockwise route around the old airport doing the tupperware-shuffle. This part included walking the entire length of one of the old runways and it enabled me to take some pretty good photos of Templehof in the bright autumn sunshine.
The now-closed airport hasn’t been chopped up and redeveloped. Instead it’s been turned into a public park and more or less left to its own devices. All the original taxiways and runways are still there, albeit a bit weed-covered in places, and it’s full of people running, walking, jogging, rollerskating, sitting about drinking beer and any number of other things that are traditional in urban parks. Including hunting for tupperware. I won’t say it was a rich vein of tupperware for me though. I’d solved a load of puzzles beforehand (with considerable support from the CO) but failed to find quite a few of them, and overall I had the feeling that I’d walked much further than my find count indicated.
Race HQ
The race was due to start on Straße des 17. Juni in Tiergarten with the course initially running out west (away from the Brandenburg Gate). Kas decided she’d like to go and check out the form up there to make sure we knew where we were trying to get to in the morning, which seemed fair enough.
To get there from Templehof Airport we took the U-Bahn straight up to Stadtmitte. This is one of those weird stations that was shut during the Cold War. It’s on a line which links the American Sector with the French Sector but happened to cross underneath the Soviet Sector. So during the Cold War it passed under the state of East Germany. I rode on that section once on my only previous visit to Berlin in late 1987. It was strange. Anyway, you can now exit the station and it’s a short walk over to Pariser Platz and the gate. It was too long a walk for us to complete without taking a coffee and sandwich break though. All the coffee shops here were packed, and we were fairly lucky to find a small table at the back of a “local” coffee shop (rather than a big American chain one).
From here we wandered through the Brandenburg Gate and had a mooch around the start/finish area. I tried to find a couple of caches but to be honest everything was closed off with barriers ready for the race so I thought I would look far to suspicious trying to do much up there. Kas was carrying a teddy bear that one of the kids had gained custody of for a period of time. It was one of the school bears, awarded for good achievement or efforts during the week. For some reason the kids wanted us to bring this one to Berlin rather than looking after it themselves. So it travelled all the way over here with us and had its photo taken at the Brandenburg Gate.
Tiergarten
At this point we decided to separate for an hour or so. I wanted to go grab a few geocaches in Tiergarten and Kas didn’t want to do much if it involved walking. So she mooched up and down the start area and found a coffee stall. Meanwhile I dashed off into the park southwards to grab a couple of nearby caches. I had somewhat more success once away from the race area.
When we met up again we decided to have a leisurely and slightly touristy wander down to Potsdamer Platz, which takes you through areas that have changed radically since the wall came down. They have laid a set of brass sets into the roads and paths so that it’s possible to follow the line that the wall used to take. When you’re at Brandenburg Gate you can’t help but notice how close the wall actually was to the gate.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
On the way down the street you also pass the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This is a very modern structure consisting of a number of concrete blocks of differing heights but roughly the size of a coffin. They are laid out in regular arrays with walkable paths between. The effect is quite spectacular if you walk through the centre. The idea is to induce a sense of disorientation. It takes up a big chunk of a city block and is well worth a visit, but after reading the Wikipedia page it’s obvious there was, and still is, a lot of controversy about it.
Evening Caching
We took the short trip back from Potsdamer Platz back to the hotel. Kas needed a bit of a late-afternoon snooze so I scooted off caching again. This time planning to try a few urban caches to the west and south of our hotel. Aside from meeting a German woman who was holding one of the caches I went looking for, and apart from standing in a massive dog turd, it was another unremarkable and fairly unproductive session of 4 finds but at least as many DNFs.
At some point I realised the time and had to say goodbye to my temporary caching buddy. I needed to get back to the hotel and have a quick shower before we went out to a fairly simple Italian restaurant along the main road from the hotel. It hit the spot, and we were done early enough to get back for a nice early night. We had to get up frighteningly early in the morning. Kas’s wave set off at 9am, so she needed to be up and ready in the marshaling area by 7:30am at the absolute latest.
