Arrival

After landing in the Berlin airport, I didn’t feel like I was in Germany until I got the stamp on my passport. Unfortunately, that took a few hours. mostly because there wasn’t a passport agent for a long time. So the entire flight was simply waiting in front of an empty passport control booth. However, once I finally got out, I bought the 9 EUR ticket, which lets me travel in almost any public transportation within Germany for 1 month. I got on the train and reached my friends place. I’ll be staying with him until I go to Ecotopia.

German Jewish Community

For historical reasons, most of the Jews in Germany are from Slavic origin. So when meeting a local Jew there are four possible languages that they can speak; German, Russian, English and Hebrew. There are many people who only know a certain subset of those languages, so there isn’t always a universal language. One morning I met the roommate of my friend. So before I started talking to him I asked “English? עברית? Deutsch? Русский(Russian)?” and he responded “Русский!”. I wasn’t ready for that answer, so I just said “доброе утро(Good morning)” and then asked what his second preferred language was. So we spoke in German.

Work

I gave myself about 2 weeks in Berlin to prepare for Ecotopia. I don’t need that long, but since it is a new bike, I had the fear that it will not be good and I will have to return it and get another bike. However, most likely that will not be an issue, so I got the key to my company’s office in Berlin and prepared to work form the Berlin office. I didn’t realise it, but it is located at an extremely central location in Berlin. It even has a Dunkin Donuts across the street. Unfortunately, here in Germany it appears that they only sell donuts and coffee, no raisin bagels with cream cheese.

Preparing my Bike

The next goal for my time in Berlin was to prepare my bike. So I went to this huge bike store. It was so big that it even had a bike route inside so that you can test ride your bike and to simply get around the huge store. I got a lock, phone holder, and a few tools.

Test Ride 1

In order to test my bike I rode with my friend to Lake Tegel, which is about an hour away from the center. During that ride my friend’s pedal broke off. So he sent it to repairs and I then met him at the lake. Originally I planed to go to Ecotopia after a week or two, but now we have to wait until the bike finishes its repairs. At the lake we went kayaking for a few hours, and then I biked back while he took the train home.

Test Ride 2, to Poland

After seeing that the bike could handle a few hours of biking, I decided that I wanted to bike to Poland. The route wasn’t particularly impressive, but I thought it would be cool to bike from Berlin to Poland, and it was. However, in order to give myself a goal, I decided to go to the grave of the Pri Megadim near the boarder. I found an interesting route, and in the morning I headed out.

Segment 1, to the Outskirts of Berlin

The route started about an hour away from where I was staying, so I opened Google Maps and navigated there. The route that Google picked for me involved biking through a really nice forest.

After biking for an hour I reached the start of the route that I found, Friedrichshagen station.

Segment 2, Bike Paths and Quiet Roads

The next few hours involved biking in the shade of trees on bike paths or roads without too much traffic. The path was flat and the infrastructure was great. In Israel, road bikers are hard core people, who bike next to crazy Israeli drivers. There is a minimum speed required, since otherwise cars won’t have enough time to react to you. Mountain bikers require more skillful techniques, but it is a much more relaxing ride, without hearing a car horn every minute or so. In Germany however, road biking can also be very relaxing. A lot of the intercity roads even had bike paths.

Every once in a while I would check my phone to see if there was a Geocache nearby. Geocaching is a scavenger hunt game that was founded once the US released the GPS technology to everyone. The way it works is that you hide a cache in some interesting place, and then you upload the location’s GPS, a story about the place, and some clues to the website. Most of the ones that you see are small ones. But every once in a while you find a wooden box in an abandon shack, like I found. The box was locked with a 3 digit combination and there was supposedly a clue in German. However, I could not decipher it. Luckily with only 3 digits, it isn’t that hard to brute force.

Segment 3, my Battery gets to Critical Level

For some reason, I noticed that a lot of phones report a certain battery percentage, but then near the end the percentage lowers really fast. Well, at a certain point my battery was very low. This happened at Karl-Marx-Straße. That of course means nothing, because almost every village in East Germany has such a street. Luckily a brought an extra battery (some phones still have removable batteries) and an external charger. However, at that point I decided that it was not a good idea to use my phone for speed tracking, rather only for basic navigation. So I unfortunately cannot add this entire route to my Strava account.

Segment 4, Frankfurter Straße

During this segment I was trying to conserve more batter. So rather than glancing at my phone every once in a while to find the local Geocaches and track my speed, I was forced to enjoy the view. That wasn’t so difficult, due to the fact that the view was amazing. Since I wanted to conserve battery power I didn’t take that many pictures, so you’ll just have to trust me that the rural roads of East Germany are very relaxing.

Segment 5, Frankfurt (Oder)

Eventually I arrived at Frankfurt. I would first like to point something out regarding names in German. As you might know, Germans like really long words. So you might think that there wouldn’t be to many name collisions. Well, you would be wrong. For example, there is a well known city called Frankfurt, located near the Main river, then there is a lesser known city called Frankfurt, located near the Oder river. If you are Ryanair, then there would be another city called Frankfurt, located in Hahn.

The largest and main Frankfurt that people think of when you say Frankfurt is further lengthened to Frankfurt am Main since is it near the river Main. That is the Frankfurt with the banks and stock exchanges. In order to remember, just remember that it is the main one. The other one is called Frankfurt an der Oder because it is near the river of Oder, just remember that it is the other Frankfurt. Then in 2001, Ryanair successfully changed the name of an airport that was 120km from Frankfurt am Main to Frankfurt-Hahn. That caused quite a lot of confusion to tourists arriving at an airport in the middle of nowhere when they expected to be in one of the largest cities in Germany. And if any raver had a connection that was less than 5 hours long, they missed it.

So, when I arrived at Frankurt an der Oder, I approached some locals and asked them “I’m in Frankfurt, where is the stock exchange?”. None of the Germans even cracked a smile. That could be because my joke delivery in German isn’t as good as in English, because I wasn’t the first tourist to make that joke, or simply because they are Germans.

Segment 6, Poland

After seeing all there was to see in Frankfurt (which was very quick), I biked to the bridge to Poland. One major thing I noticed after crossing the bridge was that there were lots of Ukrainian flags and the Ukrainian trident. There were lots of signs in Polish and Ukrainian that presumably said words of support for the Ukrainians.

Since I would later return to Germany, I would it would only be nice to return with a gift of some kind. The first thing I saw were several giant stores selling cigarettes. A bit later I found stores selling alcohol. So I picked my souvenir.

After that I biked to the grave of the Pri Megadim. The Jewish graveyard wasn’t maintained that well. Although I assume that I was the only Jew to go there for quite a long time.

After seeing all there was to see in Słubicach (didn’t take too much time) I crossed the bridge to Germany and got on the train to Berlin. The entire train ride cost about 3 EUR for my bike ticket. I was able to reuse the 9 EUR ticket I bought when I arrived.

On my way back I talked to my friend who was hosting me. He said that there was an event in the evening and that I should join. So I asked him for the address, it was none other than on Karl-Marx-Straße. It appears that if you want to see East Germany, the best way is to travel from one Karl-Marx-Straße to the next.

Conclusion

My friend’s bike is still in repairs, so until then I’ll just work from my office in the city center, and every few days bike to another interesting region. If I end up seeing less of Ecotopia, that doesn’t seem to me to be so bad.

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