An emotional walk

On days like these, I know why I love this city.

Lately I’ve been doing loooong walks. Just walking around, listening to music, with no particular destination. It seems to be some kind of autumn thing for me. I do like taking walks all year round, but during autumn it almost gets out of hand – the shortest walk I can manage is 1,5 hours. Usually it slips to two hours or more. It’s just the most relaxing thing there is for me right now!

Last autumn, I had the exact same thing in Helsinki. And I waked, and I walked. But the problem with Helsinki is that it is quite small, despite being a “small big city”, and I soon was very familiar (i.e., bored) with all sorts of routes within a reasonable (~10 km) distance from my place. Of course I developed various favourite routes, but nevertheless it really took my imagination some exercise, or then the effort and bore of travelling someplace, to keep it varied and interesting.

Here it’s quite different. This city is SO immense, there’s always some area remotely nearby that I don’t know that well and is interesting to discover or learn to know better during walks. Everything within 2–5 km from my place is already familiar to the point of boredom, so here’s what I do: I skip the dull part and hop on the U-Bahn, and begin my walk straight away in an interesting environment. The U-Bahns and S-Bahns can take you quite far in 10 minutes, whereas the subway network is very modest in Helsinki. And trams and buses take forever to get anywhere. Did I ever mention that waiting is not one of my strengths...?

Today was again one of those days my walk slipped to nearly three hours. Despite having walked dozens of times along the Landwehrkanal, which runs just nearby my place, I’m not bored with it yet. And it leads to Puschkinallee, which for its part leads straight into Treptower Park, so there I had the beginning of my route. I don’t know Treptower Park more or less at all – I’ve been there a couple of times, but I definitely have no clear picture of it in my head. And still don’t! It’s so big and undiscovered to me that I still have many wonderful walks ahead there :) I wandered around in zigzags, according to my “oooh! what’s that over there? / what a nice trail! / I wonder what lies behind that / etc.” impulses and stumbled upon all sorts of things.

”Stumble upon” should maybe be awarded the prize for understatement of the year when it comes to the Soviet war memorial. It’s a bombastic war memorial and military cemetery honouring the memory of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin, and celebrating the victory over national socialism. The Battle of Berlin (April–May 1945) was the final big battle of WWII ending in the unconditional surrender of Germany. Check it out if you have the opportunity, it’s... big.

”The war memorial depicting a Soviet soldier holding a child that he saved and stepping on a crushed Swastika”
From: Wikipedia

There are also a few cute ponds in the park, and guess what I saw there? A stork! This was exceptionally cool, for storks aren’t common in the city, and just two days ago my friend told me with amazement how she had seen a stork in the middle of Berlin :) Or some sort of stork-y bird, I don’t know all that well the differences between storks and herons and cranes and what other kinds there might be.

As I wandered ahead, I noticed the cutest bridge ever, and to by excitement it was open. It took me to the most wonderful little island ever, in the middle of Spree. The island is called Die Insel der Jugend, which means “the island of youth”. I don’t exactly know what it was, but the whole moment was just so overwhelmingly wonderful it almost brought me to tears. I was on a beautiful small island, surrounded by glistening water in the yellow street lightning, with frozen grass and leaves rustling under my feet. Bliss.
Check out some wonderful pictures on the island’s web site: Insel der Jugend / Treptower Park.

I continued to walk along the Spree, and where did it lead me? To Spreepark! It’s an abandoned amusement park whose owner fled the country to Peru some ten years ago, leaving the bankrupt amusement park behind. I had heard of it, but all I knew was that it was somewhere in or near Treptower Park. Deserted places like that always give me the creeps. It was really weird to imagine how that particular place had once been filled with people amusing themselves in e.g. the ferris wheel, which now lay in the the gloom completely abandoned and just waiting to slowly fall apart. Creepy and sad – and yet somehow very, very fascinating.

This city is just so much more than just the bars and clubs of Kreuzberg and the cafés of Prenzlauer Berg. <3