Some former rich person’s house
Called “Tag des offenen Denkmals” in Germany, I discovered this gem by pure coincidence. I was itching to visit the Berliner U-Bahn museum at Olympia-stadion Station in the west end of Berlin. The museum only opened every second weekend of the month so I thought the second Saturday of September would be the perfect day.
As I walked into the museum, I realised that the ticket booth was closed so I just walked straight into the main exhibition area. Upon approaching the gift shop I asked why entry was free. The clerk kindly explained that it was the day of open monuments every second weekend of September and that all historical monuments were open and free.
“Wow!” I thought to myself. “I’m totally Asian and I’m going to take full advantage of this opportunity!”
Old brewery, now converted into office and startup space
Knowing that Soichi, a Japanese friend of mine living in Berlin, loved to learn about culture, I called him up and told him to meet me at Alexanderplatz the next morning with a bicycle. That morning, we visited Charité, the leading medical university in Berlin where major vaccines were once discovered. We were able to enter the medical museum and browse its historic facilities. Later in the day we were at Unter den Linden where we visited a theatre that was once the house of a very wealthy man.
Then at 2pm, we arrived at Ackerstraße to wait for a guided tour of continental Europe’s first underground train. I checked the tour times online in advance, but didn’t know that I had to book in advance. The tour guide put us on the waitlist and told us that if people didn’t come for the 20-person tour, he would let us in. Surprisingly, only 18 people showed up and both of us were allowed to follow the tour.
First underground railway on continental Europe
We felt very privileged to be able to take part in this tour, since only 20 people a year were allowed into this historic site. The trains were first used to run cargo shuttles underneath the factory buildings before they occasionally carried passengers. By WWI, it was converted into an underground munitions factory and an air raid bunker for factory workers during WWII. At least that’s what I understood after only learning German for two weeks at that point.
Me, giving a lecture to nobody
In the late afternoon, we visited an old brewery that has since been converted into office space. There were a few bars around, but nothing too remarkable. Then, we headed out to Humboldt University’s natural sciences exhibition gallery where we saw skeletons of long-extinct creatures. We’ve been enrolled in this university and didn’t even know we had a museum! Of course, I just had to go to one of the lecture halls and pretend to give a lecture to a class of empty seats.
