On this day, I visited the National Museum in Krakow, the Polish Aviation Museum and ended with a grand dinner at a goose restaurant.
On my final day of the trip, I checked out of my hotel and took the train back to Warsaw and onwards to the airport. It was a smooth flight back to Singapore, with a stopover in Doha.
Thanks for reading this epic travelogue! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did experiencing and writing it.
On Day 10, I said farewell to Beerlin and set off for Warsaw via the Berlin-Warsaw Express. The six hour ride took me through the flat plains of Eastern Germany and Poland.
I spent the day sightseeing with my friend Jakub, and we visited several historic landmarks and museums.
On Day 12, I visited the Warsaw Rising Museum, which took up most of the day.
I spent the day mostly catching up on work stuff online, as well as catching a breath after nearly 2 weeks of constant travelling. Chilled at the hotel.
Click HERE for Day Fourteen to Day Fifteen
I spent Day 8 exploring the Neues Museum and the Pergamon Museum, both filled with thousands of artefacts from across the world. One of the most fascinating days of my trip.
On Day 9, I toured the Alexanderplatz, the Berlin Cathedral, the Stasi Museum and a food fair.
To read a detailed account of this fascinating Cold War museum, click HERE.
Click HERE for Day Ten to Day Thirteen
My friend Alex and I spent the day touring the Imperial War Museum and the districts with Big Ben, Parliament and Buckingham Palace.
On Day 5, Alex and I hung out at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Harrod’s before we bid farewell to each other. I then ended my last day in London with a play at the Duchess Theatre.
Click HERE for Day Six and Day Seven
I checked into the YHA Hostel at St Pancras, which was conveniently located across the road from King’s Cross Tube station. The rooms were comfortable. As it was already late afternoon, I rested a bit before heading to Leicester Square to meet my friend Zane, who was studying in London, for dinner and some sightseeing.
On the first full day in London, I decided to dive straight into history with visits to the Churchill War Rooms and the (in)famous British Museum.
On my second full day in London, I explored the historic Tower of London, met up with my friend Alex who had come down from Scotland, browsed the wares at Camden Market and ended the day with a fantastic tapas dinner.
Click HERE for Day Four and Day Five
As a student of History, I think it’s not necessarily bad to take down statues of figures such as colonialists and slave traders. The purpose of having statues of these figures is to literally put them on a pedestal and honour them. We don’t need to have statues to remember and learn the history they represent. After all, there aren’t any statues of Hitler and most statues of Lenin have been destroyed. But we still learn about their lives and actions in school and through books, films and museum exhibitions.
The statue of Stamford Raffles has stood in front of the Victoria Memorial Hall since 1919. During the Bicentennial commemoration last year, there was much discussion over his legacy and that of colonial rule in Singapore. Raffles looted many artefacts during the British invasion of Java. Priceless Malay cultural artefacts and manuscripts were lost when Raffles’ ship “Fame” burned and sank in 1824. British rule also meant the dispossession of the indigenous people who were gradually left out of the booming colonial economy.
I don’t support the destruction or disposal of Raffles’ statue. But if the statue of Raffles is ever shifted to a museum with added context explaining his complex legacy, that doesn’t mean Raffles is being wiped from our national consciousness or that history is being “erased”. There are plenty of roads and institutions bearing his name to remind us of him.
But what it does mean is that we can finally acknowledge the impact of colonialism on the indigenous people of this region by vacating his place of honour. It would also be a potent signal that after more than five decades of independence, Singapore is finally ready to move out of its coloniser’s shadow.
Thirty years have passed since the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. Germany, which had been divided into the communist East and the capitalist West peacefully reunited a year later.
But the scars of Cold War division are not easy to remove, even after three decades. And there is no more potent symbol of the lingering effects than the Stasi Museum. Located in Berlin’s Lichtenberg district, the vast complex of buildings used to be the headquarter’s of East Germany’s feared Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit), or Stasi.
From 1950 until its dissolution in 1990, the Stasi was one of the world’s most effective and repressive secret police forces. Almost 1 in every 63 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi in some form, with the agency having over 90,000 employees and 170,000 informants by the time the Berlin Wall fell.
After East Germany’s collapse, the Stasi Records Agency took possession of the Stasi’s millions of records, estimated at around 111km in total length. Half are kept at the former Berlin complex with the rest housed in various Stasi museums across the former East.
I went for an English guided tour in the afternoon, taking the U-Bahn to Magdalenenstraße station which is right next to the museum entrance.
I walked up the driveway to the main building, known as House 1, passing the huge plattenbau prefabricated towers that made up the bulk of the complex.
The guided tour began in the lobby, which was adorned with East German and Communist flags, statues of Karl Marx and the Soviet secret police pioneer Felix Dzerzhinsky.
In the centre of the lobby is a large model of the Stasi Complex made in 1982. The guide explained that there were plans to expand it further by demolishing neighbouring residential areas but these were of course disrupted by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The guide proceeded to take us through various exhibits showcasing the Stasi’s rise to prominence under Soviet control, the vast surveillance network it built, the careful methods it used to recruit trustworthy officers as well as the last days of a once-feared apparatus.
I felt that the most poignant exhibit was one which carefully reconstructed how the Stasi worked to discredit a particular dissident using psychological methods:
“First, they ensured he lost his job and was unable to find another. Rumours were spread that he had contracted an STD by being unfaithful. An agent was dispatched to seduce the wife and cause further marital trouble. The dissident was kept under constant and obvious surveillance to induce paranoia. A copy of the evaluation report stated that the man’s life had fallen apart after just 6 months, rendering him useless within the dissident movement.”
The next floor is known as the Minister’s Level. Erich Mielke, who ran the Stasi from 1957 to 1989, had his offices here. The rooms are preserved as they were in the final days, giving an unsettling glimpse into the heart of this sinister organisation.
The highlight of this floor was the minister’s personal office itself. Although largely empty, one can still imagine the intrigue that permeates this space, with the austere furniture standing as silent sentinels to all they had witnessed.
The Stasi Museum is smaller than expected, occupying House 1 within the entire complex, and some exhibits are only in German. But the stories told within are very compelling, and display the worst of humanity in East Germany’s repressive society.
Yogi’s Verdict: ★★★★☆
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