Postcard Wars

That last entry reminded me that I haven’t written about Berlin and its incredible atmosphere at all on Postcard Wars yet.

Holy crap! That pretty much summarizes it.

I was in Berlin as recently as last summer, and the city just seems to keep reinventing itself, this latest reinvention as Football World Capital. Some new sights: 

• An enormous, glimmering, glass-roofed main train station that’s billed as the crossroads of Europe and welcomes fans with a view straight into the heart of the city, with the Reichstag and Bundestag directly in front.
• A pair of huge, metallic soccer cleats in a field in front of the station, with fans hanging out near or on them. This is directly beside the ‘Capital Beach,’ where Berliners lay out in the sun along the winding river Spree.
• In Alexanderplatz, the TV tower of East Berlin has been transformed, as Postcard Wars has reported before, into a giant soccer ball. It stands guard over the city and looks especially cool at night.
• In front of the Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament, lies Adidas Soccer World. This includes the aforementioned 10,000-seat replica of the Olympic Stadium, with two large TV screens on either end of the ‘field,’ with halftime entertainment provided by dancers, emcees and fans who get called onto the field to have some kind of soccer competition against each other (hardest shot, etc.). The best performance in this department comes from the Paraguayan fan who won a ticket to his country’s game vs. Sweden later that night and spent the next 15 minutes running around the stadium hugging people. The Swedish fan who came out and got down with the dancing girls during halftime was pretty cool too.
• Soccer World also features a host of mini playing fields around the replica stadium where teams from around the world play each other in reduced-player games. I saw a Swedish team – by the way, Swedes just dominated Berlin during my time there: thousands of them everywhere – and the New York Fire Department also fielded a team, which my associate Craig reports was comprised mainly of Irish Americans. Go figure.
• The Fan Mile stretches between the Siegessaeule (Victory Column) and the Brandenburger Tor and packs in hundreds of thousands of fans with more big-screen TVs and wurst and beer stands. In the afternoon we saw forklifts bringing in scores of kegs. Our plan to steal one did not come to fruition.
• The Sony Center at the futuristic Potsdamer Platz has been transformed into ZDF’s soccer headquarters, ZDF being one of the main German TV stations. This is where Pele and Franz Beckenbauer have been doing interviews, and the place is also surrounded by a legion of table soccer games – including an especially frustrating one in which players are challenged to put the ball into a hole five inches off the surface of the table. How is that possible? I implore you: how is that possible?
• Having a ‘Leinwand’ – a TV projector screen – is crucial for the survival of Berlin businesses during the World Cup. If you don’t have a Leinwand, you are worthless. Just give up. To that end, most bars in along the trendy Schoenhauser Allee in the Prenzlauer Berg part of town have outdoor seating and, you guessed it, a Leinwand. For last night’s Mexico-Angola game (0:0), we found ourselves choosing between a Mexican place, a Vietnamese place, an Indian place and a Russian place where we could sit in front of the Leinwand, have dinner and watch the game. We chose the Mexican place and cheered for Angola. I will not hesitate to admit that I don’t like the Mexican team.
• In front of the Brandenburger Tor, the symbol of divided Berlin, is a huge soccer ball that is actually an interactive IMAX-style movie theatre where fans can call up scores and highlights from this World Cup and others. It looks somewhat like a spaceship.