New Year’s in Berlin was an interesting experience to say the least.  We left our hotel in Potsdam about 7:30PM and arrived at Berlin’s main train station at about 8PM.  From then on we were immersed in huge crowds of people until the early morning.

The main celebration is at the Brandenburg gate where over a million people gather to listen to live bands playing all night.  We thought we could take a bus to the festivities, but the crowds seemed so big and everyone seemed to be walking in the same direction, so  we just decided to follow where they were going.  All the side streets toward the gate were closed for crowd control, so it turned out to be quite the long walk to the gate, easily over a mile. The entire walk was a nonstop cacophony of drunk people and fireworks. It seemed much more dangerous than any fourth of July in the US, with amateurs (a lot of whom were probably drunk) shooting fireworks and throwing firecrackers in the middle of a big city.  

Once we finally entered the cordoned off park for the celebration we were only able to get about a quarter mile from the gate until the crowd in front was packed so tight no one could move. Then we waited…

We met some nice German people from Dusseldorf and Berlin, a girl from Georgia (the US state), and a soldier from Indiana packed in tight next to us. We talked to them all night and they helped the time pass until midnight. They even shared some alcohol and champagne with us that they had smuggled past the gate guards. There were bands playing the whole time, but they were all Germans we’d never heard of, until just before midnight, when David Hasselhof took the stage. His performance made everyone excited to forget about the old year and move onto the next. There was a countdown and lots of fireworks at midnight, as well as an opera singer singing “Joyful Joyful” in German.

We left right after the fireworks, and the crowd seemed bigger, drunker and more prone to light fireworks.  We couldn’t really choose our exit and ended up having to go toward the Potsdamer Platz station instead of the main station (Hauptbahnhof) from which we arrived.  The Potsdamer Platz station was a zoo. More annoying than the crowds, though, were the firecrackers the size of sticks of dynamite that  every so often someone would light and that would explode with a deafening echoing throughout the station. Eventually, by about 2:30, we made it back to our hotel, making for a 2.5 hour journey, one that had only took 30 minutes earlier that afternoon.