Backtrack 1: In which the adventurers return to Bee-litts

I'm at the internet cafe on Rosenthaler, killing time before our last (!) lecture with Chandan at Humboldt in three hours. After a few weeks of buying 1.50 Euro tea and listening to blaring Motown remixes at Cafe am Engelbacken, we've discovered this gem of an internet cafe just a few stops away on the U8: two floors, benches with comfy pillows, some Amy Winehouse (RIP) gently wafting from the speakers, a bring-your-laptop-and-don't-buy-anything kinda crowd. It's like they knew we were coming.

The side.

Anyway, this is the perfect time to catch you, my dear readership of people who share various surnames from my family tree, up on some of the adventuring that has gone down in the past week or so. We'll start with Beelitz last weekend. Juliya and I had only seen the southeast quarter of the complex on our first trip, so Brian, Katy, Juliya and I started with the buildings in the northwest. There's a lot more "town" north of the train station, and at one point we ran into a cute little cafe with outdoor seating. That would have been great, except that it was not 500 meters from three huge, ornate, abandoned, boarded buildings. WTF? All these German people were happily brunching on the lawn in the shadow of this roped off ghost town as if it weren't there. Generally, walking through a crowd of paying customers to duck under the red "DO NOT TRESPASS" tape and climb into the window of an abandoned building is not a good idea - so we kept walking up the road until we found another way into the compound.

We found it!

This is the first building we ran into. Yup, the surgical pavillion. The crown jewel of all creepy abandoned hospital buildings. This was the least boarded up of all the buildings we had seen so far--in the picture above, the front door was actually missing. Unfortunately, this meant that, in addition to giving us easy ways in, it gave everyone else and their mom an easy way in, so the building had suffered a lot of vandalism and a lot of graffiti. Destruction aside, we found some pretty cool spots.

The elevator shaft, complete with old gated elevator left on the top floor. On the wall next to the elevator was a note written in Sharpie: "ATTENTION. 02/09/05. This elevator is broke, take the stairs!" Thanks dude.

We weren't totally sure what this was--some kind of medical imaging equipment, or just a strange TV on a stand?

We could see this from the outside as we walked in, so we had to find it one we got inside! A big, tiled room with a domed ceiling. There were a few others just like this throughout the building.

This operating room (Juliya translated the Russian sign outside the door!) used to look like this. Pretty creepy. It looks like everything's been taken, including most of the tiles on the walls.

More Russian for Juliya to translate! "My comrades the surgeons! Be careful!"

We must have spent two or three hours running around this crazy surgical pavillion. On our way out we crossed the street to the northeast corner of the complex and found the fully-functioning Parkinsons clinic we had read about before. No exploring to be done there, so we headed back down to the southeast corner that Juliya and I had checked out a few weeks before. This time, we wanted to get into the building that Juliya and I hadn't found a way into before--the one with the "poisonous substances" chart in Russian sitting in one of the barred-up windows. We may or may not have brought a hammer with us, and we may or may not have planned to remove boarding with it....but regardless of what we did or did not do, none of the boarding or doors would budge. In fact, the hammer that we may or may not have had actually broke--the head broke right off the handle! So, even if we had a hammer before, we definitely did NOT have one now. That's what you (would) get for buying the cheapest hammer at the hardware store.

A little bummed out--"What are we gonna do now?"--we headed to the other large building across the square. Juliya and I hadn't found an entrance into this one at our last visit, either, but it was worth a try. We found one open door, but it led into a dead end in the basement. Morale running low. Then, we ran across a barred-up, ground level window with a missing bar. The only problem here was that it led into absolute darkness. It was so dark that cold air was blowing out--when's the last time this basement saw sunlight? If it had been just me, or even just me and Juliya, the adventure would have ended there. When a dark creepy basement stands between me and exploring...yeah, I pretty readily admit defeat in that case. Brian, on the other hand, was totally game! He grabbed a flashlight and jumped in while we three scaredy cats waited outside. Ten minutes later he came back and led us through the basement, up some stairs into an interior courtyard, and through a kitchen-looking area to more stairs that led into the main building. What a champ.

Yup. Everywhere we go.

From what we saw, this building look less ward-ish and more like an administrative building, or a special events building. The first thing we found was a two-story high tiled domed room with a bath in the middle. Why such a gigantic room for such a small bath? I don't know. After stopping to do one of our by-now-infamous "Jump on the count of three and say 'communism!'" shots, we continued exploring the first floor. This place must have been so beautiful when it was up and running.

On the second floor, we ran into more "What could this room have been for?" rooms. One one side of the floor we saw glass doors with "Saal V" painted on them (prize for anyone who can figure out what language that is and what it means?). We opened them up and found this:

There was a wide pane of dark mirror-like glass leaning on one of the walls, so we had some fun with that, too:

Right down the hall, we found Saal III. The doors to this room were already open--when we looked down the hall from Saal V, we saw color, but we weren't sure what it was....

...until we went in. This had to be one of the most unexpected, most out of place rooms we ran across. We all had our theories - did pediatric put on plays here? Did the kids eat here? Did they recite cool Communist credos here about victory and fitness and being comrades? Did they have classes, or lessons here? Or was this just like the kids' hospital playroom? And the murals - did the kids paint them? Did volunteers paint them? For being abandoned for 10 to 20 years, they still looked pretty good.

Yes, we did play in their little playhouse net to the stage, and yes, it was awesome.

Part of the mural around the stage--apparently some Soviet was into Vox guitars.

After playing around in the kids' room we explored the rest of the floor. We never found Saals I, II, or IV, and I'm pretty sure we saw the whole building. Maybe they're in some other building? Just as we were getting ready to leave Brian found this spiral metal staircase, and suddenly there was a whole 'nother floor to explore! We couldn't quite tell what parts had been third floor and what parts had been less-finished attic back in the day. We did, though, find some very unusual graffiti. If these same tags had been in English and dated after 1995, we would have passed them right by with little thought, except for maybe slight annoyance at vandalism of this historical site. Instead, they're in Russian, and dated decades ago. Funny how the passage of time changes them, in my eyes, at least, from run-of-the-mill graffiti to unusual artifacts, traces of people who lived here or worked here or moved through here.

We left thinking we may come back again, to figure out how to get into that building with the chart and maybe check out the whole southwest of this place that we haven't even stepped foot on yet. But now, with two days of presentations in front of us before we pack up and leave, it looks like this was our last trip to Beelitz. So, last night we watched The Pianist so we could try to spot all the scenes that look like they were shot there. (Pro tip: The house where Adrian Brody hides at the end of the movie and meets the kind-hearted German officer who shelters him as the Nazis take over the building--totally Beelitz!!) Until next time, noble heilstatten.