Yellow line

Do you know those depressing days when you get the feeling that your life is always the same? Well, on one of those days you might decide to do something different: pick a random street, walking forward, just to see where it leads. I live in Berlin: no matter how far you might walk, there's always an underground station (U-Bahn, as they call it here) ready to take you back home, so, basically, you can get lost without really getting lost. Knowing that, exactly 5 months after I firstly got to Berlin, I finally realised how to go from my working place to Potsdamer Platz.

Now, I'm sure the Sony Center is renown in the entire world, as the shopping centre nearby. The station is surely interesting for its architecture and the view of the entire city you can get if you pay the 6,50 € for the elevator might be worth it (my friends appreciated the photos I've taken from there, my wallet reminded me why I usually prefer to take the stairs)... but no, nothing of these was what I wanted to talk about. I found my little treasure later, as I decided to go back home: at first, it looked like your average underground station in any city in the world. It was just as I stepped on the train that I noticed something different, or, better, I felt it. The train was making weird noises: it wasn’t one of those trains I take every day to get to work, it was obviously older, the design was bulk, unrefined, you’d wonder how a wheelchair could fit in. It was probably just a feeling, but the coach seemed smaller, almost cosy, despite being so unpractical in comparison to the newest ones.

I was thinking that when the loudspeaker cracked and instead of telling the name of the next station, as you would expect, we got a friendly welcome from the conductor! That caught my attention and I started looking around with more curiosity: it wasn’t just the train, even the stations, on that line, have the same old fashioned architecture. If you manage to forget about the other passenger’s modern clothes and concentrate on the stops, you’ll be taken back in time through a quick serie of stations with an unique architecture. It’s the line U2, between Potsdamer and Alexander Platz. It was thanks to it that I started paying more attention to the underground stations, each line marked by a different architectural fashion (revealing, to the expert eye, the period when it was built) and tiles in distinctive colours. They’re all unique, though the yellow U2 will always be my first love!