I have always had a fascination with abandoned places. A while back, I found a website that listed a bunch of abandoned locations in Berlin, and I wanted to find something exciting. The city is rife with abandoned places, and one that really caught my attention was an abandoned theme park, complete with roller coasters and other carnival rides. Unfortunately, I read in the comments that it was now heavily guarded and one could easily get caught.
Not feeling bold enough to attempt that, I looked for another location. I found an abandoned sports hotel, and a few friends and I went for it.
We took the overnight bus on Friday evening to Berlin and arrived first thing Saturday morning. After dropping our stuff off at the hostel, we went straight to the abandoned hotel.
The hotel was built in the late ’70s so that East German Olympic athletes could stay there while training at the nearby facilities. Now it is home to discarded belongings, graffiti, and the otherwise homeless.
We obviously started off at the ground level. Through a hole in the wall, we got in and quickly worked our way into the stuffy and dark basement.
After wandering around a little, we came back up to the surface and explored some old rooms where the champions of champions would sleep. Now it was littered with trash and obviously used by those less fortunate.
Nap time
The hotel was kind of split into two. There were some impassable doors between them, so we wandered around on the outside. Luckily, one of my friends managed to locate a ladder that we used to climb into a broken-out window.
This half was much more open. I would guess it was a restaurant, which makes sense because we found what looked like an old kitchen nearby.
We started climbing up to the top when we discovered that someone was sleeping/living up there. He started yelling at us, so we turned around and retreated farther down to the ground level. He kept yelling for quite a few minutes, so we decided to go into the basement where we couldn’t hear him anymore.
At one point, we heard a few voices murmuring nearby. It freaked us out a bit because we couldn’t identify exactly from where the voices were coming from, so two of us picked up some steel bars we found, just in case. Luckily, we never did need them.
Creepiest room with swimming pool buoys hanging from the ceiling
By that point, we had seen enough, so we left and luckily didn’t get caught. We then went to the Video Game Museum in the afternoon.
A giant joystick to play Pacman with
They also had the Pain Station, where you play Pong, but if you lose, your hand either gets whipped, electrocuted, or burned.
How a couple of our hands looked after playing.
After that, we just walked around a bit before ending the evening with a free open-air concert by AIR at the Brandenburger Tor.
After the show, we wanted to get a drink at a bar. It took us hours to find anything. It seems that there are simply no bars immediately around the Brandenburger Tor, and it took a good amount of walking before we located anything.
The next morning, we just went to the bus station and came back to Cologne in time for work the following day.
It was pretty exciting, and I would like to see more abandoned locations. There is an abandoned airplane museum in Germany that I would also like to check out. Maybe someday in the near future…