Berlin

Our hostel in Berlin was the nicest I've seen! Everything was decorated in a modern style, and we felt like we were at a hotel! That is, until we headed to our thirty bed dorm room! Imagine trying to get a moment's peace for sleep with thirty different itineraries in one room! On top of that, we were next to a fifty bed dorm, and those residents could only access their room by walking through ours! So eighty people, coming and going through our room, all the time. The good thing about hostels is that everyone staying in them is in the same boat: they are traveling on as little money as possible, and when they go to bed, they want to sleep peacefully. This makes everyone pretty respectable when people are trying to sleep. The eighty people were as quiet as possible! The layout was ideal in terms of luggage storage: there is a separate luggage room with lockers. This way, people can rummage and repack out of earshot of those sleeping. You wouldn't believe how annoying zippers are, and how loud plastic bags can be! This also saved room in the dorm. These dorms were in the basement of the building, where it was quiet and dark, and rather ideal for sleeping.

We relaxed and just browsed around that day. We saw the infamous "walk" and "don't walk" signals,

and looked at our map when we got lost at this park.
We decided to go to a pub crawl that night to see the night life. Steph and I almost immediately met three guys, each traveling alone, in the group we were on the pub crawl with. Surprisingly, they were all gay. What are those odds?

We had fun on the pub crawl, and met so many nice people! We headed back around 4 am, and decided to stop for food. We had some really good doner kebabs (Europe's street meat) and met some colourful people at the restaurant which was entertaining. We finally caught a cab home around 5:30 am, because we didn't want to get lost. I lost my voice on this evening from all the smoke in the bars, and struggled with it for the rest of our trip.

I did nothing but sleep the next day. I wasn't kidding when I said the basement is ideal for sleeping. The lack of windows makes it always feel like night, and we slept on and off until 4:30 pm. I was pretty upset about wasting a whole day. After dinner, my throat was still bothering me, so I figured I wouldn't go out that night and try to sleep it off. Steph on the other hand stayed up all night making friends in the lounge at the hostel.

The next day, we did a walking tour. The Canadian girls I met in Amsterdam had just been in Berlin and highly recommended this tour. We started at the Brandenburger Tor.

This is our guide!



I'm not trying to take a photo of a crane here, but this is a view of Pariser Platz, where anyone found walking when the wall was still up, was instantly shot.

Our guide was really enthusiastic and knowledgeable; I would have loved to have him as a professor because I find enthusiasm makes learning a lot easier. Here in Pariser Platz, where the Brandenburger Tor is, is the Adlon Hotel.

Our guide has a funny anecdote about this hotel. Years ago, he was an aspiring reporter. He and his crew were on a break one day in Pariser Platz, and our guide was enjoying a coffee at the Starbucks across the street from the hotel. Suddenly, he heard a woman scream outside. His view out the window was obstructed and he figured a scream could be anything and didn't bother trying to get a better view. Clearly his reporting instincts are nonexistent, because he decided to enjoy his coffee break instead of going out to see if there was a story to capture, even when dozens of other people started screaming. In a few minutes, he was still inside enjoying his coffee when the crowd outside went dead silent. When he finally came out, he asked his cameraman what the commotion was about. The cameraman replied with "I've seen some crazy things in my life, but this one takes them all!". This aspiring reporter had decided to drink a coffee instead of capturing Michael Jackson dangling his baby over the balcony at the Adlon across the street. Now we know how he ended up as a tour guide!

From the Brandenburger Tor, you can see the Siegessaule.
Twenty years ago you would not have been able to see the pillar from Parizer Platz because the Berlin Wall separated the two. Our next stop on the tour was the Holocaust Memorial.


I really liked this memorial because it is rather abstract. Each of the stones are different, and the ground is not level but wavy. People can have individual perspectives of the memorial, much like the way everyone has something different to say about the Holocaust. It is also a peaceful place. All the stones absorb a lot of sound, so it promotes reflection. The stones may be an inviting place to sunbathe on, but a security guard will pop out of no where and demand that you respect the memorial, our guide warned us. Across the street from the memorial is a parking lot for an apartment building. On the sidewalk by the parking lot is a little sign with a map explaining the bunker Hitler was last in. This sign is directly above this bunker. The Germans have worked hard to honour what should be remembered, and quietly dismiss what they don't think should be remembered. It has to be difficult as a nation to display to the rest of the world a balance between what horrible things should be remembered and what horrible things they want to pretend never happened. What's more, they do this in such a way that they want to restore themselves as a good country with a horrible past that they want to forget, but not ignore. After being in Berlin, I think Germany has done as good a job as anyone could hope to do in restoring themselves.

Our walk pretty much skirted along where the Berlin wall used to be, though most sights are on the East side of the wall. Over one thousand people were shot when trying to get past the wall. So in a few of the buildings we saw close to the where the wall had been, had bullet holes, like this.
We got to see a part of the Berlin Wall still standing. The first two images are on the East side, and the second two are on the West side.



Our guide told us that the wall went up in something like 56 hours! This was to minimize the number of people escaping to the West side by giving them as little time as possible once they realized the wall was going up. Officials would also use tactics such as making sure workers on the wall had families on the East side, and would watch their families while the men would work, to dissuade the men from escaping and leaving their families. The foundation of the wall still remains in the ground. There are two rows of bricks encircling the West side to remember where the wall stood. Every once in a while, you see a bronze plate on the bricks with an inscription describing what the bricks represent.
At every souvenir shop, there were pieces of the wall for sale.
Next we headed to Check Point Charlie. Today, it is basically a busy intersection, but if you look around you can see bits of history everywhere! Steph and I agreed to swap all the photos we take, and she has all the photos of Check Point Charlie for now. When I get them from her, I will post them! We wandered to another square call Bebel Platz, and saw the Staats Oper, the second opera house in Europe. Our guide told us that this opera house was rebuilt twice during the Second World War because the first time it was bombed, Hitler demanded it be rebuilt because he loves the opera. After it was rebuilt, it was bombed again!
Also in Bebel Platz, a book burning took place here, before the Holocaust started. There is a memorial in the middle of the square: a glass pane in the ground that lets you see into a room of empty bookshelves, with enough room on the shelves for every book that was burned. There is also a bronze plate that states (paraphrased) in German, "When we start burning books, we start burning people", which turned out to be true.

I got some images of museum decor around here as well.


Our next stop was Berliner Dom.


I'm sure our guide said something interesting about this place, but Steph and I were too busy taking pictures of it! This next photo shows the deconstruction of a communist building, and I believe it is the last one. Germany is really washing itself clean of its past name!
Our last stop was the Museum of Natural History.
Here the guide talked more about the history of Germany during the cold war. He went off on many tangents and had many interesting things to say. He really managed to give us a good picture of Germany, where the country has been and how it got to where it is. I'm pretty sure he verbally delivered several essays, and our tour was almost two hours longer than scheduled, but I really enjoyed all he had to say, and I'm happy I learned so much! After the tour, we walked around a bit to the sights we wanted to see again, and on the way we crossed a bridge with a great view. I can't recall which bridge it is though!

That night, we went out with the friends Steph made the night before in the hostel, and one of Steph's friends who is currently living in Berlin. Even after all the sleep I got, I was still feeling pretty sick, so I tagged along and just kind of watched everyone else enjoy a few beers. We went to a few different bars, and I noticed that everyone was dressed like it was the 80's! Also, bright red lipstick and mullets seem to be popular in Germany, a couple of fashion choices I'm really not used to! To top it off, people were dancing to remixes from the 50's to the 80's, and they were swing dancing, jiving, twisting and doing the hustle with frizzy hair and scrunchies! I had to double check that I wasn't in Footloose! One guy we were with from the hostel was from Switzerland and speaks fluent German. He was really helpful talking to locals and asking for directions and whatnot. By the end of the night, I was calling him the Easy Button!

The next morning, we had to catch our train to Prague. Seeing as we didn't get much more than a hour of sleep that night, waking Steph was tricky. After about 45 minutes of trying to rouse her with every trick I knew and thinking I could give her just five more minutes each time something didn't work, I drudgingly dumped a cup of water on her. Well, she wasn't as angry as I thought she'd be, but it was still unpleasant! We got over it by the time breakfast was done.

I absolutely loved Berlin. It is a clean city with lots to see and looks like a nice place to live! I would love to go back one day and see more. A couple things I would have liked to see the day I slept are the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial and Reichstag. I hope to return one day with my boyfriend because he has a huge interest in WWII and his enthusiasm would make seeing Berlin again a lot of fun!