Berlin, Germany

The final city we visited on our Euro-travel-trip was Berlin, which, consistent with the common theme of all the cities I visited, was completely awesome! Like most of the cities I had already visited, I knew very little about what to do and see in Berlin, but I was completely blown away by how amazing of a city it was. One of the first things we noticed the night we arrived, trying to find our hostel, was the amount of street art. Some of it just looks like plain over graffiti, but much more widespread. And some of it is amazing and looked like photographs made out of paint. A lot of it really was art!

Our Hostel

My favorite street art: The Creation of Atom!

Street Art

The next morning, we realized that we were going to be doing a lot of walking in Berlin. In our ignorance of Berlin's geography, we booked a hostel that was about three miles from the Mitte, which is the main touristy part of Berlin, where most of the things to see were. Our hostel was right next to a subway stop but each ride on the subway would have been about $3, which just didn't seem worth it, so we decided to walk it. We fortunately did break up the walk by stopping at a delicious bakery, where I had one of the most amazing things I have ever eaten. It was like a moist custardy, powdered sugary gigantic flat cake type thing. When we got to the Mitte, the first things we noticed were the giant TV tower, lots of bear statues, and lots of buildings that looked like they were made in Rome, with columns and old looking stuff like that. For some reason, that wasn't quite what I pictured when I pictured Germany, but it was still really cool.

TV Tower: Berlin's highest structure

Looks like Rome

Bear statue

As the day continued, Katherine and I decided to do our final free walking tour of the trip. And as usual it was extremely cool. Here are some of the interesting things we saw:

• Sign in a river saying not to swim or drop anchor there, because there is an unexploded bomb there still left from World War II. Apparently this is fairly common around Berlin.
• Museum Island, the site of five world class museums. Also, how our guide introduced us to the creativity of German names. The first museum of the island originally was named "The Museum." When a second museum was added it was named "The Old Museum" (Altes Museum) and the new museum was named "The New Museum" (Neues Museum). How creative!

• A very simple but powerful memorial to "victims of war." It was basically a wide open room with only a statue of a mother holding her dying son. Underneath the statue are buried an unknown German soldier and an unknown concentration camp victim.

• Crosswalk signals: shaped very differently in East Berlin.

• Humboldt University: Where several very famous Germans were educated, including Einstein and Max Planck.
• Another memorial, below ground, visible through a window in the ground showing plain white bookshelves with enough room to hold the 20,000 titles that were burned during WW2. Near it, students sell books that were banned.

• A chocolate store that our guide said was the best in Berlin. It had amazing chocolate sculptures, including a chocolate bear, a chocolate Titanic, and several choclate German landmarks, on the outside and when we returned later it was indeed amazing chocolate. It was also interesting cause it was all in German and I didn't really know what I was buying.

• The Berlin Wall, or at least the second largest remaining piece of it. And Checkpoint Charlie, the American-run checkpoint from East to West Berlin was.

Berlin Wall

• One of the most interesting things we saw however, was the place where Hitler had his bunker and where his body was discovered and burned. It was interesting because it was so uninteresting. There is nothing there indicating that anything of any historical importance happened there. The bunker is covered in grass, and it is right in the middle of a grassy section of a parking lot.
  
• A new contraversial memorial to the Holocaust. Contraversial because it's very ambiguous. It's a bunch of stone pillars in lines. Nothing is written about what they mean or represent. Someone said the idea is to make you think about the Holocaust for yourself and to try to figure out what it means, rather than simply being shown a list of names. The other thing though is that the stones are covered with a chemical to repel grafitti and that chemical is produced and developed by the same company that made Zyklon-B, the gas that was used in the holocaust to kill the very people that the memorial is commemorating. Some people have a real problem with that, and I can certainly see why.

• We finished the evening at the Brandenburg Gate, which is a really cool gate in a big square. It's one of the major landmarks of Berlin. Incidentally, it's right next to the American Embassy. When the Americans decided they needed a bigger fence around the embassy, they asked the Germans to move the thirty meters to the left. Keep in mind, this gate is REALLY BIG and is like the biggest landmark of Berlin! The Germans declined the request. Also, right near the gate is a pretty important hotel: the hotel that Michael Jackson dangled his baby out of!

Brandenburg Gate

Balcony Michael Jackson dangled baby from

Dinner that night was delicious. I had something that was basically meatloaf wrapped in cabbage topped with a different kind of cabbage, with a side of potatoes. It was really really amazing. After dinner, Katherine and I decided to check out a ping-pong bar we had heard about. It was pretty different. It was a giant plain concrete room, with a ping-pong table in the middle and a bar off to the side. You could put down a 5 Euro deposit for a ping-pong padde. Then you joined the line on one side of the table. When you reached the front of the line you took one shot and if you made it, you went to the end of the line on the other side. If you missed, you were out. I never did too well, but it was fun and some people were very good!

Ping-Pong Bar

The next day, Katherine and I repeated our same routine of walking to the center and stopping for delicious baked goods on the way. In the city, we walked around in the morning. We saw tons of bear statues. We also saw one of the best street performers I have ever seen. He played the water glasses, but he played like really complex songs with tons of glasses at once! It was mind-blowing! Later we saw something extremely strange:
Katherine and I were standing by that memorial we had seen yesterday with the statue of the mother and son, when we noticed a giant pink man in a rabbit costume (like a pink Easter bunny). He was carrying a Christmas wreath covered in carrots with some German writing on it. He left that wreath in front of the monument, walked about 20 feet and was charged by three police officers who grabbed him and threw him into a van. We still haven't really figured out what it was about, other than that it had something to do with Africa. Not really sure exactly how that works, but that's what the flier someone handed out said.

???

We ended the day at one of the museums on Museum Island: the Neues Museum, which had an amazing collection of Egyptian art including the Bust of Nefertiti, which was really beautiful. There were also tons of really cool scrolls and mummys and sculptures, and bones and more. It was a great museum and a great end to our trip.

Bones

Bust of Nefertiti

After the museum we headed back to our hostel and went to sleep. An early morning flight the next morning and we were back in Copenhagen. Home sweet home, at least for another month.