Brrrrrlin

The best way I can think of to describe the city of Berlin is cool. The general atmosphere of the city is modern. It is the current center of the alternative scene in Europe. When I talk to my friends on campus overwhelmingly everyone loves Berlin. In our trip we got a pretty good mix of the historical half of the city as well as the new city.

Our first day we took a free 3 hour walking tour with this company called New Europe. They provide free tours in most major European cities in English and Spanish, and they are really good! On that we saw most of what used to be East Berlin. Including the Brandenburg gate, Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie, Nazi buildings, Holocaust memorial, museum Island, opera buildings and much more. The one negative thing I can say about it is that it was soooo cold!! It was about 6 or 7 Celsius the entire time with rain. My friends and I all did my mom proud and dressed in layers though. That night we made dinner with people in our hostel which was pretty cool and then a group of us from the hostel went to go dance in one of Berlin's famous night clubs. The had animated screens inside and played lots of techno, it was pretty cool.

Sunday we met up with a friend from school who used to live in Berlin and went to a giant flea market. It was way in the North of the city, we were lucky and had sun that day. It was so cool walking around seeing the random stuff people were selling and the really amazing things people had made. The market was next to a park and a amphitheater. The amphitheater was entirely covered in street art. When we left there were tons of people gathered there for karaoke that happens on Sundays. After a quick stop off for boba tea (Sarah and I were ridiculously excited to find Boba in Europe) we went to the East Side Gallery. This was my favorite tourist attraction/museum in Berlin. The East Side Gallery is the longest standing stretch of the Berlin Wall and it is entirely painted over by street artists. It is a little over a kilometer in length, and its gorgeous. All the paintings remember the wall, give messages of hope and capture the spirt of the change that took place with the wall coming down. After the wall we decided to try the schnitzel, which was about what you would expect fried chicken to taste like.

Monday we decided to hit all the free attractions which ended up being a little depressing. We went to the Mauer Memorial which documented the evolution of the wall with descriptions of individual escape attempts. The really unnerving thing about the history of the wall is that it came down around the time me and the people I was traveling with were born. It's unbelievable how recent the devision of the city was and how in what is basically our lifetime it has developed so much. It is also interesting to wonder about people who can freely walk into previously forbidden parts of the city and how seeing remnants of the wall makes them feel. We also went to The Topography of Terror, an exhibit on the SS which stands on the land that used to be their headquarters. We soon realized that most of the free exhibits were free because Berlin wants people to remember things like the Wall and the SS so that they do not come about again. We also saw Checkpoint Charlie, and while we were walking away we ran straight into a group of people from our school! Which just shows that I can never escape the Bubble.

On Tuesday we went to a concentration camp. We debated going because it seems weird to go and take a tour of somewhere so full of horror, but came to the conclusion that it is a necessary experience to really understand what happened.

Wednesday, which was supposed to be our last day we went to the Pergamon museum. However because of the strikes in France our flight was "disrupted" and we couldn't leave until Thursday morning at about 8am. The Pergamon was really cool though, especially because we had learned about a lot of the exhibits in my art history class this semester! Between that and the Louvre I felt like I had just rehashed the first half of the semester.

I really enjoyed Berlin, I would love to go back sometime, hopefully when it's warmer! I want to just explore the real city next time. We had fun walking around the neighborhood around the flea market and just looking at houses and restaurants. I also loved all the pretzels I ate in Berlin. The depressing sounding exhibits were offset by the amazing people I was with, the general atmosphere of the city, and the dancing at night. We also ended up with some entertaining hostel mates, including two very smelly older German men, one very drunk man from Mexico, a really nice singer from South Africa and a nice very quiet German guy. I really can't pick between Berlin and Paris, they are complete opposite cities and I enjoyed them both. I will write about Paris in the next day or so.