Brrrrrlin

It seems there comes a time in every blog's life when the author has to plead forgiveness for long stretches of time between updates, and this blogger is no exception. I had every intention of updating after my trip to Berlin, and rest assured, (I know you were all so worried!) it was a great trip full of lots of photos and memories, but I found myself inundated with stacks of homework from the second I got back, and literaly haven't had time until right now to update. So, here I am, pushing three weeks later, stress free (almost) and ready describe to you my new favorite city in Europe: Berlin.


In a 2003 interview, the mayor of Berlin Klaus Wowereit said "Berlin is poor but sexy." He couldn't have said it better. Berlin is industrial, modern, bizarre, covered in graffiti, slightly smoggy, cold, relatively tree-less, but fabulously full of life, art, movement, young people, old people, a thirty six languages in a hunder different accents. Here's an example of some of the street art you can find throughout Berlin:



Berlin is full of history, too. You can't walk around the central part of the city for more than half an hour without starting to notice all the physical reminders of the past 100 years of history in the city. Marks of WWII and decades of Cold War separation between east and west Berlin are everywhere. I visited what would become one of my favorite places in Berlin the first day I was there: the East Side Gallary, an art gallary on the east side of a stretch of the Berlin wall. When I visited, the paintings, which had been put up shortly after the "fall" of the Berlin wall, had just been redone. The first picture is of Sarah and Axel (who did such a great job showing us around the city and making us feel welcome!), the second is of an interesting art piece, and the last juxtaposes a part of the wall that hadn't been repainted with a part that had been redone:



The East Side Gallary stretches a few football fields along the river Spree. Each section was unique, and had a different message, and it was a joy to see.

Later that day, we took a break from artsy-culture and absorbed some of the consummer culture by visiting KaDeWe, suppossedly the largest shopping center in Europe. There we found Christmas!


The next day, Sarah and I went on a free tour around the central part of Berlin. This is a picture of us waiting for the tour to start in front of the Brandenburg gate in Pariser Platz.



Out tour guide was a friendly, American student, who knew quite a bit about the history of Berlin, and the stories behind the monuments and buildings. After the Brandenburg gate, we saw the Parliment building, the parking lot now over the bunker where Hitler committed suicide, and then the Holocause memorial, pictured below.





Later we visited one of the few buildings in Berlin that survived WWII: the Nazi Airforce Headquarters, turned East German government propaganda building, turned present-day tax office. The story goes that the building survived the war either because it was so large, it could be used as a landmark by the Allied Forces' air forces to recognize Berlin. Just on the other side of this building, a part of the wall has been left standing, though aprts of it have been destroyed or taken down.



The tour continued through a few more Holocause memorial sites, such as the memorial to the books that were burned in front of Humolt university during the Nazi's rise to power, and the memorial where a Jewish Holocause victim and a Nazi soldier killed during the war are buried side by side.

After the tour, Sarah and I visited the Pergamon Museum on Museum Isle. It had reconstructed Greek, Roman, and Babylonian architecture. German archeologists had brought back, piece by piece, ancient monuments, to reconstruct them inside the museum. Below is a photo of the Gates of Babylon:


Sarah and I spent the rest of our time in Berlin hanging out in our hostle, shopping, wandering around the city, and generally having a blast. Our last day, we visited the Hamburger Bahnof Museum of contemporary art, which is housed in a renovated and remodelled train station, before making our way to the train station to catch our flight. Unfortunately, due to the line we were suppossed to take to get to the airport being under construction, it took us nearly 3 hours to get to the airport by the alternate route. We had an Amazing Race moment with three other American student's who we met at the train station as we ran from the bus, across 6 lanes of traffic and about a quarter of a mile of terminals to our terminal, with just a half hour before take off. We got to our gate just as the flight fors nearing the end of boarding. Needless to say, Sarah and I beat the others, who got tied up in security and lost in the maze between security and our gate.

Berlin was awesome; the picture below says it all, in giant street art on the side of a building:


I even managed to get a picture of a Berlin bear-like dog at the train station! Thanks for reading, and I promise to update more soon, as classes wind down and I take a trip to London with my mom!