Big sleep in today, we were lucky our Serbian roommate was being very quiet walking around in his budgie smugglers, and was equally polite when greeting us Good Morning in his tighty-whities hehe! Breakfast provided by the hostel – muesli and fruit!
Walking around Kreuzberg near our hostel was always interesting with lots of street art/graffiti, vintage shops, multiethnic restaurants, a mixture of great and absurd fashion on bikes, gay/ lesbian couples, multiethnic neighbours (Turks and Arabs), and floating bars on the canals. The area had so much character, and it seemed everyone could just let out their inner self in whatever form that may be! We were limited in our expression with our 4 t-shirts and 2 pants combo in our bags.
We were super keen to see Eastside Gallery where there is a couple of hundred metres of the remaining Berlin Wall, painted and spray-painted with pretty cool art and graffiti, and some powerful statements. The idea of a wall to block and separate half a city is still mind-boggling.

The public transport (mainly metro but also buses and trams) in Berlin was amazing, efficient and easy to use so we made it to Checkpoint Charlie which was the main border patrol between East and West Germany. It’s pretty touristy now, with actors dressed up as soldiers in front of a small hut with ‘checkpoint Charlie’ written on it. There is also a copy of the original sign facing west to warn people as they head east that they are leaving the American Sector. The McDonald Golden Arches creates a odd backdrop for any tourist picture. The museum there was so interesting and outlined the whole of the Cold War, how and why it happened. But even better was reading about the ways people escaped front he east to the west; one family sewed bed sheets together into a hot air balloon and floated across, others hid in speakers, surf boards, built planes, kayaked, and many redesigned their cars to hide people between the motor and the seats. Very brave! Close to checkpoint Charlie were sectors of the wall with portraits of current dictators from around the world. It made a string point.

Next to the Brandenburg Gate we joined a free 3.5 hour walking tour of the city and learnt a lot about the horrible past 100 years. The Brandenburg Gate was partially obscured as Obama was arriving the following day for a speech under the gate so we didn’t get a great photo. Just behind the gate on the road is a small brick outline of where the Berlin Wall once stood and which zigzags across the city marking the previous separation of East and West Berlin.
The Holocaust Memorial was interesting, designed by an American dedicated to the millions of murdered jews and the size of a football field, it consists of 2711 sarcophagi-like sculptures of different sizes, starting small and low on the outside and increasing in size and height into the centre. It is set up in strict rows and columns and when you walk through the middle you easily get lost and walk into others who come around the corner. There is no official interpretation of the memorial, everyone comes up with their own. My interpretation was that each square centimetre of sculpture represented a person murdered, and another was that the small blocks represent when the Nazi’s first came to power their rules were annoying and inconvenient but people could generally still get on with life but there were a few obstacles in the way. As time went by, the obstacles got bigger and it was more of a challenge to see clearly and to get around the obstacles such that it swallows up your whole life, hence the large blocks in the middle of the memorial where you see people disappear as they walk through to the other side. I’m sure there are many more interpretations.
We passed Hitlers Bunker where he hid before committing suicide a few hours after getting married in there. It’s now a large 1980’s concrete apartment building, the bunker was blown up by the Soviets in 1947.
We walked past museum island where there are four major museums including the Pergamon museum ( which we decided to miss as have even so many ruins and artefacts).
There is a cool memorial marking the place where the Nazi’s burnt all books written by those considered anti -German or a against their ideas. It’s a clear piece of Perspex in the ground, and below is a room of empty shelves, representing an empty library, very creative. Next to it is a quote by Heinrich Heine from around 1820, ‘where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings’.

We climbed up the Reichstag to the top of the large glass dome which looks down into parliament and represents the transparency of the parliament to the people. Back down, we grabbed a wiener and Pepsi while watching a protest on Barak Obama (not sure exactly what the issue was), before going to a beer garden to meet some others from the walking tour.

I would now like to announce that I finished a whole beer by myself, yes I am probably a beer-snob, preferring the delicious German beers over those in NZ, but Scott is slowly helping me acquire my taste for beer (every beer he has I have 1/3), so I may still be able to have a beer and watch the rugby when I get home!!