Sorry for the radio silence – we’ve had intermittent internet access since leaving Amsterdam and when we do have it I end up spending most of my time searching for a hotel room in the next city or catching up on personal business. Anywho – we’re getting ready to leave Prague tomorrow but I’ll back-up a minute to tell you about Berlin.
Berlin was really interesting – our hotel didn’t have the internet it promised so we had to punt and spend time at several cafes with wifi access. Check out the Aloha mango-lime lemonade we had at one of them – the ad for the drink was what sealed the deal and made us spend some time there.
The touristy sections of the city were so very fascinating. We toured the memorial monuments, German History Museum, and Gemaldegalerie art museum.
The Brandenburg gate has a very interesting history. If you turn around from where this picture was taken, you’ll see a Starbucks (lol) – oh and the fancy hotel where Michael Jackson dangled Blanket. The best graffiti seen from the train in Berlin “Rest in Heaven MJ”. It made me laugh for some reason. I think I’d had just about all the Michael Jackson tributes that I could handle at that point.
The symbolic stones below are of 96 politicians who were murdered by Hitler in concentration camps because they tried to stop his campaign of horror and death in its infancy. If only they’d succeeded.
This is a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The controversy is that the cemetery-like memorial for Jewish people does not also specifically commemorate the other victims of Hitler’s regime. On that note, the Homo memorial was right across the street. I’m shocked that we forgot to take a picture but it was basically a large cement block just slightly askew and there was a window that you could look in. Against the back wall of the box, they were playing a movie of two men kissing, over and over on this weird kissing loop. Hmmm… interesting.
This memorial is for the unknown soldiers of WWII and the unknown victims of the Holocaust who fell in concentration camps. As we passed by small towns on our way to Prague, I couldn’t help but wonder how many might have housed these death camps.
We stayed in the Eastern part of Berlin – just out of the tourist zone and into a real neighborhood. I have to say that Berlin (so far) has had the greatest number of drunk and disorderlies lurking about on the streets. I’ve never seen so many people drinking openly (trams, metro, walking down the street)… Most of the neighborhood was covered with graffiti – not necessarily good quality graffiti either. Check it out Ma – the kindergarten’s in Berlin have graffiti too! … okay … so at least yours wasn’t this bad:
Berlin has been our least favorite city so far – of course, grain of salt, we didn’t have any internet access in the hotel making life a little miserable but still. We tried putting our finger on what we didn’t like about the city and really only came to one strong conclusion. There was an underlying, intangible sense of tension throughout the city, both in the tourist areas and in the normal living areas. It gave a feeling of combustibility – like the city could just erupt or go-off any minute. We never really saw too many visual signs of this and can’t empirically prove the statement but it just felt that way. We were happy to depart for Prague and enjoyed our 5 hour train ride. It’s a great time to read up on the city you are about to live in for a while.