Hey y'all. On Friday night I left Stockholm on the Berlin Night Express train, and now I'm in Berlin. I've now not only traveled by train and boat, but also by train ON a boat. The middle of the train ride was a ferry trip, and it was quite the experience sleeping in a train but feeling it rock back and forth like a boat.
Anyways, I got to Berlin central station bright and early at 6 AM, and couldn't check into my hostel until 2 PM, so I had a lot of time to kill on Saturday. I ended up wandering around until about 11, when I met two other English speakers who were from Canada and England. We went on a walking tour together around all of central Berlin ("Mitte"), and saw a lot of historical sights. Among them:
The Reichstag. It is also called the Bundestag. This is the building that Hitler bombed before WW2 and blamed it on the Jews and others. We now know that Hitler himself likely bombed the building to unify Germany against the "evil outsiders" and take control. Today this is the German parliament building and it symbolizes democracy here.
The Brandenburg Gate. One of the only parts of the city that survived both WW2 bombings and the Soviet takeover.
The hotel where Michael Jackson held his baby out over the balcony. Very historical.
The Holocaust Memorial, artwork based off a graveyard of Jewish victims in Prague. Unfortunately the anti-graffiti paint used on the memorial was created by the same company that supplied the gas for gas chambers in concentration camps. When this was found out, the company wisely decided to donate the paint rather than charge for it.
The old Communist headquarters in Berlin. Look how happy all the communists are in the mural!
And lastly, of course, the Berlin Wall.
That night I went on a pub crawl which was alright. It ended with a lot of crazy dancing in a nightclub, and I even managed some swing dancing of course :)
The next day I woke up and went the the flea markets in Mauerpark. It was probably my favorite part so far, crazy bartering. I bought a belt with a secret compartment in it. There was also the biggest crowd for karaoke I had ever seen in my life there. It was funny to hear people with German accents sing American songs.
Today I am hanging out with some Australians. Did I mention that I have met more Australians here than Germans? There are a lot of them. And a lot of beautiful churches too. And on another unrelated note, I sat on Karl Marx's lap:
One last highlight of the trip was seeing a Bugatti Veyron, the fastest road-legal production car in the world!
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