Berlin

We were planning on getting up at 7:30 or 8 this morning to get going, and when I woke up at 7:40, Knechtel said to wake her up at 8. So I went downstairs to read for a bit, and forgot my key to our room. And rather than wake up everyone in the room, I read for a while, and now I'm going to update.

First of all, a bit about our rooms, for those who haven´t traveled like this in Europe. We have stayed each time in a "dorm" style room, each time with 6-8 beds in it. We use three, and whoever else is staying uses the others (which is why I don't want to wake the other 5 people staying with us this morning). Sometimes we have talked to these people a lot, other times we haven't at all (in fact I haven't met 4 of the people in our room right now).

Anyway, on to Berlin. We got in two days ago, later in the night than we wanted to because we got on the wrong train and went two hours in the wrong direction. When we finally made it, every hostel we called was booked. We ended up walking to this one we saw an ad for in the train station, and they had room (but were also pricy and in a bad part of town - both ghetto and not near much we wanted to see or do). Anyway, we went for Thai food (it was now close to 8pm), and that was fun mostly because the man working did not speak more than 10 words of English. We then got some cheap beers at this corner store, and played some cards...

Yesterday we got up and went across town to a better hostel that we had called the night before, and left our bags (we couldn't check in til 2pm, and it was 10am), and went to walk around town. We grabbed a 2pm walking tour of Berlin. It was scheduled to run 4 hours, and actually went closer to 5. It was amazing. There is a lot of stuff we need to go back and see in more detail, but overall it was a great overview, and it was very helpful for my (our) German history.

Everything in Berlin was destroyed in WWII. So (pretty much) everything that you see that is older than 1940 was (pretty much) completely rebuilt. I'm not going to even try to type the German names for the things we saw (names and German and two of my weak spots as a person, so combined...ick). We went to the Brandenburg Tor (gate) which was awesome. We saw the Richstag, which we plan to go back to to hopefully go in. We walked by Hitler`s bunker (which is now just a locked up hole). Check Point Charlie was kind of over-rated, but I think we are going to go back to the museum there, which we are told is mostly stories of people trying to escape E Germany, and are supposedly very interesting (and "The English is bad in a funny way", according to our tour guide). There is a new Jewish monument that just opened in the last 2 months which was really cool. The old airforce building was an interesting story. By the treaty that ended WWI, Germany was not allowed to have an Airforce (or a Navy). But leading into WWII, they build a huge Airforce building. It was the largest office building in Europe at the time (and still is). During WWII bombing, every building on the street was completely destroyed, except for the airforce building, which was unscratched. Anyway, we also got to see a couple points where the Berlin wall still stands. Basically, one night the E German government just put up barbed wire fence around the perimeter of W Berlin, which was an island in E Germany. So if you lived in W, but were spending the night at you girlfriends on the other side of town, you just couldn´t get home. Or if you lived in E and worked in W, you just couldn't go. Within the next week or so, they turned all the walls into concrete. It is just kind of amazing to think about.

There are tons of pictures of everything to come. Anyway, last night we were exhausted, and made for an early bed. Today, we are hoping to go back to the Rakestag, to the Hamburger-Bahnhof Museum, the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, the Russian cemetery, and East-Side Gallery (which is an art gallery on a section of Berlin wall that still stands), and to Tacheles. Tacheles is this area that once was a huge Jewish department store. When the Jews fled Germany, the government took over the building and used it. It was mostly destroyed during the war, and stayed that way until the wall came down. When the wall came down, and the E Germans fled out, many hippie W Germans came in and grabbed up all this disorganized, free land. By the time the E German government got to figuring out what to do with this land, the people in Tacheles were so ingrained in the community that the community demanded they be allowed to stay. The government tracked down the children of the owner of the store, and he chose to rent the rooms to the people there for €1 per month. So it is now this kind of hippie-art community in this old building with bars and music.

That´s it for now. Hope everyone is well. Go Pistons :)