Dresden and Berlin (mainly just Berlin)

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On our way to Berlin, we stopped at the old Saxony capital of Dresden for lunch. Dresden was greatly impacted by the WWII bombing...Uh, there's not much to say about it besides old. So yeah, moving right along...

Dan gave us a driving tour of Berlin. We saw the Soviet memorial, the Holocaust memorial, the Reichstag, the Bradensburg gate, and of course the Berlin Wall and more. We saw the mural part of the wall as well as the part that is less well-perserved and gives you an idea of what it looked like way back when. There are holes in it as a result of people chipping away at it when it was announced that it would come down. For the sake of preservation, a wired gate was put around it to prevent people from venting their anger at it. The Bradensburg gate had miraculously survived the WWII bombings in one piece but you can still see bullet-holes that were covered up in a different color. The Holocaust memorial is a maze of cement blocks of different sizes. There are different ways of interpreting it and the architect will never reveal exactly what he intended but one way of interpreting it is it's supposed to make you feel disoriented, displaced, and lost as the jews did. Across the street from the memorial for jewish Holocaust victims is also a memorial for the lgbt who were killed in the Holocaust. It is a monument that you look through to see a video playing inside that commemorates the victims. The Reichstag is Germany's parliamentary building and usually you can go in, but due to high terrorist alert, we were unable to. Apparently you had to email them two days ahead of time or something. The Soviet Memorial commemorates the Soviet Union and represents the union with statues of strong men protecting women and children and/or kneeling honorably.

The next day, I went on the Third Reich Walking Tour. The tour guide covered much of what we covered on the driving tour but went more in-depth about everything and also took us to additional places. We saw the grass patch beneath which Hitler and his wife killed themselves. The patch is next to a parking lot and according to our tour guide, a lot of people coming from nearby clubs deliberately go to the patch to vomit up their drinks. The city will not make the area into anything other than a grassy area with an information board for fear of attracting the wrong tourists if they remade Hitler's bunker. They want to remember the victims of the Holocaust rather than the perpetrator. Our guide also informed us that Hitler and his wife had married just a day before killing themselves. Not many people knew about his to-be wife during the war as Hitler had to keep a bachelor image since he gained a lot of support for German women who swooned over him. We were shown former Nazi residences and headquarters, one of which still instills fear in Germans as it is the Berlin Tax building. We were given a feel for which parts were East Germany and which parts were West and the death area in between where people were killed while trying to escape to the West. There are still lines of brick on the ground where the wall's foundation used to be. A more recent history site we were shown is the hotel room where Michael Jackson dangled his baby from in 2002.

After the tour, a bunch of us met up with the rest of our tour group at Lowenbrau to have pork knuckle, a popular dish in Germany. I won't get in to how fattening it is since it is pretty disgusting to think about.

Then I went to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum which used to be the checkpoint between the Soviet and American sides of Germany. The museum housed all things Berlin wall related. There were a lot of interesting escape stories. People got very creative; there were escapes via a makeshift hot air balloon, by gliding across on a rope, by an inflatable boat, by a makeshift aircraft, by makeshift scuba diving equipment, and of course the traditional method of hiding someone in your car. I found all the stories very fascinating and learned so much more about the wall than I did before. I can't imagine being physically cut off from the other half of your city where your friends and families may be, and for that to go on for 48 years. There are some people today who even wish the wall was still up since it was all they had known.

A few more interesting quirks about Berlin is the ampelmannchen and the bears. The ampelmannchen is the crosswalk man that is way cuter than any crosswalk light you have seen before. The green ampelmannchen is shown walking and the red one is shown with his arms spread out, standing still. This may sound like something you've seen before but trust me, you haven't. The lights are unique to Germany. East Berlin had made these lights in an effort to stand out from West Berlin. After the wall came down, the lights started to fail because they were communist-made and West Berlin was also insisting that all traffic lights conform to the standard one. However, there was a big protest over this given how damn cute the figures were. Eventually it was West Berlin that conformed to the ampelmannchen and he soon spread throughout the rest of Germany.

The bear is Berlin's mascot. Throughout the city, there are statues of bears in the most random of places, painted in different colors and posing in different positions.

That night, we did a Berlin Pub Crawl where we went to 4 or 5 different pubs/clubs and met people from all over the world!

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