Bruxelles and Berlin

Hi cowtown!
We are now in Berlin, possibly the coolest city in the world, and we have plenty of exciting news to tell you about. After Paris, we took the train to Brussels, Belgium where we stayed for 2 nights. Brussels is a charming little city, easily covered on foot over a few days with lots of medieval Flemish architecture and narrow little cobblestone streets. The main town square is beautiful and on our first visit to it we were treated to a professional handball match, an interesting sport that we knew absolutely nothing about. We didn’t have any specific attractions that we wanted to see, so we mostly spent the days wandering around and getting lost while trying new beers from corner stores - in any case, the biggest attractions are the French fries and the waffles, both Belgian inventions and both delicious (really healthy too).
Next we had a 7 hour train ride to Berlin, arriving in the new Hauptbanhoff station which is Europe’s largest and a tourist attraction in-and-of itself. We were in a bit of a rush, because that night Zabs, Ryan and I had tickets to see the greatest band on earth - that’s right, Radiohead. As expected, they put on an amazing show at a really cool venue located in a park in the suburbs. We got lost on the way home, but it turned out to be a great way of meeting other Radiohead fans from around the globe who were also trying to stumble back to their hostels.
The German capital is a city that has been in the process of completely re-creating itself for the past 18 years since the fall of the wall. On our first full day here we took a 4 hour walking tour with a really great tour-guide that covered all of the main sights in the city centre and came with an insightful history lesson too. Highlights included the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a controversial monument designed by architect Peter Eisenman, as well as the Berlin wall, communist sites, the Brandenburg Gate, and other Prussian buildings that managed to survive both world wars. We spent the evening at Potsdammer Platz, a shiny skyscraper district that was formerly a desolate wasteland right in the middle of the “kill-zone” while the Berlin wall was still in existence.
The next day Ryan and I took a daytrip Dessau, a small industrial city 2 hrs south of Berlin that is the home of the Bauhaus Akadamie, the Mecca of modernist architecture. The building itself, built in 1926 (and closed by the Nazis in 1933), is a perfect example of early modernism and the school that it housed was perhaps the most revolutionary art, design, and architecture institution of the 20th century. To give you an idea, most of the items you can find at Ikea today are derived from Bauhaus inspired designs, and most good modern architecture (emphasis on good) carries on the tradition that Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe started. The ladies, not wanting to interfere with our geek-talk, spent the day shopping in Berlin and met up with us in the evening for drinks in the trendy Gneisenaustrasse neighborhood.
On our third day, we visited the Reichstag building, the home of the German parliament that is crowned by Norman Foster’s climbable glass dome. We took it easy during the day, saving our energy for the night - and what a night it was. We took part in the New Berliner walking pub-crawl, which takes place every night but on this particular evening a record-breaking 200+ people were in attendance. Needless to say, it was quite a wild ride. 5 bars, several new international friends, countless beers and vodka shots, and a couple of bratwurst and donairs later, we returned to the hostel just in time to see the sun begin to rise.
We took it easy again on the fourth as we recovered from the pummeling of the night before, visitng Mies van der Rohe’s Neunationalgallerie and the Topography of Terror, which is an information centre detailing the Nazi’s reign of terror over the people of Europe and located at the ruins of the SS/Gestapo headquarters. Our travel companion Ryan left us to visit relatives in Bremen, but we will be reunited again in about a week when we reach Prague.
Our fifth day consisted of a trip to the flea market that takes place every Sunday in the Mauerpark in north central Berlin (“mauer” means wall and the park is adjacent to the path of the former wall). It was very big and very cool, with awesome vintage clothes and accessories, graphic design tee-shirts, LPs and CDs, and all sorts of random junk. We also caught a hilarious live set from a Canadian band called Trike that had even the hippest of Berliner hipsters cracking a smile at their antics. The rest of the day was spent wandering around the streets surrounding the market, exploring the numerous cafes, shops and pubs.
Sorry for the length of the entry, but if you’ve made it this far you’ve seen that we’ve just got so much to share with all of you. We are all doing well, and we hope you are too.
Take care,
Matt, Zabs, and Leslie

p.s. sorry about the sideways pics - this blog site is painfully slow and rotating them would have been excruciating

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