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Published: July 13th 2010
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best picture i took all trip Got up on time to do the 11am free walking tour of Berlin. Not exactly free since you are expected to tip your guide at the end but it is still well worth the money. These things are amazingly popular. At the meeting point for the tour by the Brandenburg Gate there were probably about 150 people or so waiting to go. They broke us down into groups of 25 and off we went. The tour lasted about 4 hours with a short break for lunch. It was well well worth it and quite informative. Only problem was it was about 98 degrees today so everyone was pretty baked out in the sun all day.
Usually I hate listening to people drone on about history but pretty much everything we talked about happend in the last 75 years so I was pretty into that. Definitely a good way to get introduced to Berlin since its a pretty weird city. There is no center. There are just two sides pretty much (east and west) which had been divided until 21 years ago. You can still clearly see the difference between east and west as well. The city was destroyed in the
charlie
don't mess with charlie second world war and it just became the capital again about 11 years ago so its all pretty modern. Crazy city. Its like everyone just rushed in to fill the void that was left here first after WWII and then again after the fall of communism so its a weird blend of modern history, bureaucratic buldings, counter culture, eastern bloc architecture, bombed out buildings, etc. Anyways here is what we saw on the tour:
-Brandenbourg Gate and Pariseplatz with the hotel where Michael Jackson hung the baby out the window
-newly rebuilt Reichtstag
-Holocaust Memorial (very abstract and interpretive), one of the coolest things I have seen in a while
-the parking lot above Hitlers bunker haha
-part of the remaining Berlin Wall (David Hasselhoff flashbacks)
-memorial to those who died under tyranny
-memorial to a large book burning in 1933
-Checkpoint Charlie
-lunch at a currywurst place. These things are awesome snacks; chopped up sausage in a ketchupy-chili sauce with extra chili powder thrown on top. Yum.
-Berliner Dom
-old SS headquarters
-old Luftwafte headquarters
The tour was well worth it just to reiterate. Gives you the perspective you need to appreciate the city.
Went on
mem
holocaust memorial a run nearby in the evening before heading out on the 666 anti pub crawl with some Brazilian guys also in my room. It's supposed to not be like a normal pub crawl which is a bunch of tourists going to bars which are empty and waiting for them to show up. But yeh, it was like all others just with slightly weirder bars. Have to say I did enjoy the ping pong bar. Just a big room with one ping pong table and a small bar off to the side. Have games of about 20 people playing around the world with a beer in their hand ha. Pretty cool. Besides that it the crawl wasn't the best. Still had a good time with the people I met anyways though.
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