Berlin, what a city!

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Today I had more time to breath and see the city. I spent most of my day in the large city park, this city has such history its amazing, I got a closer look at the Soviet Memorial to fallen soldiers, it was interesting to see, they had two tanks and two cannons! Sadly, reservations are needed to go in the Reichstag, but I got some made for tomorrow luckily! I figured I would check out the "underground" of Berlin too, it takes you into bunkers and air raid shelters from WW2. I can say too, the scariest thing that I have done on this trip is to go up the Siegeseele, it is rediculously high. What is odd, is the effect the war had on Germany today, therer are still bullet holes littering monuments and buildings, some have been repaired though. What was odd, was the Siegeseele was almost torn down by the French because of the towers meaning. It was built to commemorate Germanies 3 victories to become a nation, one of which was France and there was a large placket commemorating the victory which was actually made of captured French cannons.

I also saw the memorial to murdered jews of Europe, it was quite interesting and was sad to see that people were disrespectful and playing there. Oddly enough, I went to get in line for the memorial in the basement, and behind me was one of the Americans I watched the game with yesterday, in a city of 4 million and of a crowd of 500,000 I run into him twice! The museum was quite interesting in the basement and we had to go through scanning and security to get in, they started the museum with information on the progression of the holocaust, then into a room of individual accounts with enlarged copies of their writing then it put in German and English, next was a room with numbers of jews killed in different countries and a list of whole families that were lost. Very sad, the entrance to the museum was very true, "It happened once, it can happen again." A very sad but true phrase.

I also suggest checking out the embassy in Hamburg over Berlin, the Berlin on looks so much like an office, the one in Hamburg looks like a mini White House. The city park though is so cool and massive, I was able to check out so many different statues and some with bullet holes still. Something cool was how many rabbits there were and they traveled in packs and were not scared of people, I still cannot get over the red squirrels though, Fanny told me to keep and eye out for the black ones (apparently they are mean).

Tomorrow should be fun, bis bald!

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Photos

soviet war memorial 2
most things are posted in english or german