Berlin, Day 2 (Christmas)

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Merry Christmas!!!! I couldn’t believe the day was finally upon us, and I woke up missing my family so much. It’s the first Christmas that I’ll be away from home, but it’s the same for Adam. We’re out here to have a great time and our parent would want us to do the same, so we had to get past these feelings and get on with our day.



I woke up to Adam shaking me up, at 10 in the morning… I had made the decision to go to bed at 6 am earlier that day, but Adam decided to just get on with his day, so he had stayed up all night. He told me that he had already gone off on his own and done some exploring, and that he wanted to get in line to go and see the berlin dome… I was very impressed with how energized he was despite the lack of sleep. I was extremely groggy, but he told me to suck it up and have a coffee… glad he was there because if not I would’ve slept until the late afternoon and we wouldn’t have been able to see half the things we did.



We went to a coffee shop around the corner and bought a simple breakfast of croissants and coffee. Breakfast isn’t quite the same in Europe, it is much lighter than the quantities we enjoy in America. I was still hungry, but decided that I might as well start getting used to the light morning meals since I’m going to be in Italy for 3 months and Adam and I both headed off to see some sights.



Our first stop was Checkpoint Charlie… kind of a let down to be honest. It didn’t really appear authentic at all, given the fact that there were billions of restaurants surrounding it, all incorporating the landmark into the name – for example, “Checkpoint Currywurst” or “Checkpoint pastries”…. It was tasteless. In addition, there were two guys dressed as American soldiers that would take a picture with you, for a fee of 3 euros. The landmark had become something that was inauthentic, nothing comparable to what it had meant to all of the berliners who saw it as a gateway to family members on the other side of the Berlin Wall, or a door to economic opportunity, or freedom from oppression. The museum was a disappointment as well.



After that we got in line to get our tickets for the Berlin dome, the sight where congressional members gather to debate and hold meetings. It’s a beautiful building that arches up 115 meters, with spiraling walkways all the way up to the dome. You need tickets to be allowed in for time slots throughout the day, and you also need to go through security and have your passport checked before entering, which didn’t make much sense at first but I guess the building is after all the place where some of the most important members of the German government meet. Adam and I went up an elevator to the platform where the walkways began, and they had neat audio devices in several languages that would automatically begin once you started walking up one of the pathways. You get to see a lot of Germany from a bird’s eye view as you go up to the dome, which was really cool. We took some picture at the top to remember the experience, and then went back down to exit. It was way more interesting than Checkpoint Charlie.

After the Dome, we went back to Brandenburg Gate in hopes that we would make it for a free walking tour at 2:30 pm, but unfortunately we learned that they all left at 2:00 pm once we had gotten there. Instead, we took some picture in front of the Gate, which I will post later.



Not too far away from the gate you can find the Berlin Wall, the Topography of Terror (which I will explain during a later post), and the Memorial to the 6 million dead Jews of the Holocaust. We passed by the memorial and decided that it was too eerie for us not to check it out… At first it resembled a gravesite, with all the slabs of concrete representing the gravestones of the millions of Jews that lost their lives at the hands of the Germans. When we walked through the sloping grounds however (the ground on which all the slabs stood on had different gradients), I felt trapped as the slabs towered over me, as if the scene was trying to recreate the disorder that all Jewish people suffered to their normal ways of life during the reign of the Third Reich. We also took a picture in front of the memorial, but we took it before we realized the weight and somberness of the place… So we were caught smiling, but quickly realized that our expressions were inappropriate. I’ll post the pictures later, but I should note that it’s really not our best moment on this trip so far, and that if we could change our facial expressions to reflect the mood of the place then we definitely would have.



We arrived back at the hotel around 5:00 pm, absolutely exhausted from all the places we had walked too. It didn’t take long before Adam crashed, tired from pulling an all-nighter the night before. I can’t fall asleep during the day for some reason, so I just decided to go on a quick run and get some work done. When Adam woke up around 10 pm, I think I had gotten some dinner after my shower, which was a simple and greasy meal that consisted of a thick hamburger, fries with garlic sauce, and a small cup of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. I really haven’t been eating the best on this trip.





We were both too tired to go out though. So after I ate, we just watched some TV and fell asleep, but not before saying to each other that we would both get up early the next day and get a lot done.

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