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Published: April 16th 2010
Alternative Pub Land
So many cool graffitied dingy and charactiised pubs of fun and happynessBerlin is amazing. It has a population of 3.5 million but is made for a population of at least double that so has a very roomie and laid back feel to everything. Understated yet meaningful WW memorials, huge parks, buildings scarcely higher than 10 stories (which is apparentyly the norm in Germany) and a local pilsner which tastes quite good, Berliner Pilsner if you can stretch your imaginations to that name =) as well as a massive alternative party scene which fits the bill nicely.
After finding our brand spanking new (seriously, i think it was a week old) Hostel 38 seconds walk from the Hauptbhanof (maint station, see you learning too) we decided to go for a run through the massive park neaby, the Tiergarten. CG's foot was playing up so i ended up exploring a bit on my own. To my pleasure I found something both amazing and wonderful. A geological memorial to peace lol. Some guy, sailed a boat around the world, took some 5 x 30 tonne stones from 5 different continents and brought them to Berlin, leaving a brother stone on that continent or origin. Then there was some thing about at some date the
Book Burning Memorial
The square where the book burning took place. Memorial is underground set of empty bookshelfs to commemorate the lost knowledge sun shines and reflects and blah blah, invisible lines of peace connecting blah blah. The moral of the storey is they were some cool rocks!! Also, my run took me past the Reichtag building. The location of the last main location of hostilities betweent the soviets and the nazi's. Some of you might recognise it from the last level in Call of Duty 2 as I did lol. Cool building though.
Kicking things off early that night we hit up a pub crawl. Being a saturday night in Berlin, there was like 100 people on the pub crawl (at the start) which was less enjoyable than smaller ones because its just a chore for the hosts making it less fun. Its cool bonding with you hostes you see to get a lay of the land so to speak, muck moar gooder. Did the useal pub crawl meet all in my path thing, except when offering my hand to a gentleman for a salutory shake, i realised too late the he was using all of his hands (aka 1) to hold a drink so i was left awkwardly demonstrating my abundance of apendeges......it was quite funny. Whatever, im not a
French Chruch..in Berlin?
An old king of Prussia conviced some french to come to Belin with the alure of prayer. bad person =P lol. I think I smoothed it over ok though. The night offcourse finished with ending up at some amazing bar in some quadrant of Berlin with no concept of how to get home. And since we lack any concept of public transport, having literally walked everywhere to this point, it was taxi home time after that lol (Hauptbhanhof Bitte {Bitte = Please})
Day after that was sleepy day lol, but then the day after that we went on an very very nice cycling tour. It ended up taking 6 hrs and covered most of the major things Berlin has to offer, the 1961 ''look how good it is to be a communist'' soviet TV tower, Hitlers bunker & death site aka, a gravel car park with a poster describing the bunker within (they wanted to avoid making it into any kind of shrine), the Jewish Holocost memorial (which is very cool memorial, understated yet hauningly reflective. You can draw alot of parallels to endless unamed graves, or to the train carriages that took people to the concentration and death camps), the famous book burning square, the Wall, checkpoint charlie (apparently one of the zones of high
Teh Wall
You know friction when the wall was active), Bradenburger Tor (one of the old gates to old shool berlin, in fact the last one standing that remains of the old completely walled city {and no not the walled western berlin of last centuary}) etc.
Then after all this, you guessed it, sick boy thought it was time to strike!! So I went out and found me some tonsilitis (I guess i wasnt just allergic to work). So i spent 2 days in bed in fever dreams. If you must know i dreamed that i was made of nanomachines and every time I rolled over it was the nanomachines reforming. I also thought i was dying but it was ok because I was part of a large nanomachine city which was just rebuilding me as i moved. This made complete sense to me lol. My fever left me and now i just have a massively saw throat (nothing my bootleg amoxycillan left over from previous bouts can't cure). I missed a band we came to see, A Willhelm Scream (im looking at you Mitch), which CG solo'd and said was amazing, but i did russle up the enthusiam to see the Blue
All Along the watch tower
An example of the towers that guarded the wall. These sat between the concret steel reinforced wall and the barbed wire fortifications Man Group on our last night. Not sure if you have heard of them but they are fricking amazing!! I dont think there is any other show like them on earth. They play the blue man character, and innocent childlike character exploring there surrounds, making music and doing vary comedic things intersperssed with alot of crowd participation and lighthearted antics. Very fun and colorful.
We were sad to leave Berlin, especially with the next stop being Amsterdam. A stop we wanted to cancel after I remembered i kind of hated it there the last time I came (admittedly the Red Light night tour was very very interesting to say the least lol) but other than that not much to offer. We are however commited to a flight on the 15th so we will find the best and cheapest private accom we can (private i feel is a must in Amsterdam unless you are a fan of stone a-holes). Plus we must strenghten our defences!!. Last time i was in Amsterdam, we had our car broken into, smashed window, in a locked carpark and our gps stolen.
Until Next time yall!!
Much Love
Nacho'las
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Rebecca
non-member comment
:)
Someone had a lot of free time recently...