Berlin – Day 29 – 32

Ya, I know, I haven’t posted in a while. Might be 20% laziness and 80% I’m just saving up all the awesomeness for this post.

The team went to Berlin this weekend. Lets just say getting to and from the airport on transit was a bit of an ordeal. I don’t know what others think, but the transit system in Berlin is hela-confusing… I’ll let you decide by this photo…

We stayed in the Heart of Gold Hostel, good location, friendly staff, no complaints really, fairly standard as far as hostels go! I still think they could have upped the Douglas Adams theme a bit more but I am kinda partial to the author 🙂

On our first day we did a bike tour with Fat Tire Bikes and it was fantastic. The weather was great and we saw tons of different sites around Berlin such as Checkpoint Charlie, site of Hitler’s bunker the book burning site which has a very cool memorial, unless you’ve been there I can’t describe it very well. I didn’t realize how nice the city was considering its torrid history. However now it is very touristy and it is unfortunate that it still has a very high unemployment rate. Our tour guide Niels was great, and he had a fun time making fun of Chi Chi 🙂

The second day we were there we went to the Neues Museum. Ok, not very German like, but they had a very cool Egyptian exhibit. I guess back in the day when people started excavating tombs in Egypt, they just thought it was totally ok to take what they found back to their home country without asking anyone. It was a bit of a free-for-all. Therefore a lot of Egyptian artifacts made its way to Berlin. I was excited to see the bust of Nefertiti, I didn’t realize that the artist actually didn’t sculpt it as a ‘youthful’ version which was popular at the time (and what most women probably want :)).

On our third day the weather was a bit crappy, but we decided to do some touring around on foot and made our way back up to tiergarten and the awesome cafe there and had some yummy schnitzel ! Later in the evening we walked along a remaining part of the Berlin wall which is now painted with various murals. I’m still amazed with the Berlin wall, since so many things

Berlin Wall – Mural

happened with Germany before I was alive, yet I was old enough to remember when the Berlin wall went down. Its hard to believe that such struggles happened so recently and there are still so many countries dealing with similar problems today.

Our last day there was Sunday and on Sundays you have to go to Mauer park flea market. It is just a miss-mash of strange people, entertainment and stalls with everything you can think of from old furniture, to Polaroid cameras to neat vintage jewelry. Oh and of course the park has fun-tastic swings !

All in all Berlin was not a city I was really thinking of going to but I’m very glad that we went there and would recommend that people visit Berlin at some point in their travels!