Brrrr in Berlin (The German Capital Part 1)!

Hello Everyone!

Well, Megzi and I have been here in Berlin, the last city on our 2 month trip, for about 3 days now and we are loving it...but freezing to death (we saw our first snow of the trip yesterday)! We are staying in the nicest hostel I've ever been in, so clean...it's like a hotel! Berlin has so many things to see and do and so we've been zipping from one place to another to experience everything we can! Not to mention eating all sorts of exotic food...everything from Vietnamese food to Thai and even the famed Berlin currywurst (a sausage covered in tomato sauce and curry powder...I didn't so much care for it!)

On our first full day here we did basically nothing...we went grocery shopping in an attempt to set ourselves up for the week and then we went shopping...taking some time to familiarize ourselves with the transit system here. Berlin has a really great system going on...between buses, trams, trains and the metro you are never far away from what you want to see!

The second day we went on a 3 1/2 hour free walking tour offered by a company called New Berlin. This is a fantastic concept. The tours are free and at the end you are encouraged to tip proportionally to how good you feel the tour was and your own budget. There are some people who abuse the system, I'm sure; but it insures that the tour guides do a really good job of taking care of you. I learned so much on this tour and would really encourage everyone to take it if they come to Berlin. We saw the Holocaust Memorial, the site of Hitler's Bunker, the island where Berlin first began as a small fishing village-it is now the island where all the museums are located, and most importantly (hehe!) we saw the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled his small child over a balcony. Our tour guide was a spunky Scottish girl who explained to us about much of the city's history...she seemed to really know her stuff!

I thought that this trip as a whole would be educational more about WWII than anything, but I was wrong. The more I am on this trip, and especially here in Berlin, I'm learning quite alot about life behind the Iron Curtain and Soviet/Communist occupation. Things that I never learned about in school and I now find that to be such a shame. Highschoolers should be learning this!

For instance: I always knew about the Berlin Wall...most people have heard about it...but I never knew that West Berlin (the side occupied by the Allies) was basically an island inside Eastern Germany. I never knew that the Berlin Wall was built around the whole of Western Berlin...it was 155km long! We are seeing portions of the wall and the measures that the East German government used to hold their people in (did you know that there was actually 2 walls-an inner one and an outer as well!)...we are hearing stories of escapes or attempted ones, of death and suffering. We are seeing the divisions and differences of each side of this city and the lengths, in the 19 years since the wall came down, it's going to in order to repair itself and become whole.

Yesterday we walked around, mostly through the city's very large Tiergarten but we also explored the area around the Zoologisher Garten as well, and went back to a few of the places we'd seen on the tour and wanted to explore further. We went back to Checkpoint Charlie and took more pictures and we revisited the Brandenburg Gate-also for more pictures.

We are hoping to get to Potsdam, the town with a lot of palaces, on the next sunny and clear day- maybe tomorrow- and we're also going to visit a few more memorials and exhibits around the city. Our flight back to Zürich is not until Thursday late afternoon so we are making the most of our time here and packing in as much as possible!

I'll write again soon, probably after we return to Switzerland, to let you all know how the rest of our time here goes.

Ciao for now!

LuLu