It's a Good Thing I've Got Walking Shoes. And an Umbrella.

So after our disastrous night of trying to go to a club and taking about a thousand trains, we had to be up at 8 for a walking tour of the historical district at 9. I had been up all night dealing with the goddamn internet, and ended up only getting 2 hours of sleep. I was beyond exhausted. Tall and Curly were completely hungover, so the train ride there was pretty boring, and spent trying not to fall back asleep.

 Curly didn't do the best job not falling asleep. 

Neither did Tall, that's his arm resting on the seat.

We got to the Brandenburg Tor station and got suited up with our delightfully touristy headsets. Because, when traveling with a group of 50 other Americans, it's best to just make it as obvious as possible that you're tourists, and the best way to do that is with matching head sets! Fortunately, I had my iPod with me, so I used my own headphones, and looked slightly less touristy than the rest of the group. Though I suppose being in the group likely gave me away.

We headed up the stairs, and wouldn't you know it? Literally 200 yards away was the Brandenburg Tor! I thought we were going to have to walk a while to get there, but no. The train station is right underneath it! Dirk, our lovely tour guide, told us a whole bunch of information about the gate. Like how it was build in celebration of finally defeating/surviving Napoleon, but then Napoleon was the first to enter the city through it. All sorts of fun stuff like that.

I think for the rest of this post, it'll just be pictures. That's better than me trying to explain everything :)

The Brandenburg Tor

 

The back of the Tor.

The British Embassy

I honestly don't remember what this was. But in the

center of these buildings was a memorial to the

book burning that occurred. It's pretty moving. It's

a glass sheet, and underground is just a bunch of empty

bookshelves. It's intense.

The Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny.

 

Check this picture out on flickr to see 

more details about the memorial

Close up of the statue

We took a break about an hour into the tour just on

the outskirts of museum island. That's the Cathedral

you've seen before, and to the left is an Art musuem

where I think I'm going this weekend :)

 

Tall and V being ridiculous. Her food confused

me. It was a kebab in a hot dog bun. But it still had the 

stick in it. It look hard to eat. I had some of the meat

and it was delicious though!

This is where the Castle used to be. They had to tear

it down because they found asbestos, and now there's

a big debate about whether to rebuild it or not

That big, boring, brown building is where the Nazis

formerly had their headquarters. The architecture in 

Berlin is all so fascinating because it really does reflect

different historical moments, and there are so many 

different types of buildings. The Nazis had the most

boring architecture ever.

Goebbels former office

 

 Hitler's former office is now a Peking duck restaurant, and a 

children's playground.

This is the street where the final battle for Berlin

happened. Hitler's bunkers were all underground here.

His personal bunker now has a parking lot sitting

above it. Apparently, the German government did 

this because they did not want a place for neo-Nazis to

meet and glorify Hitler. Kind of ruins it for us historians.

Our final stop was to check out a section of the wall.

So there you have it! My walking tour, all in pictures. It was positively exhausting. I highly recommend anyone interested in German/European history to do it though. I wish I had been better rested, because I feel like I would have felt a deeper impact from everything I was seeing. But that's ok, I've still got three and a half months left to go back and explore :)

On a related note, the weather in this town is insane! This whole tour took about two and a half hours. In that time it switched from cloudy and warm, to cloudy and cold, to sunny and cold, to raining, to sunny and raining, to just gloomy. It was nuts! You really do have to be prepared for any kind of weather here. Strangely enough though, I don't mind it so much. Unlike back in Santa Cruz, I really don't mind the rain here. Perhaps that's because I know that within about 10 minutes it won't be raining anymore. Or because the clouds are just absolutely stunning. And the move so quickly! When it starts to rain, you can look up and see that it's just one cloud, and if you move towards a blue part of the sky, you'll be out of it soon enough :)