July 14th–Berlin

Last night’s sleep was interesting – we are indeed in a party district, which means outside our window was not exactly quiet. At one point someone was playing the Austin Powers theme song? This city continues to be unexpected. The summer sun meant I was awake before 5am – still it was 9am again before we were up and about. Today was out first completely overcast day for a while – perhaps somewhat fitting the sombre history of this city?

This morning we were off to go on the Sandeman’s New Europe tour – my fourth of this kind (after Prague, Paris and Madrid) but our first on this trip so far! We gathered at the Brandenburg Gate, were assigned to a very engaging, funny English guide and off we went. These tours never make hugely exciting blogs – they are full of random anecdotes and interesting facts and I can never remember any of them! We saw the balcony Michael Jackson dangled his baby off of, the Holocaust memorial (a very interesting art installation full of engulfing grey towers), the wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the Museum Island, the Cathedral, the Concert Hall, many places!

   

The tour finished at 2.30ish and we headed off the to the German History Museum. This museum is actually very good, lots of information and relics spanning across the different eras. We ended up staying there for 3 hours – to be fair Andy spent 3 hours looking at things and I spent more time sitting on benches – me failing a little at museums again, oh well!

After that Andy was keen to see a bit of West Berlin so we caught a short train – can’t say that West Berlin looked any different but the Tiergarten was pretty! Then back to the hostel for a little rest before dinner. We were keen to go somewhere close tonight and this meant… Lebanese! A perfectly logical meal in Berlin yes? (actually the restaurants around here and very multicultural). I ordered a plate of 10 ‘specialities’, resulting in many random things! I actually don’t know what some of the things I ate were – very different!

Then back to the hostel to drink wine and mess around on the internet – Andy decided to watch a two hour black and white Third Reich documentary he found on YouTube! We are still undecided on tomorrow’s plans, we will see what happens!