Berlin

Sorry about the delay of this post, as you can expect, life gets a little busy traveling through Europe whilst trying to keep up with work term activities.

A few weeks back, Lydia and I made a trip to Berlin, the new/old capitol of Germany (regaining the capitol status from Bonn in 1990). Berlin was an absolutely amazing city that we would have loved to spend weeks in; however, duty called at work, so we were only able to stay for the weekend.

Getting to Berlin seemed to be too good to be true on the Deutsch Bahn (the German rail system), because it was. We had direct tickets from Bonn to Berlin; however, our train ended up breaking down half way across Germany, so we didn’t arrive in Berlin until 10:00ish at night, which wasn’t really that good considering we still needed to find a place to stay that night.

We managed to find a rather cheap hostel (Backpackers Hostel Mitte), for the weekend, although I wouldn’t really recommend it, since it was quite dirty, but mostly because there’s a far better way to budget travel that I didn’t find until after Berlin, called “couch surfing” (but I think I’m going to write an entire blog post about that soon, so I won’t go too much into it). The hostel did provide us with two great opportunities though, the first was the cheap and plentiful breakfast, and the second was a free (yes, I said FREE) walking tour of Berlin. It wasn’t actually the hostel that offered the tour; however, they did provide us with the information for it, and the tour guide actually stopped at the hostel to pick anyone up who was interested, which was quite nice. The tour company actually does tours in a few different places, and it was really quite ‘infotaining’, so I would strongly suggest checking it out here: New Berlin tours, and if you don’t believe that we were actually there, you can find our pictures on their web site, although you have to play a fun game of ‘Where’s Tyrone and Lydia????’

The guided tour was a great start to Berlin, because it gave us a good overview (4 hours or so) of the sights, and a good layout of the city. Although the tour is free, they do suggest tips for the guides at the end of the tour, but it’s tip what you want, if you want, and after the great experience we had, it would be hard to see how anyone couldn’t tip these guides making no salary for their full time job (although there were certainly a few people who didn’t tip anyway).

(*Note - For this picture section I got Lydia to help me with the picture commentary, since I've been so busy at work, and I've been falling behind on my posts)

We forgot our camera in our hostel on our first day in Berlin, so we missed out on photos of the tour and decided to come back later that night. Luckily for us, Berlin looked even more enchanting at night. Here you see the Brandenburg Gate with Viktoria, the goddess of victory, perched atop it, driving the Quadriga. This statue was once stolen by the French after defeating Germany in a war in the early 1800's... Yet, a few years later, Germany won the next war and took the statue back to further prove their victory over the French... it has been said that the goddess now watches over the French embassy, which is around 50 metres to the right of this photo.

Here is Berlin's most famous hotel - the Avalon. It has very high priced and swanky hotel rooms... but the best part about it is that out of one of those window's, Michael Jackson made history by dangling one of his children, blanket clad, over a swarm of fans below.

Late on the Saturday night, we decided to take a free tour of the Reichstag - German's original parliament building that was once burned down (can you guess when... how about by whom?) and restored in the 1990's. It was open quite late - until 1:00 am. This dome is new - it was constructed so that the people of Germany could look down on the Bundestag, or German parliament.

The view down on the seats below.

The next day, we set out on adventures again. Only, we couldn't walk anywhere until the red traffic light stopped offering us hugs...

And the green "walking man" took off reading his newspaper. The walking man is very famous in Berlin - there are entire shops dedicated to him. He was designed back in the days of East and West Berlin for the East Berlinners in order to cheer them up... whatever works, I guess. After reunification, West Berlin fought to get rid of this happy little guy, but the East won that battle and kept their walking men in tact.

After crossing the street and walking some more, we made our way to Museum Island, which was named after this musem... the Old Museum. Behind it is the New Museum. They created a better naming system for other museums after they realised their little problem.

Littered across the front lawn of the museum were these ginormous, sorry "pleasantly plump", statues... an interesting installation piece that we admired and couldn't resist posing in front of.

That entire day, neither of us could get Mika's "Big Girls are Beautiful" song out of our heads! And just mentioning it, it's in there again...

Ty - On a side note, after these fat bottomed girls made our rokin worlds go round, Lydia and I took in a Cabaret show in downtown Berlin, which was really cool. The play itself was really cheesy, but some of the stunts and special effects in it were really cool to watch. The cabaret included a set of mexican twins who ran across this enormous revolving pair of death wheels, a high-tower-multi-hi-bar chinese flipping act, and an underwater-with-no-air-supply-making-out-naked-duo-dance.......now tell me you wouldn't want to see that!!!

Perpendicular to the Old Museum lies the Berliner Dom. Although this church looks extremely old, we were informed by our tour guide that it was built in the early 20th century.

This oddly plain photo is of Babel Plats - the place where the famous book burnings took place. Thousands upon thousands of books with "differing ideas" from those of the Nazis were burnt at this very place, right outside of the university... not only did the students take part in the horrifying act, but some professors participated in the mass destruction as well.

This is the Humboldt University, named after Alexander von Humboldt, which is situated across the street from the Babel Plats. Einst

The scholar, himself, perched outside the university.

Here is Lydia smiling away, pretending to be Checkpoint Charlie.

These stark masses of concrete make up the "Holocaust Memorial", also named the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe". The slabs vary in size and height, and grow larger and taller in the centre of the piece and shorter and sparser around the edges. The ground actually dips in the centre, so from the outside, each concrete rectangle looks relatively similar in height.

In the distance you can see the standard apartment buildings that were constructed around the time of WWII.

The masterpiece was designed by the famous architect, Peter Eisenman. It is meant not only to be looked at, but also experienced. One must walk through the maze of grey concrete in order to fully understand the artwork and the message that it gives out.

Here's a shot to show the sheer gigantism of the memorial.

After re-visiting the Holocaust Memorial, we headed across the road to Tiergarten Park. We thought this statue was rather nice, picturesquely surrounded by the quickly changing autumn foliage.

Some more foliage... this photo was obviously Lydia's doing.

Another random and beautiful monument hidden in the Tiergarten.

A shout-out to my pops!

This is one of our last photos of the day before we caught the train home... and before our camera stopped cooperating with us. This giant monument, the "Victory Column" is located in the centre of the Tiergarten Park. The gold statue on the top is again of Viktoria... Goddess of Victory. Apparently some Berliners have given this statue the nickname of "chick on a stick". Seems fitting!