Berlin

Hey! We have been partying in Berlin for the last five days and have had a great time! We hoped the capital would be a fun place to visit, but we were not prepared for how much life and vitality and culture and history this city offers.

We stayed for two nights in Nuremburg, visited the Nazi Party Rally Grounds which has a fantastic museum built into it with an astonishing and powerful architectural design where we walk through great glass hallways piercing the building like shafts of light, visited the toy museum, and tramped all over the city, most things rebuilt since the war, both in the old design but modern buildings too.

We then hitchhiked to Magdeburg, (we were actually aiming for Berlin but when a ride told us he was going to Magdeburg, we thought that this would be a good opportunity to see the city my grandma Ursula was born in), a city that used to be in East Germany. It was almost completely destroyed during the war and then rebuilt under the direction of the USSR, then when Germany was reunited, it’s factories closed and now there is high unemployment but still so much history. The ruins and buildings are from so many different eras and there is so much contrast between them. We spent a lot of time just walking around the streets, looking at statues glorifying various parts of their history and exploring parks. It was a very worth while stop, especially because it was so different than all the other areas of Germany we have visited.

We took the train to Berlin and are staying with a new friend from the hospitality club who is taking such good care of us. We have seen so much of the vibrant city, every part of it has the feeling of a place that has been through so much and is constantly reinventing itself. We stopped by Checkpoint Charlie where they documented the history of the Berlin Wall and the various, inventive manners that people tried to escape East Germany, both successfully and unsuccessfully, visited the intense Jewish Museum, another architectural marvel, and we have seen parts of the wall and bought our own tourist chip of it. We have eaten Nepalese and Turkish and Indian and Italian food (we are getting a little weary of traditional German food), checked out an Australian gig, and an awesome club with a fire-breathing dragon on the ceiling (like we needed it to be hotter in there), drank wine while lounging in a giant spittoon-esque empty fountain under a full moon in front of the National Gallery in the Lust-garten, Mike has sampled many good German beers, and we have had great guided tours by our friend through all the artsy and dreary and hidden parts of the city, both eastern and western.

We are planning to go to Poland tomorrow, and then to the Czech Republic hopefully and then we will see how much longer we can afford to travel and how the weather holds out. I have to go buy another sweater and some mittens today, I think.
Still having a blast and we are so excited to be experiencing this part of the world!