Ich Bin Berlin!

We write this on Baby Malackai whilst sitting on the train on the way to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Not quite how the Jews travelled I suspect...

So far we have spent 2 nights and the whole day inbetween exloring the awesomely fantastic and possibly too artsy for its own good city of Berlin. The first night we walked the streets around our hostel to sniff out the general vibe of the place and although we were very impressed we were also very cold and tired, which took us back to our beds and into a deep sleep very quickly. My intial observation: It's daylight till 9pm!!

Our hostel - the site of a converted former brewery - is in East Berlin. Think concrete. But we have fallen in love with the walking men symbols. Unique to the DDR sector, both the red and the green men wear very jaunty hats and make the whole experience of crossing the road seem almost fun. Imagine our delight yesterday when we found a souvenier shop entirely devoted to these symbols, including - but by no means limited to, teeshirts, cookie cutters and pasta.






As much as we both enjoy crossing the road, we have also been doing some touristy stuff as well. We did a walking tour yesterday (the best kind: it was free) and ticked off the high priority tourist sites: Checkpoint Charlie, the remains of the Berlin Wall,


the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial for the Murdered Jews (yes, thats the official name) and most importantly, the car park - which famously is not a memorial on the site of Hitlers buried bunker, where he bit down on a cyanide capsule and then shot himself in the head - just to be on the safe side.

There were many others sites but we were slightly brain dead after the 3 and a half hour walking tour with the exceptionally perky Brazilian tour guide Caro, so we had a nap on museum island before checking out the markets.



Finally, in a city of three and a half million people you would think the chances of running into a relative pretty slim, right? After a dinner of kokos-curry nudeln (noodles) and nudeln chickenballs we hit up a random bar down the road. Where we stumbled upon Kate's cousin Anita, who has been living in Berlin the last year or so. Completely by accident, and seriously lucky (seeing as Kate had lost the piece of paper with her address and phone number on it) one drink at the bar down the road turned into a 5am finish, culminating, in a german 'disco' with a group of new friends wearing fake teeth, suspenders and nerdish glasses.

It was a seriously educational night we swear! Who would have known that you can buy bier at the corner store for 1euro and just walk into any bar with said drink? Or go to a nightclub with a gun in your bag and just leave it in the cloak room so you can pick it up again at the end of the night? Conclusion... Berlin is phenomenal :)
　

The 'confiscated items' box