Cat and I are all about finding free things to do, so when we found out our hostel was offering free tours, we thought "Oh our hostel seems pretty legit, let's try this." Well second time was not the charm, but again it was very entertaining. Our guide was this crazy guy who was a model/actor and said things like "Berlin is very multi-culti," throughout our tour. He also at one point referred to the graffiti covered area we were in as "Little Paris." And as I'm looking around, I'm thinking to myself...now I've never been to Paris, but I imagine it would be prettier than this. We ended up just taking a nice walk through random parts of Berlin.
Berlin and the area around our hostel especially is weird. You walk down one street and it looks like this:
You walk a little further and come upon a nice park, but the walls around it are covered in graffiti. This is just normal as it's turned into an art form for Berliners. Once you get used to it, the graffiti is kind of amusing as it many times consists of a lot of random English words. Lots of the buildings have murals painted on them as well.
We then walked down the
Unter den Linden to the
Brandenburg Gate...
And then made our way over to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is this huge field of these concrete blocks that are different sizes and the ground often slopes different directions. At first glance it looks and feels more like a playground, but if you are thinking about what it was put there for, it actually makes you feel very uneasy because the ground is so uneven and you can't see very well, and it's easy to lose people in there. It's actually built on top of the former location of the administrative offices of Hitler's regime. In the middle, there is a museum that is free to the public and has so much information about the Holocaust that it is hard to absorb it, and you leave feeling hollow.
Our final stop of the day was to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The people of Berlin decided not to rebuild the church after it was destroyed during World War II as a memorial of the cost of war, and I'd say it's pretty effective. It's in the middle of this huge and modern looking shopping center in what was West Berlin making the contrast all that much more striking.
May 26, 2010
And then made our way over to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is this huge field of these concrete blocks that are different sizes and the ground often slopes different directions. At first glance it looks and feels more like a playground, but if you are thinking about what it was put there for, it actually makes you feel very uneasy because the ground is so uneven and you can't see very well, and it's easy to lose people in there. It's actually built on top of the former location of the administrative offices of Hitler's regime. In the middle, there is a museum that is free to the public and has so much information about the Holocaust that it is hard to absorb it, and you leave feeling hollow.
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