A Weekend in Berlin

With things winding down in Europe for not just me, but Blake's sister, Giselle, who is finishing up her dance career in Dresden- Blake and Giselle's mom, Priscilla, flew over to help Giselle move and to visit Blake. Priscilla was flying into Berlin, which I had been wanting to check out, so we decided to meet her there for a couple of days.

Blake and I flew down on late Friday night and were ready to explore Berlin the next morning. We started off at the Brandenburg Gate to catch a free 3 1/2 hour walking tour of the city.

The tour was great- there is a lot to take in and see. After the wall was torn down, they marked its location with bricks all across the city:

Next on the tour we stopped by the Holocaust Memorial, which was really interesting. It is hard to describe, and the pictures only partly capture the atmosphere:

The tour then stopped at the place where Hitler’s bunker was, but there is obviously no memorial. In fact, besides a small bulletin board, they built some apartment complexes on top of it and now there is a little piece of grass where the residents take their dogs to do their business. Our tour guide pointed out that this probably was the most appropriate memorial to him.

After that we walked (we did a lot of walking) to a place where they left a large chunk of the wall standing. As with most things in this city- you feel weird being a tourist. I mean, on one hand- there a lot of really cool things to see, and some really well done memorials. On the other hand- a lot of shit went down in this city to say the least and it doesn’t seem right to be happy about them. So here I am in front of the old wall with my most normal seeming expression:

We passed Checkpoint Charlie, and the Deutscher Dom (German Cathedral) and the Französischer Dom (French Cathedral) which are identical churches because they didn’t want to offend anyone, which I find amusing and think they should do more of in this world. Seriously… it is like Berlin had a little French kid who wanted a red hot wheel, so they got him one, and then his little German brother started to whimper and to shut him up they bought him a red hot wheel too. Exactly like that.

Next we went to the book-burning memorial in Bebelplatz. Again, another cool memorial- there were empty bookcases that you looked down at through a small Plexiglas window.

The tour ended at the Berliner Dome where we heard the great story of how the wall finally fell, which turns out was sort of accidental. Wiki it.. it’s good.

After the tour, Blake, Priscilla and I went back to the Holocaust memorial to explore it some more and we were greeted by thousands of gay men and woman at the gay pride festival. It definitely added a fun spirit to the normally sobering holocaust memorial. There is something about shirtless men with pink feather boas in a party bus that can always make me smile.
After wandering around the city on our own some more, we met up for ice cream with mine and Blake’s friend from Lund- Raphael, who lives in Berlin. We must have been pictured out, because no pictures were taken here, which is weird since the 3 of us are pretty camera-happy.

I was pretty tuckered out at this point, so I went back to take a nap, while Blake and Priscilla met up for dinner with Blake’s old roommate from Lund- Ralf, who also lives in Berlin. Their dinner went a little late, so I met up with Kelly Clark- a fellow Valle fellow who just finished up her fellowship in Copenhagen. Kelly visited us in Stockholm this winter, and it was great to see her again. She was traveling with some friends she met through couch surfing- Oskar (a Dane) and Sara (a Swede living in Denmark). Both of them were also a lot of fun, and Oskar knew about a cool bar in East Berlin that served some excellent beer.

Blake eventually met up with us, but unluckily for him it was after we ate our Kinder Surprises (delish chocolate candies with toys in them… and yes- I am 26 years old).

The next day we started out at the Reichstag- the German Parliament Building. They recently added a really cool glass dome to the top. The idea of the glass dome is that any citizen can look down on the parliament which symbolizes Berlin's attempt to move away from a past of Nazism and Communism and instead towards a future with a heavier emphasis on a united, democratic Germany.




After the Reichstag, we meandered our way over to the Berlin Zoo, which I was super-duper excited to see. We stopped at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church:

And last but not least- we finally made it to the zoo! I have wanted to go to the Berlin Zoo ever since learning about it in my Zoo and Aquarium Science class- yes I am a dork like that. It was awesome.


The funniest part was the Sea Lions. There was this obnoxious huge male who would not stop barking, and who was extremely territorial over his ladies and his rock. Check out the videos:




Unfortunately, we started to run out of time, so we had to run through a lot of it, but we did get to see Knut! (The famous Polar Bear)

That was the end of Berlin, but all of my pics (as well as some of Blake’s and Priscilla’s pics) can be found here. After that the 3 of us headed to the airport to catch a lovely Ryanair flight (ha- for those of you following along, Ryanair flights are never lovely) back to Stockholm.

Priscilla hung out with us the next couple of days before making her way to Paris and the to Dresden to see Giselle. We did some Stockholm touristy things and relaxed and enjoyed the wonderful weather. Here are a few highlights, but all of the pics can be found here.