Between the cold (near freezing in the 30s) and the rain and the walking, Berlin has exhausted me too much for a "good" (aka "organized") post. But, we've been having a very good time.
Monday night we ended up going on an "Alternative 666 Anti-Pub Crawl." Which ended up meaning, "we're just like any other pub crawl but go to cooler bars." Which was good by us :) The most interesting was called Dr. Pong, which was a small dive bar in which a ping pong table was in the middle, which essentially everyone played at once in a round-robin sudden death elimination format - as in, the person in front of you hits the ball, gets out of the way, and you try to return the next ball. Not so easy, but pretty fun/funny.
We also were entertained by going to an absinthe bar, a "goth" bar, and a "hippie" bar- as well as the entertainment provided by some Danish boys doing eyeball shots of vodka and snorting salt before tequillia shots (WHAT???). Overall a fun night, and a good way to see the "real" (?) Berlin.
(As a side note from Matt: Interesting cultural touchstone: Yelling "America" in a certain tone of voice will always (on pub crawl) get the response, "F!!k Yeah!" from at least 3 dudes no matter their nationality. If you haven't seen Team America, you have no idea what this is about, and that's okay.)
The next day we went on a 4 hour city tour with a guide, which was great. We saw the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie (too strange to make up: the posing guards now by the checkpoint gate are actually strippers- both male and female- and for 10 euro they will actually give you a lapdance there in the middle of the street), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (controversial due to its narrow scope), Hitler's underground bunker area (now under a nondescript parking lot) where he committed suicide and then was cremated in a pit nextdoor, Lustgarten (where Nazi marches frequently occured), various segments of the Berlin Wall, and the square of the 1933 book burning (20,000 books were burned- now there is an underground room of empty bookshelves as a memorial at the spot that you can see through the plexiglass area of sidewalk).
One extremely random item of interest is that the Berlin government has numbered with nailed signs each tree in the entire city. Because Germans apparently REALLY like counting. There are 210,000 if you're interested.
After the tour ended, we dragged our soaking wet, freezing selves to the Reichstag (the German parliament building). We got a nice view of the city from the top, but unfortunatly the very top dome was closed for cleaning (you can see a photo of this in the photostream- it was really cool architecture).
Don't worry though- when we finally got home, we had some comfort food at a place called "White Trash Fast Food" (actually a very large resturant with pretty good food), and then availed ourselves of some rum-spiked hot chocolate.
Today, the 20th, we toured the German history museum most of the day- it went from around 2000 BC to the present. It was quite interesting, and since I never took European history, filled in some major knoweldge gaps, especially related to how WWII evolved.
We spent the rest of the evening in a German shopping area (Alexanderplatz).
On our minds tonight is Matt's father's father, who was diagnosed with untreatable lung cancer yesterday. If you are of the praying persuasion, please send extras his way.
Tomorrow we head to Prague, which should be a pretty journey as the leaves are beginning to change here. They are not on the Euro, so perhaps everyday things will be even cheaper than they are here in Berlin (which is much cheaper than anywhere else we've been), though since Prague is once again more of a tourist town, maybe not. Have enjoyed Berlin, but ready to head onward to a place perhaps more accostomed to American tourists who don't speak the language -everyone here assumes we are German and speaks to us in German- and then are highly disappointed when we reveal we are, in fact, not. But, at least we apparently don't look like American tourists!
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