Berlin

So I think I'm going to do this in 4 steps - one post for each city - so that it doesn't get too ridiculously long. I guess that means I'll start by saying that 5 friends (Hannah, Kelly, Liz, Jon, and Charlie) and I went on a 10-day trip through Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest with only what we could carry (no checking bags). We had a flight into Berlin on April 21st, buses and trains between the cities, and a flight back to Madrid on April 30th. It was pretty intense and exhausting, but probably one of the most interesting, fun, and educational trips I have ever been on. So here goes.

We started by taking a train to Malaga, which is about 2 1/2 hours from Seville because it was easier/cheaper to fly from there to Berlin. Hannah and I got to the train station last (about 10 minutes late) and I got a phone call from Charlie saying that everyone was there and they were worried because 'we were the responsible ones.' haha, a good start to an awesome trip. We got to the airport pretty early because the train only left at a certain time, so we hung out for a while and eventually got on the plane to Berlin - a pretty uneventful flight. It took us a while to figure out how to get from the airport to the city, but we finally got to our hostel, went out to get some food, and called it a night. We wanted to get up early the next morning to see the Reichstag and try to avoid the lines.

We woke up around 7, left the hostel around 9, and walked over to the Reichstag (the German Parliament Building). Hannah had been carrying a crutch because she has tendonitis in her feet and when the people who work there saw us, they let us cut the entire line! We saved about an hour of waiting time, which was awesome. So we took the elevator up to the to the glass dome and got to overlook the entire city, which was beautiful. From there, we walked over to the Brandenburg Gate, which is one of the most famous gates that used to be part of the Berlin Wall. Then, we went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was this strangely shaped collection of almost square gravestone-looking things that is supposed to have 'no symbolism.' I didn't really like it at first, but after we went to the museum that is under it, I changed my mind. The museum was really cool - it had an entire room with stories of about 15 different families that had been affected by the Holocaust, a room with huge screens on the walls and benches to sit and listen to stories of person after person who had died in the Holocaust, and a room with a really interesting timeline of what happened when Hitler came to http://www.blogger.com/power in Germany. It was especially interesting because there is so little Jewish history in Spain that I haven't really thought about it that much in the past couple of months. So after that, we took a break for breakfast (at Dunkin' Donuts!) and then walked over to the Topography of Terror, which is an outdoor exhibit that displays the history of the Nazi regime and is located on the area of land where the Nazi headquarters used to be. After that, we went to Checkpoint Charlie, which was one of the most famous checkpoints between East and West Berlin, and the museum there, which tells the history of the checkpoint as well as many stories of escape attempts/successes from East Berlin to West Berlin. We were pretty tired after that and went to have some lunch - currywurst, one of Berlin's most famous dishes - and hung out for a while to rest, and then it was on to the Jewish Museum, which ended up being quite the experience - it started out pretty normal, but then we ended up in the children's section and didn't really know it so we were a little confused. After a long day, we met up with a friend of mine from Brown and all went to dinner near our hostel at a Vietnamese place which was delicious. We hung out at our hostel's bar for a little while to catch up on our abroad experiences, and then we went to sleep so we could get up for an early day the next day.

Thursday morning we got up to go to a northern section of the Berlin wall, which is supposed to be one of the more authentic sections. It was really interesting and different from what I expected, which was the brightly colored, painted, Berlin wall that is always seen in pictures. This was 2 cement walls with a space (a no man's land) in between, and we were able to go up to the top of a building to see it from above. Pretty interesting, and like nothing I'd ever seen before. After that, we went over to a beautiful synagogue near our hostel, which is one of the only synagogues in Berlin that survived Kristallnacht. Now, the part that has been restored is a museum. We went to a market for lunch where we got Turkish food (delicious) and Hannah got a banana/nutella crepe that we talked about for the rest of the trip, and then to the Berliner Dom, one of the most beautiful/important churches in the city. Then the girls walked down the Unter den Linden, the biggest street in East Berlin which is full of history. You can see where Einstein went to school and where the Nazis burned thousands of banned books during the time they were in power. After that, we went to the Pergamon museum, which was especially cool because everything was built into the walls of the museum. We got to see the Ishtar gates of Babylong, a temple to Athena, and lots of mosaics. Then we met up with Nick again and went to Alexanderplatz, which is the newish part of East Berlin - meaning everything was built in the last 15 years or so. The TV Tower, built by the Soviets, is there, as is the world clock and lots of shopping. After that, we went down to the East Side Gallery, which is the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall and is the typical, graffiti-laden, touristy Berlin wall that you would expect. We walked down it for a while and found a restaurant near the end to get some more currywurst. Then, Hannah and I went back to the hostel to get some rest while the others explored this abandoned amusement park that was pretty far away. Tired yet? I was.

Berlin Pictures