Berlin's a great city. As I said, it's extremely modern, but still dripping with history. The past few days have seemed to include great swatches of the Berlin Wall and hopping between the former East and West Berlins.
Yesterday, we had lunch at a great Vietnamese restaurant called Monsieur Vuong and set out for the East Side Gallery, the largest remaining slice of the Berlin Wall. Artists were allowed to paint it as Communism was crumbling in 1990 (before, it could only be painted on the West, as the East side was too repressive). It's been maintained pretty well, and features a lot of cool art.
From there, we headed on to Checkpoint Charlie, the famed point of entry from the American zone, which later famously served as the main route between East and West Berlin. We headed back to the hostel once it started to rain... of course.
Today, at Dana's request, we headed to a big flea market frequented by Berliners. It was positively PACKED. There were all sorts of vendors there, from established food stands, to food carts, to up and coming clothing designers, to bicycle repairmen, to record dealers and jewelers and yard sale type junk collectors. It was a great time to watch locals "in their native habitat." We spent a few hours there, especially because there's so little to do in Europe on Sundays.
Next was the Berlin Jewish museum, which chronicles the history of Judaism in Berlin from time immemorial. It was a neat exhibit to see Judaism as it particularly developed in (what is now) Germany, but a little basic in terms of Judaism itself. Perhaps this is because I got comfortable with the concepts of Judaism (a) as a Christian and (b) through religion classes in school. The buildings the museum was in were neat as well. One was a 18th century Prussian building originally built by the Prussian government, and the second was designed in the late 1990s century and opened in 2001. Here's a neat view of the aerial contrast between the two at Wikipedia. I dare you to figure out which is which!
From there we headed back to the Reichstag area for dinner, with the intention of climbing the Reichstag dome for a nice view of Berlin at dusk. Sadly, dinner ran long and we were about 25 minutes late to get in the line to climb. Either way, I was able to catch a few nice shots of it and of the nearby Brandenburg Gate in the dark.
Tomorrow we're off to our next to last city: Stockholm, Sweden! This will be our first airplane trip since we flew from London to Amsterdam all those weeks ago (it feels like an eternity). It'll be a preview of our final flight from Copenhagen back to the USA. Everything's packed and ready to go for the most part- tomorrow morning I've simply got to shower, throw some stuff in my bag, and it's off to the airport! We'll be departing for our two-ish hour flight from Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld (Berlin-Schönefeld Airport), which was once the primary airport of East Berlin.
Exciting!
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