berlin, berlin, berlin

Having been in Germany for about two weeks there is one widely noticed trend in German behaviour that I feel I must comment on. Germans don't J-walk. When you do they look at you like you're satan. Well not quite, but there's some disdain. When I asked Anna about it she said 'why don't you just wait.' Although I feel like I've been a bad example because a couple of times (at night when absolutely nothing is coming) she's done it. It's kind of fun though because it's so easy to feel like a badass.

Anyway, I'm definitely not cool enough to be in Berlin. It's such a hip place with so much energy and so many different facets. Spending a few days here (leaving in a few hours..) I feel more than anywhere else like I have to come back because there is so much stuff to do. One of the things to do in Berlin is climb up the dome inside the Bundestag. It used to be free and you just had to queue for a while, now it's still free but you have to pre-register (3 days in advance) on the internet. Unfortunately we didn't realise this and so we missed out on the Bundestag. Now I have to come back! The architecture is really interesting. Most of the city was destroyed during the second world war but much of it has been rebuilt to look the same. So there are newish but old looking buildings (and they're convincing) and modern.

the bundestag

The Brandenburg Gate. Not only cool to look at but provides good shelter in the rain. 

One of the coolest things we've done here was to go on a free tour showing us around different districts looking at street art. There's a real movement here for street art, some of it's graffiti, most of it are stencils stuck up on the side of buildings, walls etc. There are some local celebrity artists, some of whom have revealed their identities and others who are phantoms. One series that was really funny (sorry mum) was a character called 'little Lucy' based on an old Czech cartoon. Apparently the cartoon is really cutesy, but in the Berlin version Lucy is always devising ways to kill her cat. My favourite I saw (no photo) was kebap kitty. (Lots of Kebaps here). The street art tour showed us this grungy, edgy Berlin.

Little Lucy.

in the washing machine this time..

Another really interesting place was the old Stasi prison. Apparently a lot of the tour guides who guide groups in German are ex-prisoners. Our guide told us immediately that she wasn't (which was pretty obvious because she was about 30..) but she is a historian who studies the Stasi and East/West Berlin history. She was fantastic and you could tell she was really interested in it all herself. I was so absorbed in all of it that it completely slipped my mind to take pictures. The Stasi paranoia was huge. They had 120 interrogation rooms (one for each prisoner) and each prisoner had his or her own interrogator so they could form relationships. The Stasi feared that the interrogators would sympathise with their prisoners so there were 120 other officers listening in on the interrogators.
In the 50s (I can't remember or find the date) the way the prison was run changed due to public scrutiny. Everything had to look above board, so prisoner's living conditions were technically very good and there was so longer any physical torture. Instead prisoners were completely isolated from contact with anyone, except their interrogator. Lights in the hallways warned guards if other prisoners were being moved at the same time to avoid one prisoner seeing another. Sweat samples were collected secretly so that if prisoners escaped dogs could track them. One man who was captured in Berlin was driven in vehicle where he couldn't see anything for around 5 hours, when in reality the prison was only 20 minutes from where he was captured.

The history around here is really interesting. Seeing the stretch of the wall that has been kept as a monument and seeing Checkpoint Charlie (where 'soldiers' charge 2 euros to pose with you for a photo... and no I didn't do it... I'm too stingy..) was very surreal.

in front of Checkpoint Charlie

the wall

The city, I think, is so interesting because it's been through so much. There's obviously history everywhere, and because so much of the history is awful (as history tends to be) there are lots of memorials. I was really interested to see the memorial to the murdered european jews, and I was quite surprised (even though I'd been told) by how abstract it is. Firstly, it's enormous. It's made up of just over two thousand concrete blocks that are built in a square pattern, but of all different sizes. I'm not quite sure, and no one seems to know, what the symbolism is exactly, but you can walk through it and when you do, thinking about what it represents it's quite powerful. Another really interesting memorial was the library without books. You can't really see it in the photo, but it's underground and you see it through a perspex window. It's a memorial to a huge Nazi book burning that took place.

bread with grain, and other stuff too

I've been in Germany for a week now and I'm still loving eating amazing bread.

I spent the first four days staying with Anna-Lisa in Recklinghausen. When you've been travelling, even when it hasn't been that long, it can be so nice to stay in a house. The Grebe's were very hospitable, Anna moved out of her bedroom and they offer to make me coffee pretty much whenever we make eye contact and also just feeding me up with bread covered in pumpkin seeds. Mmmmm. It was so lovely to meet Anna's family and get to know them a little bit and also to see her on her own home turf. We did a bunch of touristy stuff in the towns in the localish area including going to a zoo where I saw a bunch of Alaskan animals I've never seen before! We also spent a day in Amsterdam and visited Anne Frank's house. Anne Frank's house was really interesting and very well done. It was obviously very sad, but didn't feel like they tried to make it too over the top sad, it's obviously just a very moving story.

The last few days I've been in Munich. Two days ago I went with a few people I met here to visit Schloss Neuschwanstein (better known as King Ludwig's castle, or the castle the Disney castle is based on, Tash I don't mean to over-reference you in this blog but seriously, I saw the Disney castle!) It was really beautiful and the area surrounding it (it's about two hours from Munich) is stunning. It's very un-Australian with all it's rolling green green hills, pine trees and old old buildings and cobblestone streets.
We had a few incidences trying to work out, not so much how to use the trains here, but how to buy the right frikkin ticket, but it's all been adding to the adventure.

Yesterday I went to Dachau, which was, as you'd expect really awful. I knew pretty much everything before but actually being there and seeing places like the gas chambers is very confronting. There's a lot of emphasis on 'Never again' which I found quite sad because things are happening in so many places that, while not as systematic and on as large a scale as the holocaust, are a lot closer to it than we'd like to think. 

diving, bangkok again and two days in the strangest place on earth

well again I'm writing from an airport with WIFI. I'm in Abu Dhabi (you shouldn't bother drinking coffee here) waiting to fly to Germany to see Anna Lisa, currently my favourite German.

I had a nice two weeks in Thailand, and although my feet are very, very angry at me for wearing flippers for so long, scuba diving was so, so much fun. I did PADI Open Water on an island called Koh Tao (where it seems a few other people have caught on that you can learn to scuba dive). Koh Tao is very pretty and one of those places where I'm not sure if there are actually any Thai people. Apparently a lot of the people who own businesses there, to make money off people like me, are actually Burmese. Prices were fairly inflated for Thailand and the water (as in from the pipes not the sea) smelled a bit like a mix between blood and rotten eggs. Mm. Despite this Koh Tao was a really nice place to chill out in between dives and I even found good coffee. There was also an Australian pub called 'Choppers' and explaining to my American friend who Chopper Reid is was fun..'he cut his ears off in prison and then wrote some books.' Highly factual.

I liked Open Water so much I did an advanced course afterwards which included a deep dive (to 30m, Open Water goes to 18), a wreck dive and a night dive. The Advanced was really fun (although I missed my group from Open Water) and the wreck was amazing! The wreck we saw had been recently sunk (a lot of wrecks are sunk on purpose..) and was an old thai war ship. Before going down to see it, I read the section in the book about wreck diving where it stated over and over again that one of the most important things about wreck diving is not to touch the wreck. When we got down there, my instructor was so excited by it (because it was the first time he had seen it too) he climbed onto the guns at the front and had a little pretend shoot before insisting I do the same. Afterwards he was like 'well there were no other dive schools around!'

After spending a nice day in Bangkok (avoid Kao San Road and everything improves!! Unless you're really into vomit on the side of the road) with some really interesting people I met at breakfast, I flew to Abu Dhabi to meet Beck and Geoff.

They are living in a town called Al Ain, about 1.5 hours from Abu Dhabi and a similar distance to Dubai. I might be the only person in the world who has visited Al Ain and not Abu Dhabi or Dubai, but it doesn't take much to see that this whole place is strange... The outside temperature is around 45 degrees (and it's Ramadan so no drinking water in public) 80% of the country are expats and everything that is green was basically brought in and would die in about two days if not for the water that is pumped around to keep everything alive. Beck and Geoff have been here for almost six weeks and have not yet found a house, so last night I stayed in the Hilton (where they have been living) which was very nice, slightly better than my rotten egg smelling room on Koh Tao.