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.
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