Germany

This time its been awhile since my latest blog entry. I had so much fun in Germany that I forgot to post a blog! Lets start with our arrival in Berlin...

On arrival, we got our passports stamped, and tried to read all the new found German words in the airport. We had heaps of fun working out that 'ausgang' meant exit, and that walking on the right side of the path was a very good idea. Buying a train ticket wasn't so bad because we'd read up about it beforehand, but lots of people were having trouble. We were already having people talk to us in German and not have a clue what they were saying.
We found the hostel easily enough and after duping our gear and being handed a map, we headed into Alexanderplatz on the U-Bahn (the underground train) and went for a wander. After not knowing much German and thus being unable to read anything, we went to a sandwich shop that had sandwiches in the window that we could point at. This started us on our great european food journey. IT WAS SO TASTY! It was just a roll with salami, cheese and lettuce, but it was probably one of the best 'take-away' style foods I've ever had.
Next was on to the DDR museum. Here you could play with everything they had and learn about socialist Germany at the same time, so basically it was perfect for me! They even had a typical socialist house where you could go through all the drawers, open all the cupboards and see how they lived back then. It was really interesting.
We next ended up at the Brandenburg Gate. It was pretty impressive. We walked under it and around to the Reichstag, which is basically the German Parliament building. You can't actually look around the parliament, but they have a great viewing tower ontop of the building. The view of the city from there was pretty nice and well worth the 20min wait to get through security to see.
Dinner cost us 14 euro between the two of us, including a large beer for me. Compared to the UK and Ireland, thats extremely cheap, so we were ecstatic about that.

Photos of Germany day 1: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=25418&l=dab3f&id=544876388

2nd day in Germany, Esther and I decided to try and walk as much of where the Berlin Wall used to go as we could. We were armed with a map and a full belly of food. In the end, we didn't walk too far because the scale on the map was a little weird, but we did get to walk along Bernauer Strausse where the Reconciliation Church is situated, and near that is a reconstruction of the wall to show you how the layout of the wall was when it was up. There was about 10 different layers made up of fences and trenches and things. It felt very real looking at that, just imagining that all the way up the road.
It was starting to get dark, so we went to Checkpoint Charlie. All the stuff there, like the pieces of wall we'd seen, was all reconstruction stuff, so it was interesting to see, but didn't seem so fulfilling. We rounded the corner and finally found what we'd been looking for, the REAL Berlin Wall. There isn't much of it left, so seeing some of the original wall, not reconstructed from old pieces, but left to stay there was very very strange. All the graffiti that people wrote on it in 1989 still being on it and other assorted tags was really weird. A memorable experience, thats for sure.

3rd Day we dubbed 'Art Day'. This involved a trip to the East Side Gallery, a Martin Parr exhibition and going to the Bauhaus Museum. First stop was the East Side Gallery. The galley is a series of paintings by people from all around the world painted on the Berlin Wall. It was done in 1990, and because it is being preserved, it is now the largest section of the original wall left. It was really interesting to see how different artists went about painting the wall and it was also interesting to see how some of them had survived over time.
On the way to the Martin Parr exhibition we had our first real German Bratwurst. It was covered in tomato sauce and some curry powder, but it was SO TASTY. I loved it. That bratwurst goes out to the Collins' and the Halls.
The Martin Parr exhibit was pretty good and he had some funny photos up. The ones Esther and I liked were the 'Bored Couples' ones. After that we were conscious of us looking bored so for the next two hours we tried to look really interested all the time so we didn't get photographed!
We decided to walk to the Bauhaus, but as we walked, it got later and later and later, and as we turned up at the Siegessäule and decided to do the Bauhaus another day and just walk up it instead. It's a big tower in the middle of a major roundabout thats about 65m high. It took awhile to walk up all the steps, and as we went up it got narrower and narrower, but the view from it was fantastic. Totally worth going up.

Photos of Germany day 2+3: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=25422&l=6fd6c&id=544876388

4th Day. This day was a little weird as we went to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. It was the closest Concentration Camp to Berlin.
We had booked a tour of the place, but on arrival at the station we needed to be at, Esther realised that she had set the alarm for us to wake up on the phone she hadn't changed the time on for daylight savings and we'd missed the tour by 50mins. Bummer. We decided to catch the train out there anyway to hopefully catch up the tour people.
Initially it was fine, but after a while I started to overthink things and thought "hmn, we're in a train on the way to a concentration camp, weird". I told Esther of those thoughts, to which the stern response was "Uh, thanks Owen...".
Walking through the gates of the camp, it was very, very quiet. There was almost no people thee, so things were very calm. Imagining new interns for the camp walking through the gates was a horrible feeling.
The first thing we did was walk along inside the wall, where we saw some concrete blocks with smaller stones stuck on them. We took a look at them and I noted that the ground felt a bit funny, so maybe the remains of a building? As we walked away we saw a sign about the piece of ground we'd been standing on: "Mass Graves for Concentration Camp Victims". I almost threw up.
The next building we went into turned out to be the Doctors shed. Here they still had the original autopsy tables set up and below the mortuary where the kept all the people that died. It was pretty heavy stuff.
After that ordeal, we stumbled upon a Gas Chamber, Killing Trench and many more mass graves. It was a pretty intense day.

Concentration Camp Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=25931&l=f4def&id=544876388

5th Day. This was our last day in Germany. Both of us loved Germany and didn't want to leave. Definitely going back there again.
We went to the Bauhaus Museum where Esther got to geek out over design things, and after that we went up the 220m Tv Tower that looks over Berlin for sweet views of the city. It cost 9.50 euro to go up, but it was very worth it.
We caught the plane from the airport to Brussels and got to sleep in comfort in the 4 star hotel we'd booked for ourselves.

Photos of the last day in Germany: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=25934&l=15fbe&id=544876388