So I must apologize for the slight lapse in my blog updates as I spent two of the last three days on trains. Getting from Barcelona to Berlin was supposed to be relatively simple. I would take one train to Paris, go to the louvre (which I missed the first time around), and then go the next day to Berlin. As it turned out, the first two trains out of barcelona were completely full, the regional train I wound up taking had a connection that was cancelled due to a worker's strike, and so I travelled to Berlin via an uncomfortable night train and a very long train ride through Germany. It actually was not that bad, but I definitely would rather not have a repeat.
[On a side note, I am unable to edit my postings on my iPad, so I apologize for the spelling errors that may have occasionally cropped up. Also, the architect of park guell and the sagrada familia was named gaudi, not guell.]
Berlin itself has been great so far. The first thing I noticed were the people. I got into town late in the afternoon, and was hungry. A lady I passed on the sidewalk recommended I go to a nearby Portuguese sandwich shop - the best in town. It was indeed good, but the folks inside really made it enjoyable. As a lone American in a foreign country, it is so nice to meet locals who make me feel at home. It seems this characteristic wasn't just limited to the sandwich shops though; everywhere I have been Berliners have been helpful, friendly, and generally spoke impeccable English.
Alright, here is what I have actually seen. Yesterday I went on a free, tips-only walking tour of the city, and it was top-notch. We walked to the Brandenburg gate and down to where the Reich chancellory and hitler's bunker once stood. Interestingly enough, there is only a gravel parking lot and apartment buildings there now, and Berlin city code asks dog walkers to take their dogs to this spot. From there, our guide led us to the former luftwaffe headquarters, which was saved from the bombs of ww2 by the soviets. Apparently, the soviets wanted to keep the building for themselves after the war, and it was subsequently home to the GDR secret police ( the Stasi). Now it is germany's administrative center for taxes, so it appears that the building's evil legacy endures even today.
Continuing the tour, we walked to one of the few remaining sections of the Berlin wall, and then made our way to checkpoint Charlie and its famous, "you are now leaving the American sector" sign. It was lunchtime by now so I stopped at a sidewalk stand and ordered some currywurst. It was pretty tasty, but nothing phenomenal. The second half of the tour was spent visiting the Berlin opera house, the plaza where German students burned 20,000 "forbidden" books in 1933, the Berlin war memorial and holocaust memorial, and the main boulevard, unter den linden. Overall, the guide was incredibly knowledgeable and provided a great sense of coherence to the different places around Berlin. I really appreciated how he made each of the buildings come to life with a story of their own.
I completed my day with a side trip through the GDR museum, a look at the Reichstag, and a walk through the Tiergarten (a small forest with gravel walking trails and a couple of lakes, a very natural-like place).
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