Berlin, Germany – 07/27 – 07/29

(TJ) After leaving Amsterdam we arrived in Berlin which is night and day different from Amsterdam. Berlin is the only city that I have seen thus far where there are vast stretches of open spaces due to the city’s total destruction during the war and the subsequent division of the city. I don’t think that I was prepared for how many building still are scarred by bullets and shells all over the city. You could also see that the communist authorities in East Berlin just let buildings fall apart instead of doing the necessary maintenance on them. It has only been recently that any of the older building left standing started to get the necessary repairs done to them. Some of the newer buildings that they have built are impressive, we saw the new Reichstadt dome and Potzdamer Platz which are both architectural marvels of glass, steel and aluminum. If anyone heads to Berlin I’d highly recommend the German History Museum, it goes from prehistoric time to modern and is translated in to English, it will take at least a day to go thru. We went late one day and I went back by myself the next to see the rest of it. We also did a historic third reich walk, I’d skip that since most if not all of the building were destroyed during or after the war and replaced with beautiful communist apartment blocs (can’t wait to see Russia). I wish that we could have spent more time here, there is a lot of history there and I get the feeling that in 10 years the city will not be recognizable at all from its cold war past that is being built over.

(Michelle) Since most of the wall is gone, they have noted in some areas by bricks in the ground where the Berlin wall used to be. It is hard to imagine the wall being there in places where they have now built up with modern buildings.
The interesting fact I learned from history museum: In the 1930s the inflation was so bad that monetary notes became so worthless in a matter of a couple of years. It became cheaper to use your money as toilet paper than to buy actual toilet paper (the toilet paper bit is allegedly a true story). Can you imagine that one day 5$ would buy 10 roles of toilet paper and a year later 10 roles of toilet paper (what is that 2000 squares maybe??) cost more than 5$ x 2000. The inflation was even worse than the example I described. It was something absurdly unbelievable. The direness of the economy leads people hopeless and desperately needing a new leader to promise a change… and who steps in, Hitler.
We had two nights to go out here, so we spent one on a pub crawl. Very fun, we met a lot of people on this one, a couple from Ireland who I got to exchange rugby songs with, a brother and sister from Mexico (it turned out that they guy was at Purdue doing graduate work the same time TJ was there, so they got to exchange Purdue bar stories), two guys from Belgium and some others. One of the bars we went to was a surprise hit for us. It was like a beach party in the middle of a city with no beaches, with neon lights, a huge sand beer garden and loads of people. The second night it was rainy and cold, so we decided to just go to a movie… The Simpsons! I said to TJ, wouldn’t it be great if they sold donuts at the snack bar for the Simpsons movie. Then I looked around and boom, there were donuts on the counter. Did they do this in the states too?