Stability is overrated!

My roommate and I did Blind Booking through German Wings. It's an offer that gives you a category of what type of vacation you would like to do, such as "sun and beach," "Western Europe metropolis," or "party central," etc. Within each category are 5 - 10 cities and once you have chosen which category you want, German Wings doesn't tell you which city you're going to until AFTER you have paid them.

We chose "Western Europe metropolis" and ended up going to Berlin. We were hoping for London, but (very reminiscent of a very early post about the power of positive thought) Berlin ended up being 10 times better than London could have ever been!

First of all taking a 7 hour train to Berlin would have cost us 120 Euro's one way. This way our flight was only 1 hour and a 1/2 and was only 70 Euro's round trip.

Secondly, we took one of those free Sandeman's walking tours. I highly recommend these if you ever take a trip to Europe. All the tour guides work off of tips and nothing else and they are really charismatic, plus it's a great way to get a feel for the city so you know where you're going the rest of the time. Our particular tour guide was amazing. I am pretty sure my jaw was dragging on the ground for most of the tour seeing as he could paint a pretty interesting picture of Berlin's history.

And what a bad ass history it has. Berlin has been through a lot over the years and it is still an awesome and vibrant city. Kind of like the phoenix that rose from the ashes, but Berlin has kicked that phoenix's ass 10 fold! What's funny is my mother visited Berlin in the 60's and she has the exact same opinion as I do and that was before the Wall went up and came down. This city completely throws Vienna out of the running and is now my number one favorite city.

The East Side Gallery, which consists of over 100 artists from around the world that have painted the roughly 1 mile stretch of the East side of the Berlin Wall. It's supposed to represent freedom and hope for a new future and changing societal views.

I 100% believe the is an accurate depiction of what it looked like when the East side was finally united with the West side. Our tour guide hit the point home telling us that when The Wall went up at 1 am, August 13th, 1961, if you were a pair of parents who had dropped their kids off with their grandparents that night so you could enjoy an evening out in the city, you would come back the next morning to find that the wall had been erected and that your children from then on would be raised by their grandparents. Or if you were a student living in West Berlin and your school was in East Berlin, you could no longer continue your education there anymore. Examples like these go on and on and are just fascinating b/c you have to wonder psychologically, what it does to a country. How are the parents that had to watch their children be raised by their parents and only visit through slits in the wall able to bounce back from that kind of isolation? I don't know the answer to that, but they did. Which is why Berlin is so bad ass, considering they were also still recovering from being one of the most bombed cities in WWII.

Michael Jackson knows where it's at!!

If you notice the rounded edges at the top of the wall, those are sewage pipes that East Berlin purchased from West Berlin. After trying barbed wire and other gloomy ways to line The Wall, they found that those trying to escape couldn't get a good grasp in order to hoist themselves over because of how rounded the edges were. Can you imagine being he person coming up with these methods? And the irony just really strikes me that the sewage pipes were purchased from Western Berlin!

Humboldt University, where Karl Marx and Albert Einstein taught before moving onto Princeton.

The square where all of the University's books written by those that opposed the Nazi Party, all 20,000 of them, were burned. In the center of the square there is a glass panel that looks underground onto white bookshelves that could hold the 20,000 that were burned in the 1930's. It is also memorialized with a plaque that says "That was only a pre-lude; Where they burn books, they ultimately burn people." - Heinrich Heine (who ironically wrote that, not in regards to WWII, but in a work he wrote in 1820.)

Berlin's war memorial, a woman holding her dying son. Above a hole in the ceiling allows for any kind of weather to pour over it, adding to the darkness of the overall memorial.

Parliament, which was burned down during WWII and resurrected.

One of the last architectural pieces of the Nazi regime still standing. And now it holds the tax office. I'm not quite sure anyone ever really moved out of that building in the first place! It's built to make you feel small while looking at it and this picture only captures a 1/3 of how big it actually is.

Berlin really wanted to create a memorial to honor the Jewish population that suffered during WWII and this is what they came up with. The city wants it to become sort of like a park where people can sit and enjoy the day or a picnic and really integrate it with their everyday lives. It is nameless and the meaning behind it is vague. The artist didn't want any pre-conceived notions about it, which is why he purposefully left out a description.

The only concrete things that we can gain from his inspiration is that the blocks are supposed to look like the Jewish Cemetery in Prague. (Another reason to travel. Everything is all so connected and since I have actually been to the Jewish Cemetery, I completely understood and saw the comparison of the reference to this particular memorial. Compare this picture to the memorial and you will see how lopsided the concrete squares look, just like these gravestones.)

This memorial, as you walk through it, is also supposed to create a feeling of disorientation and chaos even, which is what those being persecuted must have felt everyday. As I walked through it, I couldn't help but feel that exact way because you never knew who was going to round the corner or who you were going to bump into.

The lay-out of Hitler's bunker. Berlin was being bombed 24 hours a day 7 days a week during the last weeks of the war. During the Day the Royal Air Force was giving this city Hell and the American Air Force took over at night. Of course his bunker was 49 feet below ground. So it never got destroyed until years after the war had actually ended and apartments were being constructed above it.

This is the actual spot his bunker was. And according to our tour guide is the designated spot for all Berliner's to take their dog to do all of their business.

When Hitler was found dead with his wife Eva Braun, his will asked that he be burned and buried so he couldn't be paraded around the way Mussolini was after he was captured. But the military was out of fuel and time so they really did a poor job of burning his remains.

And his half-charred body was buried right where that red car is parked. After Berlin was liberated, the Soviets dug his body up and buried him in a small town in Germany, but told the other Allies that he had escaped to Argentina. Soon CIA agents realized the truth and Soviet Politician Yuri Andropov had Hitler found yet again and properly cremated and washed down the Biederitz River.

Lots

And

Lots

Of Beautiful, Gorgeous

German Architecture!

Our tour guide (can you tell I really liked this guy) made an important note that there was a lot of talk about war and such, but that you can't delineate a country because of a 12 year period. And I think sometimes it's easy to do so. Just like America's history with segregation and the Trail of Tears or even (yikes) Bush. It's how you come out on the other side that matters!

Classes end June 30th and all I have to do is make it through an AWFUL Economics class and then I am home free! (Terrible life I know!) July should be interesting as it is a month I am declaring as "Anything Goes!" Wherever the wind takes me, I guess I will go. It's a weird feeling having nothing keeping you anywhere. It's bittersweet, the instability of it all.

And in 12 days I will be 23 a pretty unstable age, no matter where you are!

Oh yeah - Boston Bruins are beyond amazing! They absolutely deserve their 176,000 dollar bar tab! They made it worth waking up at 2am and staying awake until 4 or 5am every other day to stream their games! They made New England proud!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!