Ach, Berlin

Well hello everyone, and welcome back to the matt in europe show. As I look back to see when the last time I posted something was, i realize, wow, that was like 5 days ago, I've been busy, eh? I will work forwards from the last time.

We took the bikes out again the next day for a trip to the van Gogh museum, which was really neat. It put everything down chronologically including the time period (other artists) before he started painting, and then his work in order. There were a ton of people there which was hard to get through, but the art was neat. The part that I thought was really cool, was the "colorization" section. He had black and white copies of other artists work, and from those, he created copies, in color, of their work. The differences and similarities of his work to the original, with the only link being black and white was very intriguing. After which, we went to lunch at the hard rock, which was, well, not that great, but still ok. We continued on to biking down the Amstel River, which was beautiful (see pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/98781425@N00/ ). We saw a windmill and cows and such, which was cool, because 15 min prior, we had been deep in Amsterdam, and only left by bike. After this excursion, we hit up the grocery store for a bite, and headed back to turn our bikes in. I might add that we had to sit down very gingerly for a day or so after the biking because our butts were really hurting - like really hurting - we did a lot of biking in Amsterdam. We walked back, and a had a little nap I think, and went out for a bit after making phone calls and reservations for Berlin. If you'll see from the pictures, there was a guy, with a fireball that he kept "juggling" around his body in the square near our hostel. We went out to the bars later that night for a while, till we got tired, and realized we had to get up early the next morning.

The train ride to Berlin went off without a hitch - we got there, (again, too early, just like Toronto - better safe than sorry) and got on the train, and enjoyed the ride there. We almost got off a station too early, but we figured it out before we got off and had to face an unusually long local train system ride. Once again, we got out and said "uhhhhh so now what" when faced with how to get to our hostel, but we found an information booth, and he helped us. We are a little bit farther east than he was familiar with, and so he mapped the location and told us how to use the S-Bahn (surface trains), and the U-Bahn (underground trains) to get to our destination. I think i posted pictures of the station closest to us, Ostkaruz, which reminded me of what nazi germany should look like, but just because of the graffiti, and the overgrownness of the plant life. Our hostel is great though - great people, especially the owner Glenn, who left New Zealand when he was 18, never went back, and somehow ended up in Berlin. Great guy though - owns the hostel, a cafe next door where I've been using the internet, and probably the apartment building upstairs. We met some cool people from california who we went to hang out with that night and talked about such things as the meaning of the word "fickle" to the environmental situation in the united states / the world. Yesterday, we went on a Free Walking Tour which was one of the best tours I've ever been on - they operate solely on tips. Our tour guide was very animated as perhaps you can see from the pictures (he's the guy in the red shirt) and very good at explaining the stuff we saw. The one exhibit you might be wondering about that I took pictures of, was all the different height stones, with the narrow spaces in between. That is the "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe" (or something similar using the word "Murdered") That was quite the memorial, with quite the name which is intended to use striking language - they don't really want what actually happened to fall by the wayside. Also, we saw the berlin wall, with all the stories that went along with it. Crazy stuff, I'll tell you. After the tour, we walked around a festival (greener earth type thing we think) which featured bands - one of which was a Ska band. They were good, but it was definitely weird hearing ska in german. We proceeded to go to the Reichstad building or the parliament building which is the glass sucker that we took all the pictures on top of. It's an older building that they added the dome to the top later on. The interesting thing about that, is the purpose of the glass dome. In the bottom of the building is where the parliament members all sit. The dome is directly above it. The point is that the people of germany can walk up there and look down on their government to make sure they like what they're doing, because they are all elected officials. Make your government work for you is pretty much the theme there. That night we just kind of hung out with the other people staying at the hostel which included a bunch of guys from california, and boston, and some girls who were on vacation in Berlin from Munich - can you believe they are only 15 and 16? I don't know how things work here, but if I were their parents, I wouldn't let them go stay in a hostel at 15 and 16 years of age - whatever, they were good at speaking english, which they told us was the universal language - "you have to learn english" is what they said. Speaking of languages - it's the general consensus between me and simon that we feel bad that we sort of expect everyone to know english. We love it that they all do though - I mean, the world pretty much takes english as their second or third language, so it works for us, and I suppose for them too because people in other countries also take english, and so now french people and german people can converse if they both took english.

Today we went out to go see the Gugenheim (sp?) museum, which was free today, but was slightly underwhemling. It was just one room with some works in it, but nothing all that special. Oh, and it had a cafe. That's it - I guess it was good that it was free. From there, we continued on to the Pergamonmuseum which houses greek and roman artifacts, statues, parts of statues, and a giant gate they stole (oops, "collected") from Turkey. It was undergoing repairs because they have yet to put it back together after it got nailed by a bomb from WWII. An interesting thing we learned on the tour yesterday was how to date buildings. If the building had bullet holes and shrapnel scars, it was older than the war. If not, and it just looked old, it was just made to look old, and was built after the war. Kind of sad to have to date things with bullet holes, but as you can see from the pictures I took of the side of one building, it's pretty evident that they are there, and everywhere. After the pergamon, we decided our feet hurt too much, and we came back to the hostel after stopping at a street vendor called Check Point Curry, a play on words from the military checkpoint ran by the americans called Checkpoint Charlie. They have very good curryworst, which is sausage, cut up, covered with this kind of sauce and curry, along with fries. Very good. We made some phone calls, booked the Munich hostel, and grabbed a nap. We just had some dinner at the cafe next door - very good chicken curry for me, and a fantastic looking cheeseburger for simon. We'll see what we do tonight, but I'm sure i'm going to be tired fairly early, given that it is 10:15 already, and we have to get up "early" tomorrow to hop on an 10:57 train to munich.

Thanks for reading so much at one time - hope you enjoyed the info.

I love and miss you all so very very much-- thanks for all the support!

From Berlin, in the schlafmeile hostel,
Matt