Whatever You Do...Don't Mention the War

Just a fair warning: this blog entry is going to cover 4 days and 3 nights of Berlin tourism...so. it's going to be long. If the challenge of reading this is too daunting, just turn away now. No one will judge you.
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Day 1
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London Stansted, 6am: I had just spent the night sleeping in an airport. Don't believe the stories...it's not as fun as people say. We arrived in Berlin around 9am their time; we were stll exhausted, but we tried to power through it. Nathaniel and his sister Cassie thought that they could catch a quick nap on the train from Shönefeld Airport...
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...they were wrong. The minute Nathaniel's head hit his backpack, a 4-man mariachi/polka band started playing right next to him for about three train stops.

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Poor Nathaniel couldn't catch a break to save his life. Right after they left, a 5-man Christian a capella group entered our car and started singing gospel songs. This was going to be a long day.
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We separated momentarily so that we could each check into our respective hostels. I was saying at the Amstel House near Turmstrasse for the duration of my stay, while everyone else wa staying near Alexanderplatz. It was a pretty nice place, except for the fact that someone took my provided linens on the last night I was there.
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We needed to link back up arond noonish. Damn-near hopelessly lost, I am charged with finding a small cafe on Invalidenstrasse where everyone is eating lunch. I pass by a place called Invaliden Park..."The Invalid Park". Sure, why not? Cripples and sickies need parks, too.
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Further down the road, I walk by der Museum für Naturkunde, which was by far the scariest-looking natural history museum I've ever seen.
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We eventually meet up and decide to head ondown to the Reichstag building. On the way, we pass literally through Berlin-Hauptbahnhof (West Berlin Station).
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Enormous, gorgeous, and plenty of American food chains.
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The Reichstag Buiding: the most-visited active parliament in the world. I'm not sure why.
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Maybe it's because of the big glass dome on the roof that you can climb up. Sadly, renovation work started the day we arrived...so we just walked around the roof of the Reichstag building and looked around for a bit.
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We only spent a few minutes at the Reichstag building, because the only drawing factor about it was tht damn dome. We walked over to the Brandenburg Gate, whic was apparently a huge place for touristy pictures. We saw two guys, one in a Soviet Union uniform, the other in a WWII US uniform, both holding their respective flags, charging for pictures next to them. If there isn't a wall between them and there's no visible hostility, I'm sorry, but I just down buy it.
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Things got dark very fast. Just as night hit, we stumbled across the Holocaust Memorial. It was gigantic. Almost the size of a full city block with thousands of these concrete rectangles, each the same length and width, but differing in height as you went deeper into the memorial.

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The rectangles slowly began to turn into monoliths, towering over us and turning the memorial into a dark labyrinth.
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We had accidentally scared each other several times while in the memorial...then, we started to do it on purpose. It turned out to be rather fun.
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Don't get be wrong, I'm not making light of the Holocaust here, but could you imagine playing paintball in a field structured like this memorial? You'd shit your pants every time you turned a corner. I mean, look at how creepy this thing is at night!
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We quickly discovered that when the sun went down, everything in Berlin became creepy as hell.
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Tommy decided to go with the flow.
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We did, however, see a magnificent theatre in Gendarmenmarkt with a statue of the four muses in front of it...which was nice.

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After that, we headed down Friedrichstrasse, which is kind of like the Berlin Oxford Street (bunch of stores car dealerships, etc.) While we were walking down the road towards Alexaderplatz, we came across a totalled Mini Cooper that the owner just seemed to have recently abandoned on the side of the street. We took full advantage of this opportunity.
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TOURIST ANGRY! TOURIST SMASH!
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Day 2

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We met up in Potsdamer Platz, which is kind of like Times Square, but smaller and darker.
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I mean, there were tall buildings and a train station. I'm not really sure how to describe it there.
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They did have a display of some large chunks of the Berlin Wall around there, though. There was even a kiosk with Soviet "soldiers" offering to stamp your real passport with old East Berlin passport stamps from the 50's and 60's. I didn't want to have to try to explain to pissy UK Border Patrol that I did not, in fact, travel through time during my vacation, so I opted out of the pasport stamping.
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We made our way through the colossal Tiergarten and we stumbled upon a large monument to all the Soviet soldiers who died in WWII.
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They had heavy cannons and tanks along the outside, so we had some fun. For those of you who read my Dover blog...

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...sorry, Doug, but Tommy now holds the record for largest fake artillery penis. I hope to stand behind the HMS Belfast before I leave the UK. I want that record.
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I imagine Tiergarten is lovely in the spring and the Summer, but it just sort of looked dead when we were there.
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It had a pretty music statue, though.
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In the center of Tiergarten is der Siegessäule (Victory Column). The Nazis moved this statue from outside the Reichstag building to here, added a whole extra part to it to make it much taller, and made it the symbol of their triumphantness. It's now a symbol of Berlin's homosexual community.

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Well, there's a complete 180 for you.
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Back to Potsdamer Platz and into the Sony Center. Quite large, but everything in and near it was quite expensive.
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They did have a LEGO giraffe, though, which was cool.

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We hungered at that point, so we headed over to a little restaurant, near Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten (Zoological Gardens Station), that I fell in love with. It was mostly because of the food...
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...but they were also in close proximity to the zoo's llama enclosure. Funny story with the llamas: they were all on one side of the pen, looking at a younger on on the other side. I went to take a photo of them all looking in one direction. One must have spotted me, because when I looked up from the camera, they were all looking at me dead in the eye. I figure it was that punk in the center that ratted me out. I did, however, promise to tag them in the photo for Facebook if they promised not to spit. They didn't spit, so I guess they were cool with it.
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One of the coolest things we saw while in Berlin was the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche (Memorial church), which had it's highest spire damaged by the bombing of Berlin during the war. They decided not to repair it, but to cover the damage with cement to stand as a testament to the futility of war. There was a lot of that in Berlin. Apparently, Germans aren't a big fan of war nowadays.
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At night, we hit Checkpoint Charlie, the most famous of locations of transportation in between West and East Berlin. We walked into the American sector, but there wasn't a whole lot there.
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We were able to walk back into the Soviet sector because I had purchased a Soviet winter hat to try and combat the rain. You'll see that hat in a later photo.
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Strange enough, we ran into our buddy Devin from NYUL on the only day he was staying in Berlin. Naturally, we went out for beers. Devin let us in on a somewhat touristy beer served in a goblet and drank through a straw.

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Nathaniel said it wasn't a beer, but something he drank when he was sick.

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Tommy called it the gayest drink he had ever seen.

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I have dubbed it Der Fraubrau, or "The Woman-Beer".

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Sadly, I found it delicious.
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The effects of Der Fraubrau were so strong that when Nathaniel ordered a pitcher of man-beer to follow, he was incapable of pouring a decent glass of beer. Side-effects of Der Fraubrau may include, but are not limited to, unexpected intoxication, loss of alcohol-related motor skills, and loss of testicles.
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Day 3

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We stayed relatively close to Alexanderplatz because everyone was headed off for Munich that evening. I believe this is a shot of the Altes Museum, but I only took this because it was a convenient extra photo to take while standing in the middle of the square to take a photo of...
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...der Berliner Dom, a massive Protestant Cathedral built in the late 1800's. It cost 5 Euros to get in and people were hesitant about it, but the allure of the cathedral prevailed and we went in.
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5 Euros well spent.
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Easily the prettiest church's I've ever been in, surpassing Bath Abbey and Westminster Abbey in grandeur.
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I think the most spectacular part was the altar. You can't really see it in this photo...
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...but I'll do the best I can with this one. It's almost impossible to do justice to it without being there.
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The Berliner Dom also houses the remains of the Hohenzollern royal family, including Friderick the Great.
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We climbed up to the top of the cathedral and saw a spectacular view of all of Berlin.
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Interesting story about that TV tower, by the way. The Russians wanted to build a large, rotating TV tower when they conquered Berlin to show off how wealthy they were and how advanced their technology was. Halfway through building it, they realized that they didn't have the money or the technology to pull it off...so they hired the Swiss to do it for them.
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Ahh, Berlin...
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...we will conquer it for the Motherland!
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PS - We found a hash museum that grew its own shit in the window. Crazy.

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Our last meal together was at a little sausage stand across the street, by far my favorite place to eat in Berlin, mostly because of the awesome dude that runs it. If you'e ever in Berlin, drop by this place and get some sausages.

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Day 4

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I was on my own for my last day in Berlin...so I sought solice among the animals.

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This was the most dangerous thing I've done since coming to Europe...chilling near hippos.

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Unfortunately, my camera battery died shortly thereafter, but let's see if we can't some up the attitudes of the animals in der Zoogolischer Garten in two words...

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Vocal & Agitated

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I got the shit scared out of me by a lion who decided to give a full bellowing roar less than 10ft away from me and by a Siberian tiger that decided to roar and jump at the cage where the zookeeper was trying to transfer it outside.

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That pretty much sums up Berlin. If you're thinking about travelling there, here are some tips:

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1) Try to speak German to the people. They all know English, but they are so happy when you try to accommodate them as opposed to th other way around.

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2) Don't respond if a small child or a middle-aged woman wearing a handkerchief on her head asks if you speak English. They are Bosnian gypsy vermin who are trying to beg for money. If you do get trapped and they hand you their "begging letter", reply (in whatever language you want) that you are a university student and you don't have money. Walk away immediately. Give them absolutely nothing, not even pity...because gypsies have no souls.

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3) Eat the local food. It's some of the best in the world if you know what to order. Stick to beer and meats and you'll do fine.

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And, if you're looking for some fun extra shit we found, scroll down and read my "Top 11 WTF Moments of Berlin".