Berlin, Day 2 (Friday, Sept 10)

I started my second day in Berlin by going to the East Side Gallery. It's the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin wall, and it has been turned into an outside gallery.

It's really interesting to see the different pieces of work that people put on the wall, and the messages and the feelings behind a lot of them. It was odd walking next to such a large stretch of the wall though. It was, as I said before, a bit hard to wrap my mind around the wall and the amount of pain and strife it caused so many people and that it was up until so recently - it came down in my lifetime.

After the East Side Gallery I walked over to the TV tower to go up for (as I heard) fantastic views, but the line was so outrageously long that I skipped it and went to the Berlin Cathedral.

The inside of the church was so stunningly beautiful. It's impossible to capture it in photos.

I also went into the crypt below the church and saw the resting place of a number of Prussian Kings, which was quite interesting. After that I climbed what felt like a million stairs....

...to the top of the dome for spectacular views of the city.

After leaving the church I walked around the town a bit, and visited a few of the things we did on the walking tour the day before to have a chance to experience them without the huge group of people and time commitments of the tour. I then went to the Reichstag (building that houses Germany's parliament)...

....and climbed to the top of the glass dome on top.

After that I wandered around for a bit longer, and saw the Brandenburg Gate lit up at night, which was beautiful.

Then I grabbed a bit of food and headed back to my hostel to get some sleep!

Berlin, Day 1 (Thursday, Sept 9)

I took the overnight train to Berlin, leaving Paris at about 8pm and arriving around 9am. After I boarded I went to the dining car and had a glass of wine before I went to sleep and ended up meeting a bunch of really cool people and talking to them for a long time before bed.

When I arrived in Berlin I had decided I wanted to walk to my hostel to see the city a bit. It was an hour and a half walk (which I was prepared for) and a bit rainy (which I was not prepared for), but I still enjoyed the walk a lot and saw some beautiful things.

I got to my hostel, and the person at the front desk told me about a free walking tour that was leaving in 20 minutes, so I ran and caught that. It was a fantastic way to start my trip, and I saw a lot of interesting sites and heard a lot of wonderful stories.

We went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is an unbelievably moving memorial. Walking through it is an emotional experience....

...as was the experience of two other memorials we saw. One was designed by a woman who had lost her father in the first world war and then lost both her son and husband in world war two. It's a statue of a woman holding her son in an empty room with stark gray walls and a large hole in the ceiling. It's very moving. The second was in memorial of the book burnings that took place in Berlin in 1933 when students (students!) burned thousands of books. It's a really cool concept for the memorial, it's a huge room with empty white bookshelves. It's actually underground and you can see it through a pane of glass in the middle of the square.

We also saw quite a few other interesting things, like a stretch of the Berlin wall, and the Berlin Cathedral....

And these two churches.....

Look similar? That's because they are. The French built a large church in Berlin, so the Germans built a church too - right across the square, nearly identical, just 2 meters taller. Haha.

It was a wonderful day. I went to dinner that evening and had an amazing pork schnitzel with fried potatoes and of course a glass of fantastic German beer :)