Berlin, Germany

We arrived last night and Levi was waiting for us at the airport, and we ventured to take the Underground train to our place in Berlin. The next morning, we decided to not wake up until the afternoon... Finally we can sleep in! No early check out, or breakfast to be up for... We spent the day with Levi and Jeni and went around town, then later we attended a demonstration, which was more like a parade! It was so cool, there were floats playing music and thousands of people following the trucks throughout the neighborhood, at least a couple of miles. The demonstration was for a certain portion of land in the city that at the moment no one owns, but the government is trying to get it back, most likely for development, so the demonstration was against that. We ended our day sitting at the river until after 7 when the sun was still out. We went home and took a long nap to get ready for a night out in Berlin, which usually lasts until the morning, but we didn't make it that long.

Everything in Berlin closes on Sunday, so there is a big market in the park every Sunday. People were selling a variety of items, and food, and there was karaoke in a huge outside stadium. That was fun to watch, anyone could volunteer themselves to sing karaoke in front of hundreds of people filling the stands. Everyone would cheer for the person, and they were usually really good! I wish we had a market like this back home.

We went to an old house that was turned into an museum on the history of the Holocaust. Afterwards we went to the TV Tower, which is the highest building/tower in the city, about 300 metres high. We waited in line to go up to the viewing dome, and we could see all of Berlin up top. We had a nice dinner at the restaurant that orbited around so we saw the view as we ate.

We wondered around the city today but the main site we saw was the Holocaust memorial made of hundreds of cement blocks of different heights. I took the meaning of it as how in depth the Holocaust really was because from the outside the memorial looked like a cement garden of blocks but once you step inside you are lost within the surrounding blocks. It was a cool to see and pretty fun to run around and get lost, it didn't really strike me as a memorial though.

We wondered around another part of the huge city of Berlin and went to an outside museum about Berlin's history. It wasn't a very eventful day. We went to Jeni's apartment afterwards and decided to stay up to see the sunrise! We slept all day the next day.