Dat ist mein schnitzel

Sorry for the huge gap in posts, the Internet has been pretty slow at most hostels so photos take a million years to load! Anyway going back to mid-June and Berlin...

Zoe and I arrived exhausted in Berlin at 1am but luckily we were staying in a fantastic hostel, right in the centre at Rosenthaler Platz, and our friend Lucie arrived shortly afterwards.

Berlin is an incredibly cool city, everyone dresses very hipster and the art scene is huge. In the morning we walked past the Brandenburg Gate to the Jewish museum, where we met Gabi and Ben. It was pretty overwhelming and we spent a few hours inside, but the collection is so big that it’s impossible to see everything. I thought the architecture was very clever; the museum is built around three axes, the Axis of Exile, the Axis of the Holocaust and the Axis of Continuity.

Later in the afternoon we headed over to the East Side Gallery, which is a collection of murals painted on the eastern side of one remaining section of the Berlin wall. There were some great pieces.

We watched a beautiful sunset, had a quick chai latte (woo first in six months) and headed home to sleep.

Saturday we managed to do a 4-hour walking tour of the city, with an amazing guide called Eva, who is half-German and half-Canadian. We started at the gate and then walked past the striking holocaust memorial just behind it.

About 200m from the memorial there is a carpark, with a small sign in the corner and Eva explained that below the carpark used to be Hitler’s bunker, and it was here that he committed suicide. It was quite eerie, but the bunker is no longer there as the Soviets blew it up, filled it with sewage and sealed it off.

We then headed over to some older buildings, on a beautiful square where there are two virtually identical cathedrals (one for the Protestants and one for the Catholics) and a beautiful opera house.

Close to the square is the Humboldt University, and it is the area in front of the law building that is called the ‘Book Burning Square’ as it was here that students affiliated with the Nazis burned thousands of books by Jewish, communist or homosexual authors.

There is a memorial to the book burning just underneath the square, a room of empty bookcases and a plaque with a quote by Jewish author Heinrich Heine that reads ‘Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also’. The scary thing about the quote is that it is from 1821, in reference to the Spanish inquisition, he never knew what was to come.

The next stop was the memorial to the victims of war and tyranny, then a beautiful walk past the old palaces onto Museum Island where the tour ended in front of the Berlinerdom Cathedral, which is covered in black marks from firebombs during the war.

I learnt so much about the history of Berlin, the building and destruction of the wall and the harsh restrictions placed on the lives of East-Berliners.


Unfortunately the Internet is pretty pathetic so I'm going to have to continue later but be prepared for an ambush when the connection picks up!