Berlin: July 12
Jul. 14th, 2008 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skylark913July 12
It's 5am. I got about 3.5 or 4 hours of sleep. No word from Chris. I'll try calling him again a little later. Thom hasn't managed to get ahold of my parents. I'm wonderign if they went out of town for the weekend. Right now I'm going to finish eating breakfast, see about getting a Day Travel Pass, ring Cris once more, and then head out to explore. I'll just stay at the airport again if worse comes to worse.
Thom just called me back. Apparently Chris lost his SIM card, or got his number locked or something when he turned his phone off. He's at the hostel and will meet me at Alexander Platz at noon today if I can't get ahold of him. Mom also called Thom back. She's thinking of getting a new phone today since her's is on the fritz.
Luckily when I got off the S-bahn at Alexander Platz Chris happened to be there. So we ended up meeting early and sitting by a fountain while he finished breafast. Then we went to Vodafone so he could get his phone unlocked and working again. His German sounds very nearly fluent to me. I decided to let him handle most of the talking all day.
Once his phone is working again we set off to explore. We found a little park dedicated to the events of 1968. I got a cool picture of me sitting on Marx's knee. I like I'm asking for a pony and a rocket. We moved on and looked at some old churches and monuments.
Then we headed for the Brandenburg Gate, the place where JFK made a fool of himself by claiming "Ich bin ein Berliner!" I, however, did not pronounce myself to be a jelly donut. I settled for a picture.
From the Brandenburg Gate we headed to the Reichstag. It's a deceivingly huge building. The queue to go inside was exceptionally long, so we didn't stay long. Instead we went to look for food (Doeners are quite amazing) but found the Holocaust Memorial first. It's a huge coutyard filled with grey blocks of varying height. We theorized that it is supposed to represent the loss of identity that occured.
After lunch we head to Checkpoint Charlie and die Berliner Mauer. The checkpoint itself is rather unobtrusive, but I did get a pressed penny out of it. The wall, and memorial, however was much more moving. There were some beautifully repainted slabs of the wall on display, as well as a short strip of what is left of the wall. Also, running through the city is what we've fondly called the Berlin Speedbump. It's a line of brick that shows where the wall used to run. The memorial at the wall was about Hitler's rise to power and the horrors of his reign and WWII. It showed anti-semitic propoganda of the Nazi party and the other big names who were in the HOlocaust.
Then we hopped on the S-bahn again for a long ride to the Olypic Stadium. There was an event going on, so we didn't go in, but instead got throughly turned around in the city on our way to the Schloss. It was big and impressive. The walkway to get there was quite long. I would rather have come in a carriage as gentry than walked as a petitioning peasant.
After that we went to the Babylon Museum. There were a whole bunch of cool things in there. We started in the Ancient Greek and Roman area. I got some pictures of statues of the gods, including Artemis and Apollo. We then moved on to a set of rooms containing old artifacts and modern art. They had lots of old books. So were written in insular miniscule, and others in the fancy Altehochdeutsch text. We saw a Lego set that was of a concentration camp. It had all the gory details and reminded me of the dungeon Lego sets now. There was an exhibit called Glitter Cum Saddam. It was a series of newspapers with Saddam Hussein on the front that the artist had splattered with semen and glitter. Chris and I spent a while musing over the interpretation of this one.
Our feet were killing us by this point so we head out to get dinner and souvineers. We passed by the TV tower. It looks like a giant needle with a bubble on it. We wandered around for a bit before heading to the hostel. Did you know they've got ads that are pictures of fruit with condoms on?
After dropping off our non-valueables at the hostel we headed out again for a bit. We went to SandSation, a giant sandcastle exhibit. Unfortunately it had closed for the night. So instead we walked around a bit and Chris taught me some German idomatic phrases. "Ab geht!" means "get up!" and is used at parties in situations when drunk girls dance on tables. "Es geht um den Wurst" :literally, "it goes around the sausage," but is used to say "things are getting serious."
We headed back to the hostel a little later, knowing we'd have to be up early for me to catch my 10:15 flight back the next morning.
It's 5am. I got about 3.5 or 4 hours of sleep. No word from Chris. I'll try calling him again a little later. Thom hasn't managed to get ahold of my parents. I'm wonderign if they went out of town for the weekend. Right now I'm going to finish eating breakfast, see about getting a Day Travel Pass, ring Cris once more, and then head out to explore. I'll just stay at the airport again if worse comes to worse.
Thom just called me back. Apparently Chris lost his SIM card, or got his number locked or something when he turned his phone off. He's at the hostel and will meet me at Alexander Platz at noon today if I can't get ahold of him. Mom also called Thom back. She's thinking of getting a new phone today since her's is on the fritz.
Luckily when I got off the S-bahn at Alexander Platz Chris happened to be there. So we ended up meeting early and sitting by a fountain while he finished breafast. Then we went to Vodafone so he could get his phone unlocked and working again. His German sounds very nearly fluent to me. I decided to let him handle most of the talking all day.
Once his phone is working again we set off to explore. We found a little park dedicated to the events of 1968. I got a cool picture of me sitting on Marx's knee. I like I'm asking for a pony and a rocket. We moved on and looked at some old churches and monuments.
Then we headed for the Brandenburg Gate, the place where JFK made a fool of himself by claiming "Ich bin ein Berliner!" I, however, did not pronounce myself to be a jelly donut. I settled for a picture.
From the Brandenburg Gate we headed to the Reichstag. It's a deceivingly huge building. The queue to go inside was exceptionally long, so we didn't stay long. Instead we went to look for food (Doeners are quite amazing) but found the Holocaust Memorial first. It's a huge coutyard filled with grey blocks of varying height. We theorized that it is supposed to represent the loss of identity that occured.
After lunch we head to Checkpoint Charlie and die Berliner Mauer. The checkpoint itself is rather unobtrusive, but I did get a pressed penny out of it. The wall, and memorial, however was much more moving. There were some beautifully repainted slabs of the wall on display, as well as a short strip of what is left of the wall. Also, running through the city is what we've fondly called the Berlin Speedbump. It's a line of brick that shows where the wall used to run. The memorial at the wall was about Hitler's rise to power and the horrors of his reign and WWII. It showed anti-semitic propoganda of the Nazi party and the other big names who were in the HOlocaust.
Then we hopped on the S-bahn again for a long ride to the Olypic Stadium. There was an event going on, so we didn't go in, but instead got throughly turned around in the city on our way to the Schloss. It was big and impressive. The walkway to get there was quite long. I would rather have come in a carriage as gentry than walked as a petitioning peasant.
After that we went to the Babylon Museum. There were a whole bunch of cool things in there. We started in the Ancient Greek and Roman area. I got some pictures of statues of the gods, including Artemis and Apollo. We then moved on to a set of rooms containing old artifacts and modern art. They had lots of old books. So were written in insular miniscule, and others in the fancy Altehochdeutsch text. We saw a Lego set that was of a concentration camp. It had all the gory details and reminded me of the dungeon Lego sets now. There was an exhibit called Glitter Cum Saddam. It was a series of newspapers with Saddam Hussein on the front that the artist had splattered with semen and glitter. Chris and I spent a while musing over the interpretation of this one.
Our feet were killing us by this point so we head out to get dinner and souvineers. We passed by the TV tower. It looks like a giant needle with a bubble on it. We wandered around for a bit before heading to the hostel. Did you know they've got ads that are pictures of fruit with condoms on?
After dropping off our non-valueables at the hostel we headed out again for a bit. We went to SandSation, a giant sandcastle exhibit. Unfortunately it had closed for the night. So instead we walked around a bit and Chris taught me some German idomatic phrases. "Ab geht!" means "get up!" and is used at parties in situations when drunk girls dance on tables. "Es geht um den Wurst" :literally, "it goes around the sausage," but is used to say "things are getting serious."
We headed back to the hostel a little later, knowing we'd have to be up early for me to catch my 10:15 flight back the next morning.
