Ich Ben Ein Berliner (Day 1)

Well, I'm back from Berlin and now you have to read about the trip. And in case you were wondering, yes, it did rain the entire time we were in Berlin. Awesome I know. Someone also told me that they had heard that this June was the rainiest June in something like 130 years. Still, we persevered and ended up having a great time.

Anyway, we hopped on a bus and drove down to Gedser where we got on the ferry Pris Joachim that took us to Rostock, Germany. Then we continued our drive down to Berlin. We unloaded at the Hotel Generator, our hostel for the weekend. Despite complaints from Danish (the guy, not the language), I thought the accomodations were decent for a hostel. We got there at 3:30 so after dumping off stuff in our rooms a group of about a dozen of us set forth into the former East Berlin.

The first thing I noticed about Berlin was how much graffiti there was compared to Copenhagen. Extensive graffiti was everywhere, and it was a much more artistic than the amateur graffiti in Denmark. Danish graffiti is 1) almost always in english and 2) usually pretty weak. Typically graffiti in Denmark will be something like "wish me fortune" or "go to hell please" or something like that. The second most noticable thing was that there were a lot more cars, although traffic is still nowhere near what you would see in Minneapolis.

Anyway after hoping a couple of trains we ended up a couple blocks from a remaining strip of the Berlin Wall along Mühlerstaße (if you want a pretty good map of the traces of the Berlin Wall here is one). We walked across the Spree river and passed some cool buildings including Schlesisches Tor and the Church of Saint Thomas before hitting up some Japanese food in Oranienstrasse. After that we just cruised around for a while and managed to find a couple of interesting things, including Checkpoint Charlie, Gendarmenmarkt (home of the Konzerthaus, the Deutsch Dom, and the Französiche Dom), the Rotes Rathaus, and the infamous television tower Fernsehturm (a.k.a. Telespargel or "tele-asparagus"). With a big day ahead of us, we called it a night and went back home on the train.

I'll post more tomorrow about our trip!