Nowhere Near Berlin

Our next stop brought us to Berlin. As it turns out, Germany may be my overall favorite country that we've visited. I loved Munich, and Berlin was no disappointment. I had been gettng pretty used to the beautiful, centuries-old architecture of every single European city and I must say that in this respect Berlin was a breath of fresh air. Pretty much everything was leveled in the 1940's (in the case of the opera house, twice) for obvious reasons, so everything that wasn't rebuilt to look exactly the same as before is pretty modern and fun to look at.

Berlin is a history fan's dream. So much stuff went on there and you can still see the evidence of it. We went on a walking tour with a girl who graduated with a degree in history, so we got to hear some pretty good stories. We saw, among others, the Brandenburg Gate, a memorial to the Jews killed in the Holocaust (designed by Peter Eisenman, DAAP man), the site of Hitler's bunkers, the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the square where the nazis burnt the books, and the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled his baby over a balcony. One of my favorite things was the square where the books were burned. In the center of the square is an underground room with shelves enough to house the 2000-some books burned there. You can look down and see the empty shelves through a glass skylight, but the room is permanently sealed to represent the irrevocable event.

One of the days in Berlin we spent 8 HOURS at the zoo! It was a nice change of pace, and totally excusable because the Berlin zoo is supposed to be really well designed and stuff like that. I got to see Knut, the famous (not so) baby polar bear that has his own TV show and theme song in Germany. We watched the Emperor Penguins, my favorites, for about 20 minutes and got to see giraffes making new giraffes. One of the best parts of the day was when Megan thought that the red raccoons were hyenas. We still havent let her live that one down.