September 12-13 Berlin!

Berlin was a lot of fun. Before we went to Berlin, I e-mailed Fabian, Oliver and Jens to see if they were there. Ally did the same for Randy. Fabian said he'd be in town, but Oliver never replied and Jens was in Munich.

On the first night, Brian, Tom Tom and I arrived finally after our flight was delayed by an hour for no real reason. It's the easyjet way, I suppose. We also didn't know which train to take, so we ended up on a long train which took 2 hours to get to Berlin's downtown. On my way, Fabian called and asked if we wanted to go out tonight. Definitely!

When waiting at the train station to go to our hostel, we saw Fabian and his friend, also coincidentally named Fabian, on the train. They came with us to the hostel and we dropped off our stuff, then left. It was 2 AM by the time we left the hostel to go out. We went to the corner market, got some beers and started to drink them on the street. We met up with some of Fabian's friends and started to go out.

Flunkyball is a German drinking game which involves flunky pins, in our case empty glass beer bottles, and a flunkyball... This time, it was a leather loafer. Fabian taught us how to play Flunkyball while we were in the middle of an intersection with cops down the street from us. The game requires two teams and a couple of beers. In our case, it was one beer and several bottles of Jager. One team throws the flunkyball at the flunky pins and starts to drink. The other team runs up as fast as they can, tries to put the pins back up and brings the "ball" back. If you're ahead of the other team, you've been drinking more. Unlike American drinking games, where the loser drinks. Here, the winner drinks. It feels like such a better reward.

The next day we went to sightsee a bit. We met up with Ally at noon and had lunch at a Moroccan place, we think. Then, we went off to see the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie and all that good stuff. First up was Checkpoint Charlie, which is actually checkpoint number three (alpha, bravo, charlie). I thought it was named after a person. There was a museum near the checkpoint which records the events of the Berlin wall and the fall of the wall. It was a bit of information overload.

Next was the wall itself. Over the years, ingenious businessmen went to the wall with jackhammers and drilled off chunks of the wall to sell to unsuspecting tourists. People are willing to pay up to 20 euros for a chunk of perhaps slightly painted concrete. I paid 5 euros for my chunk, so I'm just as guilty. Because of this, the wall is a sad, skinny, bumpy concrete sliver which is now fenced off so people don't drill off any more and create holes.

From there, we went to Postdamerplatz, a square which shows much of modern Berlin. It's crazy that just 20 years ago, this place was completely deserted. Today, it had tons of buildings and shops around it. There was a fair and an open air concert going on.

The Holocaust memorial in Berlin is the only one I've seen thus far, and so it's the most striking. The memorial is a bunch of concrete blocks in the shape of graves at varying heights across a square of Berlin. Beneath the blocks is a Holocaust museum which has notes and information on the systematic murder of a wide array of people. It was sobering, but made me wonder why we're so focused on the Jews. There were a lot of other people who died. Also, there was a lot of other terrible things which happened in WWII to the Chinese, Filipino and other people in Asia. Why aren't they recognized. I think part of it is the power of the Jewish community in the US, which won... Another aspect is possibly the lack of power on the Chinese side to force the Japanese to recognize their mistakes. Also, the Japanese murders weren't systematic. They were barbaric, but they weren't systematic in the sense that they were calculating to eliminate an entire culture. They were just the "generic" rape, pillage, destroy. Not less disgusting, but I think far less disturbing.

We also got to see the Brandenburg gate, which was a originally a symbol of peace, later a symbol of separation of the wall. I knew very little about the division of Berlin and WWII, so this was really interesting to see.

From the gate, we went to see Reichstag, the Parliament building, which was beautiful and really cool, but had a 2 hour or something line, so I didn't want to go.

The Berliner Dom is quite an interesting building. Located behind (or in front of depending on your perspective) Lustgarten, it was built in 1451. In 1940, the Allies bombed it and a lot of the building became rubble. Then in 1944, a bomb of combustible liquids was placed inside of it and the fire couldn't be extinguished on the top part of the dome. The dome collapsed and they eventually built a temporary roof over it. There's a lot of controversy over whether to fully fix and restore the dome, removing the black charring. It's a testimony to the horrors committed during WWII and what people did to each other. Some felt fixing the dome was like covering up that part of history.

On our way back, we walked to Alexanderplatz to look for some food. When we got there, we saw something that looked like a circus from afar. it looked like it had tables outside, so we got closer to see what was inside and if we could have dinner there. Turns out, it was Berlin's first Oktoberfest. There was only one tent, the Hippodrom, which would then be taken down the next week and brought to Munich. This was the unintentional addition to the 3 beer weekends I was already going to in September.

That night, Fabian took us out again and we went to several more bars. No more flunkyball, but a lot of fun still. We went to a bar/club which had free chili as its food of choice. There was a projector which projected a horse on a wall and it was staring at you. Additionally, in another room, there was a DJ and a singer who was in a wolf man mask, a wife beater shirt, jogging shorts, elbow and knee pads. It was terribly strange, but hilarious.

I loved Berlin and would definitely go back again. It was awesome having Fabian there to show us around as well. I wish we could've said good bye to him formally on Sunday. He was awesome to take us around!!