99 Luftballoons....

We made our way from Prague or “Praha” as its called in the Czech language and headed 420 kilometers to berlin. In the morning however, as we were loading the bus, the drivers bags were stolen by some rando walking on and just taking it in the confusion of loading the bus. A few people saw it happen and didn’t say or do anything, not quite realizing what they witnessed. So far, knock on wood, all my stuff has been safe. We stopped off in Dresden, site of the largest death toll due to American bombing outside of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima. It was nice and fully rebuilt, so rebuilt to the point that last year it lost its “world heritage” site status. We only stayed for about two hours to get a few pics, learn a little history and grab lunch.
We then made our way to berlin and stopped off at the eastern gallery, which is a 1 mile long section of the wall, where artists have painted all kinds of murals and graffiti. After a quick check in we went out to a beer hall and got dinner and liter beers. I made some translation mistakes. In Vienna I really liked the Leberkase, which is a lot like a spam sandwich, here I ordered the kalbleber and as soon as I bit into it I was able to figure out immediately what Kalbleber translates into, calf liver. I will eat liver, but I don’t really like it. It was cultural and recommended and was ok, but not my first choice. Afterwords we went to a club with all kinds of flame throwers going off, it was neat but I had a better time talking history and art with the tour guide until a bunch of drunks from our group came to mess it up. Its been frustrating because a lot of kids on this tour have just been here to drink and don’t want to see any sites and skip all the tours and things like that, they should have just gone to a bar in America and saved money. This one couple in the back of the bus particularly suck, because the tour guide passed around one of those “rate the tour” questionnaires. They checked off all the bad comments (a lot of which didn’t even apply to our trip) and for the tour guides name they put “Nemie Redfern” …his name was greg, and he had a nickname nemo, they were never there and just sucked, but as they passed it up we saw it and so another dude and I filled it out for him, because he is also compensated for the surveys he explained. He was awesome and I liked him a lot, hes a lover of WWII and that’s a-ok in my book.

Today we went on a walking tour of eastern berlin and saw a lot of the hall marks of the city with an awesome local guide. We saw the nazi air ministry, brandenberg gate, check point Charlie, the radio tower of east berlin, red mayors house, museum island, Reichstag, Berliner dome, “monument” to the nazi book burnings, unter den linden, holocaust memorial, new synagogue (which sucked, there was next to nothing to see there), and where Hitler committed suicide in the furor bunker (its parking lot now) The guide was knowledgeable and had tons of history and on the walks between the monument I was able to ask a lot of questions about german reconciliation with its past. We then navigated public transit back to the hotel, but the main line where we are located began construction work yesterday and so our main artery around the city is severed, but its more of an inconvience than anything really I guess. I came back and repacked my suitcase of souvenirs and washed some laundry in the sink until dinner time. We went ot a steak house the one dude recommended which I would compare to an American sizzler, not good. After all that we came home and are now going to bed to prepare for class tomorrow. Guten nacht!