More Berlin Pics

Yo folks. Michal and I are making Goulash for dinner (a soup with sausage, onion, potato, garlic, special goulash spices...), and while it simmers, I decided to post some more Berlin photos:


Berlin is famous for its Curry-Wurst. It combines really good German sausage with my absolute favorite spice (curry) into one of the best street foods I have EVER had. The curry-wurst comes with curry/spice/salsa sauce stuff on top of it, then they put fries on top of that, and then they put ketchup or mayo on top of that. And then you mix it all together and eat it with a baby fork. It was amazing.



I was feeling brave on this night and ordered an extremely authentic German meal: a "pork knuckle." The pork knuckle is one of the pigs joints in its legs. They served it with sauerkraut, cheesey potatoes, and some other kind of unidentifiable green mixture that had the texture of refried beans... Anyway, you pull back the very thick layers of fat from the top of the meat (some people eat the fat and the skin, but I tried and couldn't handle it). Underneath this layer is some of the best pork meat that you will ever eat. It was great.





Reichstag is the building where the German Parliament resides (like our capital building in Washington D.C.). It is a very cool combination of the old (the traditional architecture of the old building) and the new (the glass dome built on top of it). Usually, you can go up to the top part of the dome and see a 360 degree view of Berlin, but the building was closed at this time to the public.



Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This was an amazing part of the trip. These stone structures were built to remind people of the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust so that they may never happen again. It is estimated that more than 6 MILLION jews were killed during the Holocaust.



We spent hours inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (the museum portion is underneath the stone monuments). One of the most haunting things I have ever seen were the many letters that were posted under glass plates in the floor of the museum. This letter is from a boy the about the age of my little brother (I think he was somewhere between 8 and 12 years old when he wrote this letter home to his father while he was stuck in a concentration camp... He died days later). It says, "Dear Father! I am saying goodbye to you before I die. We would so love to live, but they won't let us and we will die. I am so scared of this death, because the small children are thrown alive into the pit. Goodbye forever. I kiss you tenderly."



This is a portion that is left from the Berlin Wall. I also went to the East Gallery, which is one of the longest stretches of the Berlin Wall remaining, and it remains so that graffiti artists may paint on it.



Museum Island



Hotel where Michael Jackson hung his baby out the window:


While in Berlin, I discovered perhaps one of the most simple, pure, amazing pleasures in life... Drinking in public. In Berlin, every single metro stop has a shop where you can buy food (Chinese stands, sausage stands, and many other things), magazines (including Playboy, which was weird), and also beer. Lots of beer. The night life in Berlin doesn't start until midnight, so the metro systems operate 24 hours a day during the weekend and EVERYBODY is walking around with a beer in their hand... Even on metro. It was one of the craziest feelings in the world to see people drinking and singing songs on public transit.



And here is the hostel room that we stayed at. It was very nice and we met a few cool people. The main room had beds for 30 people to stay in, but all of us FAMU kids got put together into the 20 person room.