Day 20 (Berlin)

Yeah, I've totally been bad. I hope by now you realize that you should be going by Day numbers, and not exactly the dates... To be fair, day 20 I was exhausted from my steamy love affair with Berlin, and day 21 soon to follow, I had no internets. Well I did, but it hated me, and mocked me with it's existence and my lack of access. That being said-

I. LOVE. BERLIN.

Yes I said that last post, but I'm saying it again, and probably will again. Today I ate a good breakfast with 4 KINDS OF JAM, and hopped on my sweet bicycle and hit the town

<-- Good breakfast

                           Whatchu know about jam?! ----->

                                                          ME ON MY SWEET RIDE!!!

First, I took a bicycle tour, as Berlin is super huge, and the odds of me getting lost were... 100 percent. Add in higher speeds on a bicycle, and closer proximity to traffic, and you have a superhuman statistic for disaster. Pretend that made sense. DO IT!

Berlin has like a gajillion monuments and sites and history. I am about as good with history as I was with math and grammar in that last sentence. So, I hope you enjoy MY tour of Berlin.

This statue is super old, and got moved here from somewhere else. Probably from the bottom of the ocean where the Nazis bronzed Poseidon and his 4 mistresses who spray water on him.

This is the TV tower. The communists built it, cause everyone was moving away due to you know, the communists, so they snuck in a bunch of people from Poland to finish it, and they were all like, 'Oh yeah? Well we've got the tallest building in Berlin. We're advaaaanced. Please come back...'

This was the royal family's private church...

Oh, and this is their palace....









Though this balcony was preserved... Only the balcony is part of the old building.

Also, Berlin is pretty.

                                                    I'M PRETTY! That's what the river said.

This is the university that burned a whole bunch of books that Hitler deemed 'un-German', which pretty much meant written by a Jew or a homosexual, or didn't have enough pictures. And by homosexual, I mean male homosexual, because Hitler didn't believe that female homosexuals existed.

This is actually a very cool memorial. There is a window in the ground of the plaza where the books were burned, full of empty bookshelves. The shelves would theoretically hold 20,000 books, the number of books destroyed that day. Also, across the street every day there is a book sale, which sells all sorts of books that Hitler assuredly would have had burned.

Friedrich the Awesome was a Protestant, but was super tolerant, so he built a Catholic church for all his Catholic people. People liked him. He may have also been gay. His brother had to produce the heir to the throne, and as a thank you, Friedrich built his brother a sweet palace next to the university, which is now another part of the university.


There was another Friedrich in power later. At this time, the population was at a sad low point, and simultaneously, the Huguenots were being all crushed in England and stuff. So Friedrich was all like, 'Hey Huguenots, why don't you come over here and repopulate my country? We won't kill you and stuff.' So they did. He even built them a church. It looks like this:

Then his people were all like, 'Hey now, we're cool with the Huguenots coming here and making babies and such, but building them a church? That might be a bit too far...'



So Friedrich was all like, 'No no, it's cool guys, I'll build you one too'

'See? It's slightly bigger, and better, and totally not exactly the same as the one across the plaza'.






And everyone lived happily ever after. Well, until, you know, the bombings and stuff.


Our tour guide stopped and gave us a history lesson on how Germany got divided like a zillion times. It looked like this:

Now I can appreciate the use of sidewalk chalk, but I'm pretty sure I walked away from this lesson with- The Communists were jerks, the Soviets were jerks, the Nazis were jerks, and Germany looks a lot like a cross between a hot water bottle and a heart that has been whacked by a baseball bat.


I'm not quite sure how to segway from that thought, so here is the Berlin wall! Well, where it used to be, followed by the tiny piece that is left.

You see the rounded part on top of the wall? Yeah, West Berlin was like, 'Here East Berlin, have this pipe so you can pump sewage out of your city.' And East Berlin was like, 'Thanks! We're gonna put it on our wall and cover it with glass and barbed wire.' And they wonder why nobody liked them.

This is a guard tower. Provided you got past the inner wall, the barbed wire, the broken glass, the other wall, and the dogs, then you would want to avoid being shot by the uber-paranoid guards in this tower, on your way to try to get over another wall.

This is the Jewish memorial. The artist who created it was actually inspired by the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, WHICH I was lucky enough to see, and snap a shot-

The memorial is very cool. There was a sort of controversy when it was being discussed- the city was nervous about essentially creating a "blank canvas" for graffiti, so a company stepped up and said they had a chemical that prevents paint from setting, so it can easily be wiped off. The big controversy was that this chemical company had provided materials for weapons and such during the war, though they brought up the valid point that Volkswagon provided vehicles, Hugo Boss designed the military uniforms, etc. But as a sort of atonement, the company provides the chemical for free, and applies it every year to the memorial.

This monument was built by.... German... gnomes... ok I forgot what it was originally, but then Hitler popped that statue on top as a victory monument. Perhaps a little prematurely....

This was the main gate to pass from East Berlin to West Berlin. The statue on top was some sort of jab at the French. I'm pretty sure they took it after beating them up or something. The chick in the chariot's head stares at the French embassy, and they say she's keeping an eye of them. This is also where the Berlin wall fell, which really was due to some miscommunication. They had decided to open up border crossing because the people were all in a tiffy, and the guy who was supposed to announce it had missed the meeting and said they'd be opening (insert German term that means, 'right now'), so everyone freaked, and tried to get through at the same time, to the point no one could hold them back. It is estimated about 20 thousand people passed through in the first hour. That's a lot of people.


So that concludes my historical tour! I hope you feel enlightened. I will not accept any correction of my impeccable facts. Now that we're done with history, let's talk about some foods!

For lunch in the middle of the tour we stopped at a Biergarten, which is a "BEER GARDEN". That was not caps for excitement, it was me speaking louder and slower so you could understand. Just fyi. Though I was still excited, because they had delicious foods! I had...

 German sausage. SO GOOD.

 Bavarian meatloaf. ALSO GOOD.

AND THEY GAVE ME THIS PRETZEL FOR FREESIES! It was delicious. I actually ate it while riding my bicycle through Tiergarten. This is one of the top ten moments of my life.

After my 5 hour tour, I decided my heiny hadn't had enough, so I rode the next several hours through Tiergarten, which was amazing and beautiful, and I totally didn't get lost about 12 times.

'I'm a beautiful park, lala la la la 

                   la la lalala da da da lalalala daaaaaa

laaaaaa dee doo da day, da laaaa la la la la laaa

                                                                la.'






That's right. I sang my park song. Don't pretend you're not impressed...

My bicycle seat at this point had actually loosened, so it kept tipping backwards, and I had to cling to it with my powerful thighs, and totally didn't look ridiculous. I looked powerful. But I wasn't going to let it stop me! I cycled to the oldest pub in Germany.

 Open since 1621! Now that's just good business. I also had a date:

NO It's not the lamp! I'm not THAT lonely. You can vaguely see the spiderweb on it. Yup, I was lucky enough to watch several bugs meet their demise as they were devoured by my table-mate. Maaaaay have turned my stomach a touch, but nothing was going to stop me from this:

 That's right. Apparently "Belgian meat balls" actually means "giant lump of delicious Belgian meats". I was not disappointed. But nothing- NOTHING could have prepared me for what came next.

THIS, my friends, is a made-to-order puff pastry apple cake. Upon consuming it, I could only conclude that it tasted as though they took the first-born child of a virgin goddess, turned it into a fruit, and made this disk of baked heaven. I would eat a thousand babies if this was the result. NO. A million. Thank goodness Zur Letzten Inftanz (not infants, regardless of my current commentary) has discovered how to create this sensa infanticide, else I would be culling the population of its fruit-eligible offspring. So I think I can say the world thanks you, Zur Letzten Inftanz, for this apple cake. Thank you.