Germany: Berlin: Uber Cool Artsy Alternative Walking Tour

• **** We are sad to report that our back up hard drive crashed when we came back to Orlando in Sept/October and have lost a lot of photos from the rest of Germany, as well as Dubai and Nepal so we are only posting photos that we could recover from our iPhone and/or GoPro *****

It’s only about 300 km to Berlin from Hamburg but today it felt much further with gridlock traffic and construction. . . remind us to never drive into the largest city in Germany on a Friday afternoon in the peak of summer season

Phew! We finally made it there — 48 hrs in Berlin is perfect for a first trip. This city is old, dirty, gritty and bursting at the seams with culture, music and art. It reminds us a lot of New York and London and like those other cities, this one can be a bit overwhelming at first. We took our friend Ross’ sage advice and joined a free “Alternative” Berlin walking tour. We hoofed it around the neighborhoods of Mitte, Kreuzberg, and Friedrichshain for several hours. It was terrific to get an insider’s view on the street art around the city and visit some super cool undercover spots. We even made it to a Jamaican beach party on the river! Friedrichshain is a hip area and central for getting around on the train so that’s where we decided to stay.

It was great to learn about what the people of this city have lived through and how it reflects in their attitudes towards personal privacy, video cameras, companies tracking your credit card purchases etc. . . It also made us realize how we as Americans are nowhere near as sensitive to these issues and even offer up tons of free information about ourselves to these companies via social media, our own blog, and the use of credit cards. Definitely food for thought. . .

Did you know that there are lots of Turkish people in Germany? We didn’t know this either but we learned that the Turks were encouraged to immigrate during reconstruction of cities after WWII but instead of leaving when the job was finished they chose to stay and brought their families over. We could still feel a friction, similar to how some Americans feel about Mexican immigrants.

We also visited the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie and we were both sobered by the horrific things that went on in this country . . .but to forget about that for the night we ended up at a party called the Hoffest at the Schwarzenberg art house. This place is covered in beautiful graffiti, it was full of musicians and artists who were smoking too much for our lungs to our lungs to handle so we ended up at a crazy play going on in a nearby park. This play appeared to be a version of Shakespeare meets the Rocky Horror Picture Show in German! Interesting to say the least. . .LOL
The cool thing about Berlin is that anything can and probably will happen: we had so much fun walking around town and on museum island. These were some of the most impressive buildings and sculptures we’ve seen to date! Somehow we ended up watching a silent movie accompanied by classical music at the Pergamon museum.

Another highlight was finding Burrito Dolores, a Mexican food restaurant…YES good Mexican food in Northern Germany! There was something so familiar about Burrito Dolores that we had to stop. . . then we noticed that it’s a San Francisco restaurant, what a coincidence!

We most definitely could have spent more time here in Berlin. . . but we have to save something for another trip!