Copenhagen & Berlin

Well, I spent the last week traveling, and it has been amazing. We started off the week in Copenhagen, in the freezing cold. Also important to note, I thought that London was the most expensive place, ever. Not so, Copenhagen definitely takes the cake. Pretty much everything was at least 20-25 kroner- or about $3.50- 4.50 USD. Coffees, muffins, hot dogs (of which I ate 5), beer (starting at around 40 kroner, or $7 in bars), etc. The city itself was as beautiful and quaint as one could hope from a Scandinavian city, and we got to see some pretty cool sights- changing of the guard at the palace, the Little Mermaid statue, Christiania (hippie commune), to mention a few. Less exciting sights include a whole host of activities we were looking forward to that were closed because it was winter- Tivoli Gardens, bike tours, canal tours, etc. Probably the best part of Copenhagen was ice skating at Kongens Nytov, in the middle of the square downtown. It was scenic and a total blast.

After Copenhagen, we headed off to Berlin. We arrived at night, so we went to a very German restaurant for dinner- we all ordered sausages, or wursts, and ate them with sauerkraut and mustards, and washed them down with tall German beers. The next morning we got up to take a free walking tour around the city. Our guide was an American (and a Cal Polyian at that- for those not in the know, that's about 90 mins from Santa Barbara) and led us on an amazing tour of the sites of so many historical events from the last 800 years of Berlin history. I was surprised by how little I knew, especially about the events occurring in the last 50 years. "Berlin wall" has always been a somewhat foreign concept to me, but hearing it and seeing the artifacts from the Communist government in East Berlin was pretty incredible.

The same company that does the free tour also has a Berlin pub crawl, which we'd heard great things about and decided to go on. It was pretty epic. The first person we met from the crawl was from Santa Barbara, went to my high school, and was friends with my next door neighbor. From there, we met people from Australia, Israel, Switzerland, Iran, etc. It was absolutely amazing to meet so many people and have such a fun time.

I'm sad I didn't have more time in Berlin to see more of the city, I would go back in a heartbeat. I've never really been interested in more recent history before, but the things that city has seen are incredible. The monuments to the grisly events of the past- the book burnings on Bebelplatz, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (actually what it's called), the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Churcht and many others are very moving and thought provoking. The city itself is ugly as hell- very few old buildings, as about 80-90% of the city was demolished in WWII. Many of the new buildings were built under the Communists, who really knew how to build an ugly building.

On our last day we took another walking tour "Behind the Iron Curtain" led by a Berliner, who was born in the British section of West Berlin. The tour itself was underwhelming, but what I found interesting about it was the fact that our guide, who I thought would be strongly anti-Communist, was more like "it was kind of bad and just didn't work." On the other hand, James, our American tour guide, had told us of the horrors that occurred under the communist regime. Our tour guide seemed to have had some connections that made his experience with the Wall easier than others, but still, the difference was interesting. In typical American fashion, we like to gloss over the fact that reunification wasn't great and many people were unemployed.

Other highlights include: the National Gallery (with Rodin's 'The Thinker'- SO much smaller than Columbia's, I might point out), Shwanosee (aka Swan Lake) at the Berlin Opera House for 5 Euro, climbing the dome on the Reichstag, watching the face of one of my travel companions after she lost 50 Euro to a betting scam on the street (the rest of us had moved on and did not realize she was going to do this, which is why we didn't talk her out of it) and the other sights on the tour(s). I highly recommend Berlin to anyone.