Thursday 5 January 2012

Berlin: Germany

Part two of our trip takes us a little south to the ever cloudy Berlin, a city that has two distinct parts of life; one of which I can show you and one of which I may tell some of you about. The first part side of Berlin is the tourism side which is based a lot around the events of the second world war along side the typical attractions. In this respect Berlin is entirely unique in the fact that it has memorials everywhere to atrocious acts in war that it itself inflicted, which deserves a heap of praise, no doubt. The flip side of this is that there is so much to this place and you get the feeling that Berlin would like people to see it for what it is now, which is a phenomenally cultural hub that has some awesome around almost every corner!

One of the first attractions we checked out in Berlin was the famous Berlin zoo, which was the most depressing thing I saw the whole time I was there (which sounds weird I know), but you can imagine African animals in small enclosures at 0 degrees. This elephant honestly looked like he was trying to jump for a good couple of minutes;







At this time of the year the Christmas markets are in overdrive, with chocolate, trinkets and of course Bratwurst!


And cool model trains;


This legend just casually solving equations at the wax museum;



The architecture of the memorials is insanely creative throughout the city, the memorial to the book burning is an empty room with enough space on its shelves to hold all of the books, while this memorial to all of the Jews lost in WWII was very impressive; basically there is 4700 odd concrete blocks that are small at the edge and go over head as you head in to the middle, the ground is constantly undulating and it is very repetitive and disorientating. The symbolism is supposed to represent the path into the disorientating depths for Jewish livelihood during WWII;


Under which is memorial with several rooms about the history of the time, this 6 individuals represent the several million lost during the time;


Different parts of the Berlin wall are memorialised in different ways, but this was one of the coolest;


And the memorial to "All the lives lost". Probably one of my favourite photos of the trip;


And tourist photo;

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