The Least Likely Favorite

I love the place we are staying. I love how much history it has and if I spoke German I would walk through knocking on doors asking to hear the residents stories (and I'm sure they are glad I don't speak German). We are staying in the only un-renovated building on our street in East Berlin.

That means that the owner of this building hasn't been found and the government can't do any repairs (besides maintaining) to the building. It also means that they haven't yet kicked out the residents who lived here when East Berlin was walled in. And finally, it means the first day we arrived we were a little nervous when the address we were given matched this building.

History Come to Life

So, most of the stuff we are seeing is so old we have never even heard of it, or only in passing in some class somewhere in high school. That is not the case with Berlin. This is where recent history was made and I have just loved soaking it up.

Today, Josh and I split up for the first time in 26 days and we took different tours. I took the Berlin Overview walking tour and he took the New Architecture tour. My tour was supposed to last four hours but I got an amazing guide and 5 1/2 hours later he was finally winding down. It was crazy finally realizing the whole Prussia thing was started in Berlin, then all the Nazi stuff and how that happened, and then if that wasn't enough there was still the Cold War. I mean really, could one city have so much history/turmoil.

Josh's tour wasn't quite as exciting and was supposed to last 3 hours but he was done in 2 1/2 because he was the only one that showed up for that tour. But, he wasn't there for the tour he was there to just see the buildings so in the end we were all happy even though it was 90 degrees and we were tired.

After all the walking outside we decided to find a museum that was open on Mondays and settled on the Jewish museum. It was great (very interactive so it was great for me kids).

And then we were hoping to catch an English movie but didn't make it in time for the last showing today-but we did get to see a guy take off almost all his clothes in the middle of a square. Josh was afraid he was going to light himself on fire, but don't worry he didn't (or at least not during the 15 minutes we were watching).