An American in Paris

Another very eventful sight seeing day in Berlin!

First we went to the Berlin wall memorial, where there are pieces of the wall still standing and all sorts of informational panels telling you cool stuff about what happened.  It was really informative, mostly because I hardly knew anything about what really happened since I wasn’t alive.  The area where the memorial is was called the “death strip” because part of it intersected an old church cemetery.  At one point, the East Germans actually moved most of the graves because they were interfering on some official wall-something-or-other territory.  Umm…this sort of human behavior will never cease to make me feel intellectually superior to most.  Sorry, but really?  Moving an ancient church cemetery because it’s getting in the way of your stupid wall?  GTFO.

After the wall, we walked to a really yummy coffee shop.  That area of the city has been trying really hard ever since the wall fell to become more hip and welcoming.  There are vintage stores and coffee shops every five feet it seems like.  It was called “bonanza coffee heroes” and I had a latte and sat and watched little birdies flit around collecting crumbs.  Then we walked through probably the cutest area evvvvver and just oohed and ahhed at every little thing we saw.  We got thai for lunch.

We went to see checkpoint charlie after lunch.  It was the most famous border crossing between East and West Germany back in the day.  There’s a museum there too, showcasing all the creative ways people smuggled themselves to the other side, but it cost like 12 freaking euros to get in so we were all eff that.