Hey, remember that one time four months ago when we went to Germany and Austria? And then I got too busy/lazy to finish sharing our trip? Here is the last stop of vacation, three nights in Berlin. Well, in reality, it was 3 nights and 2 days, and we were getting tired, and the weather turned crummy. So I am sad to say we didn’t see as much in Berlin as I would have liked to.
We did go on a great 3 h our walking tour through Insider Berlin, where we learned lots of historical tidbits and saw the famous/infamous sites. We had a really entertaining and knowledgeable guide – he studied modern European history with a focus on the 20th century, so he was a wealth of knowledge about WWI and WWII. That’s where most of these photos came from – with the rain, I didn’t like having my camera out too often, so this all I got.
Here’s a shot of what’s remaining of the Berlin wall:
And some art on pieces of it:
Checkpoint Charlie:
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The rainy gloom felt appropriate here.
Brandenburg Gate:
Columns on Museum Island where you can still see bullet holes from WWII fighting:
I honestly don’t remember anything about this, hah. That’s what I get for waiting so long to go through these photos.
Later that night, we decided to act not-old and head out to a club. I say not-old, because the clubs in Berlin don’t even open until midnight. But we made the trek to the opposite side of town and hung out with all the other foreign tourists who have no choice but to club it up on a Wednesday night (this is basically the only dance club open then – it’s their “new faces” up and coming DJ night). 
Located in an old power station, with the main dance floor in the basement, Tresor was a fun experience. Dark, loud, and with bass so heavy your whole body vibrates, it was Ryan’s first exposure to a really industrial-style techno dance club, and we loved every minute of our fun night here. No pictures allowed, but I snuck this one of the upstairs DJ when coming out of the bathroom. 
After getting turned around trying to figure out the bus changes on the way home (too late for the U and S bahns!), and me having to pee behind a store because I just couldn’t hold it anymore (30 and still keeping it classy), we finally made it home around 4:30. That may have been why we were such wastes of space the next day.
When we did finally head out, it was to another super neat experience. Berlin Underground is a non-profit group working to excavate much of what lies under Berlin. They receive no financial support from the government, so offer guided tours of many of their excavated sites to fund their research. We unfortunately missed the only tour of the day for the one I really wanted to see, an old WWII bomb shelter complete with artifacts left down there in the ’40s. I was pretty bummed about this, but we took the Cold War nuclear bunker tour instead. No pictures allowed, but this was absolutely fascinating. It includes a converted WWII shelter as well as another secretly built right into a new-at-the-time subway stop in the 1980s. The stories behind everything from the entry procedures to the machinery used to get clean air, to the still-stocked kitchens was intriguing. The city didn’t stop paying to maintain them until 2007 – it is so strange to think of how recent that was! Anyhow, super fascinating and a little off the beaten path and I would recommend checking it out to anyone going to Berlin.
After that, we were spent and ended up watching a movie in bed the rest of the night. I felt a liiittttle guilty when there was so much we hadn’t done – the East Side Gallery was less than a mile from our apartment, for example, but I just couldn’t bring my tired self to go back out into the cold. More to do next time, right?
