I have recently returned from a brilliant 4 day trip to Berlin, where I have done so much walking I can't even explain! It has been a really, really good city holiday with loads of friends, and I plan on sharing my trip with you guys through the many pictures I took.
We left on Saturday morning at ridiculous o' clock (3am), got a coach to Gatwick airport, and an early flight off to Berlin. I LOVE flying, and take-off gets me super excited which proved highly entertaining for my friends sitting next to me. Once we'd arrived we got another coach to our 5 star hotel... I'm kidding, we stayed in a hostel... But there's nothing wrong with that and we had a brilliant time despite the lumpy pillows!
We then when to one of the most famous memorials in Berlin; the Berlin Wall. Along the way we looked at a couple of other things such as a huge red bricked bridge and the river that runs through Berlin, but the main attraction was the wall. Some of the graffiti on the wall is relatively modern, in contrast with the original writings and art. For any people who have no idea what the Berlin Wall is, it was the wall that separated East Germany which was controlled by the Russians, and West Germany which was controlled by the Americans after World War II. It is interesting walking through Berlin and constantly crossing between former Eastern and Western districts, as you can see the difference in architecture in places. The wall itself definitely expresses the sort of feelings the people of Berlin felt about being split up from the other half of their country.
We then walked along some more streets of Berlin, before we were to look at the memorial of the holocaust from Nazi Germany in World War II. I must mention that all of the people I went on this trip with study History at A-Level, and so our tour of Berlin had a lot of relevance to our topic of Germany from the reign of the Kaiser Reich from the late 1800s to the end of the Nazi Reich in 1945.
The memorial for the holocaust was so interesting, from the surface it simply looked like lots of equal concrete blocks, arranged in straight lines and all the same height apart from some lower ones at the edges. The uniformity of these blocks for me represented the victims of the holocaust loosing their identity's and individual thought. However, as you walked into the memorial, the ground became uneven, and began to get steeper and steeper, meaning that the blocks became taller and taller, and you became more disorientated despite the fact that these blocks were still ordered in straight lines. We agreed that this disorientation seemed to represent the way in which the victims must have felt increasingly lost and isolated in their time as prisoners in concentration camps. The architect Peter Eisenman certainly did a fantastic job with this relatively new memorial.
The group and I then wandered along more streets in the centre of Berlin passing some other monuments that we would visit on other days of the trip such as the Brandenburg gate and the Reichstag government building.
Here you can see a traffic light you might not recognise. This green man is called the Ampelmann and is special as it was the green traffic man used by Russian East Germany, meaning that you can always tell whether you're in former East or West Germany due to the difference in traffic man. This guy looks so cute with his little hat right!?
We then found a place to eat frickin' huge burgers because we we're starving, and paid a quick visit to the Ampelmann store. Hell yeah, they have a store for the cute traffic man and a website. As you can imagine we all went to bed in the hostel absolutely exhausted from doing so much in one day, but its definitely worth doing as much as possible and making the most of it when you're only in a city for a limited amount of time.
I'll keep uploading days 2, 3 and 4 in separate posts once I've edited them (which takes forever), and thanks so much for reading!
P H O E B E. G R A C E //
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