First day in Berlin, we decided to walk, to learn our way, and use the public bus and tram the next days.
First impression: everything is HUGE. The buildings, the trees, the streets, the doors…
We walked and the first nice surprise was an old red-brick building, with it’s walls marked with the war scars, that had a sign at the entrance saying ‘Frikk Festival’. It had to be something great. It was somehow a small (very small) Tacheles(more on that later), the walls were crammed with graffitti and stickers and we were in awe. German people seemed to be quiet and very relaxed.
There are gardens everywhere in Berlin, everywhere you go there are huge gardens, with a whole lot of trees. We get to Alexanders’ Platz and that’s where the fun seems to be! There lots of beer selling places, pretzels’ places and very cool XXL donuts. There seems to be some kind of fair going on also, there are artists and places with funny things for the kids. I expected to see people asking for money, but amazingly there weren’t any – except some gipsys’ girls and this one guy that was probably just joking around.
There are also the most amazing shopping centers with the most amazing shoes shops. Girls here seem to wear boots all the time – it’s not as hot as it usually is in Portugal, but it’s still not that cold to wear boots, but that’s what they wear. I hardly saw people wearing tank tops, shorts or flip-flops… but they have a nice style going on.
By 3 pm we were tired as hell, so we found a very nice place called emma’s where we had our first german beer. Aside from being half a liter of beer it tasted pretty much the same to me… but this was only the first one. The waiter seemed very surprised when we asked for beer… and even more when we asked for the big ones. ah…
We walk a bit more and we got to the museum island. The buildings are amazing. Very beautiful and humongous. This place is so full of history that I just want to sit somewhere and try to take it all in. And that’s where we had our first german sausage. Delicious! and I don’t even like sausages that much! We sat in the shadow of one of the corridors of Altes Museum to enjoy our small meal, so we’d have energy to make it to Unter den Linden!
On our way I kept trying to take it all in… Those buildings, it’s hugeness and it’s architecture were so beautiful and packed with everything that city went through… I was both fascinated and terrified by the enormous quantity of bullet wholes in the walls and collumns of those buildings… At Bebelplatz, I felt the chills running down my spine. The nazi book burning was here. At this place. More than 25 000 books were burned because they were considered “un-german”…
We were extremelly tired, but we kept on walking back to the hotel. But I’m glad we walked.
We had dinner at Dolores, a south american place near Alexanders’ Platz where we ate delicious burritos and drank the most delicious teas ever.
On our way back, we bought a beer for the walk… we finished the beer long before we got to the hotel because we decided to enter this garden and we basically got lost in it.. well, we weren’t lost, but we kept trying to shorten our way to the hotel, and ended up making it longer… but the garden was so amazingly beautiful! The lakes surrounded by trees, people working out, people laying in the grass reading, couples sitting and eating… very very nice.
We ended up finding our way back of course and we were soooo tired that I prepared myself a nice hot bubble bath and after that we immediately threw ourselves into the comfy bed and slept.
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