L-I-V-I-N Quit working to go travel around the world for a year

July 29/30thh: Berlin tourism Made it to the airport easy enough and got the flight easy enough. Easy jet: $44 w/ baggage for a 1 hour flight…pretty good deal and they are pretty efficient about things. Had to spend the last of our danish money on some crap candy at the airport. Got to Berlin and took the train into the city and found our hotel easy enough. Big hotel, nice full breakfast buffet, but no fucking air conditioning (high in the 90s). After settling in, we made our way down and hit a few tourist spots and had some crappy sandwhiches at the train station…ended up feeding a fair amount to the birds as it was pretty entertaining. You would throw a giant piece at a pigeon and they would wonder around looking retarded and a little bitty sparrow that was smaller than the piece of bread would come and get it and try as hard as it could to fly off with it…they all seemed to make it though. Saw Alexanderplatz (the giant tower), the world clock thing, Checkpoint Charlie (which is basically a toursit spot now), Brandenburg Gate, the cathedral that was bombed during the war that they left unrepaired….kind of. The steeple has a big hole through the top, but then they put an interior roof so it just looks like it’s a giant open remnant…really a museum. Instead of rebuilding the cathedral/church, in the 60s they just built a giant hexagon with like all blue stained glass; surpised they didn’t fill it with shag carpet. Interesting site I guess. We took a bus out to see some botanical gardens we well. Over to the zoo as it was right next door and we didn’t really have much else going on. Spent several hours there as this zoo is very large. Nothing too new or crazy that I hadn’t seen before but great zoo none the less. Wondered through the park, stopped to have a drink, sausage, and watch a world cup game at this little hidden pub place. Continued on through the park and around to the sculpture garden eventually ending up at Brandenburg Gate. Headed home after as it was a pretty long day. Holocaust memorial was very cool. Hundreds of concrete blocks like 2-12 ft high lined up in seemingly endless rows. Turns out it doesn’t actually symbolize anything…just a concrete field of blocks of varying size and leaning a bit. Of course all I could think about is how cool it would be to play paintball there. Went down through the underground museum portion and got a taste of jew life during the holocaust. You can’t joke about nazis or the holocaust or any of that stuff in Germany…they get pretty pissed off. Tried to get in the modern art museum but it wasn’t open for some reason. Then it was fashion week so they had all these crappy tents in the squares covering some of the tourist sights. Hit the Dali museum which wasn’t that impressive at all compared to the one in London. More sketches and stuff than anything else. Made our way down to the East Side Gallery which is the section of the Berlin Wall that they commisioned to be painted by different artists in 2009…each artist got like 20-50 foot sections to paint whatever they wanted. Every 500m or so there was a section of wall missing and they put a bar or club behind it of course. I really didn’t notice the E/W berlin split until it was pointed out to me or I thought about it. E. Berlin is very repetative with plain, rectangular drab looking buildings and housing. Also, there are above ground sewer pipes that just run along the sidewalk; when there is an intersection they just bend them up and over with the steet lights. Credit card number got stolen from online and someone ran up like $20k in like 1 day. Slight annoyance but got a new one sorted out and shipped to my next destination easy enough.