Germans love their football
Be sure to check out my Flickr set for Berlin:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/81692166@N05/sets/72157645070653730/
After meeting my host Sebastian, I got some shut-eye before waking up today for the first of three full days in Berlin. I had decided to visit some of the attractions on the eastern side of Berlin.
First up was a visit to the East Side Gallery. It's a long, loooong section of the Berlin Wall in Friedrichshain that was never torn down after the Fall of the Wall in 1989. The result was a massive amount of graffiti that has never been removed. The whole wall section has in fact been painted with a coating which stops the original graffiti from ever being removed:
I also made a new plan for eating while over here. I never wanted to spend much money on food while I was over here, so I made some observations in my first few days that now stand me in good stead. I've reckoned on a decent meal for dinner every second day, eating at food stalls (known as an Imbiss in Germany) for most other meals. Ice cream is also very cheap and plentiful over here, so I expect I'll be having a few. That being said, I found a stall at the East Side Gallery selling traditional currywurst (spicy sausage palette) for €2, with an ice cream stall next door. Bargain!:
Traditional currywurst palette
I then headed walked all the way to Treptower Park, which had been recommended to me by Sebastian, stopping off to briefly photograph the Molecule Men statue, a weird-looking statue on the Spree River:
In the park, along with some fabulous flowerbeds, there was also the Soviet War Memorial, which commemorates a fraction of the Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin in World War II. The park was actually fairly empty, not too many tourists apparently consider visiting the park:
Sombre emptiness at Treptower Park's war memorial
After a brief mishap getting the wrong S-Bahn (S42 goes on the anticlockwise loop, not the clockwise loop. Oops!), I made it to Tempelhofer Feld. It's a park that is open for the city's residence after the entire airport, which served West Berlin pre-reunification. You can walk the length of two active runways, as well as many of the taxiways. There is a public garden, BBQ areas, an old shooting range, and even a mini-golf course. I couldn't resist walking the length of the south runway:
Lots and lots of walking later, I arrived at a U-Bahn station and went into the city. I wanted to visit Gendarmenmarkt, where there are several big old buildings: on the north side is the Friedrichstadtkirche (Friedrichstadt Church), and the Deutscher Dom (German Church) is on the south end. In between is the Konzerthaus Berlin (Berlin Concert House). At the foot of the Konzerthaus, a German in a dinner jacket was playing the violin. BEAUTIFULLY! He had attracted quite a crowd, and I sat and listened for about half an hour. Once he was finished, he coolly packed up and rode his bicycle away.
My supermodel diet culminated at Little Green Rabbit, where I had a really nice salad. They replaced a couple of the ingredients for me, so I ended up with a chicken salad with croutons, couscous, pear, cucumber, radish and chives, with a raspberry sauce:
Great little salad joint
Finally, I also got to visit the grounds of the 300-year-old Charlottenburg Palace today at dusk. There are lovely gardens, water features and even a 'tea house', albeit an enormous one, on the grounds. By this stage, the batteries on both my phone and camera were running seriously low, so I went a bit faster than I usually would. I still got some nice photos before I went back home:
That's all today from Berlin today, tomorrow I'm planning to visit the Zoo and the Tiergarten, and surrounding attractions. Until tomorrow!
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