Another brick...

I arrived safely yesterday and found my way to the hostel fairly painlessly. Well, except for the slight confusion figuring out which train to get... oh, and that little run in with the ticket inspector, which saw me narrowly escaping a fine for an unvalidated ticket. Typical, less than two hours in the country and I'm already a fugitive of the law.

Like London, it was pitch black at 5pm so it didn't make a lot of sense to go out sight seeing last night. Instead, I checked into the hostel, said hello to a couple of fellow travellers and headed out for some food and a few drinks with one of them (and a brief look around, of course).

Waking up this morning at 8.30am reeking of cigarette smoke (never, ever forget how wonderful the smoking bans are!), I quickly had a shower and tried to figure out what to do and see today. After perusing some of the pamphlets for the various tours around the city, I discovered a nice walking tour was leaving just down the street from me - in 20 minutes. Rushing out the door with my bag, camera and warm clothes, I caught the U-bahn to the station and made the tour in plenty of time.

Oh yeah, it's frickin' freezing here! Last night it was apparently -2 degrees. Today it was 5 degrees. I am ever so thankful I decided to buy gloves and a new beanie on the weekend, I think I'd be a block of ice otherwise.

The tour was a good four hour, five kilometre walk that mostly focused on the eastern side of the city (history buffs will know this was the Soviet side until recently). Our guide was a really friendly American girl who's gone native, and she detailed a great amount of the history of every place we visited. Photos will be posted when I get back, I promise - there was some good stuff!

The Pink Floyd freak in me was most excited by a visit to Potzdamer Platz which, in addition to being one of the most infamous areas of the Berlin wall, was also the site where Roger Waters performed his massive star-studded staging of The Wall, just months after the actual wall was dismantled. Interesting enough, part of the area is just an empty block of land. There's a lot of this around the city, actually: there are still disputes over the rightful owners of these areas - the Potzdamer Platz area in particular was forcefully taken from a famous Jewish-German family by the Nazis in the '30s, and it was only recently that reperations were given to the descendents of the original owners.

There's a lot of pretty spectacular architecture around, although the vast majority of it is recreated from how things looked before it was all bombed to pieces. Of course, the most infamous of all structures is the wall itself, which thankfully no longer exists beyond a few small pieces. That said, there are plenty of reminders of its presence if you know where to look: the most obvious being the cobbled path that winds throughout the city to mark where the wall intersected east from west.

One of the other memorable areas we visited was the memorial to the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Only recently constructed, it consists of 2711 (I think it was) concrete blocks uniformly spread over a five acre area. No two blocks are apparently the same height, and the ground they are embedded in is also non-uniform, so it's a bit of fun to walk through. The guy who designed it made it this way specifically, but refused to offer any explanations to what they mean - instead, it's up to individuals to make up their own minds as to its significance. Not surprisingly, I have my own theory - but I'm not going to share it with anyone.

Not far from this is the area where Hitler's bunker lies, where he committed suicide during the final days of the War. The original attempt to build new apartments over the top of it were scuppered when the ground was found to be too unstable to build on, so instead the bunker was filled with concrete and a car park was put there instead. Oddly, this seems a fitting tribute to the psychopath who destroyed so many lives.

After the tour, I considered my options and decided to head back to the hostel to figure out what to do for the rest of day. And rest, I'd been on my feet walking for over four hours straight!

I still haven't decided what to do yet, but I'm strongly considering going on one of the pub crawls offered - it seems like a decent introduction to the night life here, plus it'll give me an opportunity to meet some new people.

As for the rest of the week, there's plenty of other tours to do, museums to see, shops to visit... too much. Should be fun, can't wait to find out what I end up doing!