Day 22

Ok today was our free day in Berlin and I must say it was a relaxing day.  Up til now we had been really pushing ourselves to see absolutely everything any given place had to see which has been wearing us out a bit.  We decided to take a bit of an easy today as there wasn’t a insurmountable amount of stuff to see.

The day began with a walking tour of central Berlin.  The guide was incredibly knowledgeable and showed us sections of the Berlin Wall, the car park built above the bunker Hitler committed suicide in and a massive unmarked and unexplained memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.  The memorial in particular was rather interesting.  It was composed of several concrete blocks of the same width and length with only different heights.  All were arranged to make a grid pattern of walkways but not a maze.  Before anyone could ask any questions about how the memorial is to be interpreted we were told there wasn’t one.  The architect from the US who submitted the design never put an explanation for it forward.  Apparently they had such a hard time trying to come up with a suitable memorial to the horror of the Holocaust that they decided this design would mean something different to everyone and it was quite remarkable to see and walk through.

After the walking tour we headed toward the Absinthe Depot.  We had heard of it before and the implication was that it was a place where we could tour the Absinthe making process.  It just turned out to be a small shop that sold plenty of different varieties of it.  No worries though the area had a few random shops to check out and then we headed to a park near the museum district which was on an island.  We did not have time to go into the museums but we did gets some pictures of the museum architecture and listened to a street performer do some rather good versions of Beatles songs and others.

We had a stop at the Hard Rock Cafe as per usual before tracking down something decent to eat.  We thought we had succeeded at a small Italian place with some good set dinners posted but they turned out to be only until 7pm so being after that we decided on burritos instead.  We also were able to quench our desire for bubble tea after dinner as well.

Managed to make it back to the hostel in time to sort through some of the photos we’ve taken before turning in for the night.  Tomorrow we’re off to Amsterdam!