Berlin, Day Two

The other thing my readers told me in great numbers, besides the Vasa Museum, was to eat a Doner Kebab in Berlin. So we did. Good, but we probably could have searched out a better place. Or maybe I just wasn't that hungry.

Then we did a 5-hour walking tour of the city. Our guide was Barnaby. I share that only because people e-mailed me recommending Terry (who now only does Potsdam tours) and Kristian. We didn't really make an active decision, but Barnaby was the guy who picked up at our hostel, and he was with Terry's company, so we went with him. It was a good tour. We saw all of the big Berlin sites, like the wall, and the Reichstag, and Checkpoint Charlie, and the site of Hitler's bunker, and some palaces and monuments. There's a piece of the Berlin Wall by a nightclub. The wall is guarded by some very perfunctory fence you can easily hop over. One of my friends said it was hard to get over the fence. Well, not as hard as getting over the wall. Barnaby was good about giving us the history and background so all made sense.

He told us about a graffiti guy -- Berlin is covered in graffiti -- who draws the number 6 on lots of surfaces around town, but only temporary ones. Because 6 sounds like "sex" and he supports free love. Or something like that.

Other highlights:

1. Germans count their trees. There are 412,000 in Berlin.

2. We saw where skater Katarina Witt's apartment was.

3. There are 17 shades of brown in German, good for describing East German architecture.

For dinner, we ate in a Mexican restaurant. Maybe not the best choice in Berlin, but it wasn't bad. The waiter, who looked Mexican but didn't know Spanish, called the quesadilla a quesallada, repeatedly.

Then we hung out at another hostel, which had Trivia Night in the bar, and we won. I mean, it would have been shameful if we hadn't, I suppose. Even though a third of the questions were about German history.