Germania 1.5

This post is going to be more Germany stories, but before I begin I would like to give a welcome and shout out to my new global readers. For a while I was down to USA and Italy, and the loyal readers really started to make their presence known, but it seems this blog is going global. To give you an idea here are my recent pageview stats: USA 78, Burundi 7, Thailand 7, China 5, Germany 3, Ukraine 3, Hong Kong 2, Italy 2, Poland 2, France 1. Thanks everyone for reading my blog and I hope you're enjoying it.

So Berlin 1.5 When last we spoke I had met my friend from Albania and was getting ready to spend the afternoon and evening with Austin. It had started to rain, but we weren't deterred. We went back to Austin's apartment, dumped my stuff and then went off to explore one of the shopping and modern districts in Berlin. On the way we met up with Kevin Fox, a fellow ND friend and a Dillon man to boot, who is working in Germany and the three of us went exploring.

Famous Berlin zoo, bombed accidentally during the war

The Berlin bear, found all over Berlin with different decorations

The old memorial church, also bombed

We stayed in that region and went to KaDeWe a shopping mall for dinner. It's a 9 level shopping mall that is actually kind of cool. For dinner we went to the top floor and had burgers, which I hadn't really had since I came to Europe and am missing for my diet. However, I decided to break the mold and had an ostrich burger, so I can now add that to the resume.

What did the fish say when he swam into the wall? Dam!

We left KaDeWe and headed to explore. We walked through the Tiergarten, in the rain, but it was still kind of cool. We passed by the victory monument on the way and saw some other interesting sights.

We were walking through the woods on some mystical fairy tale adventure and we stumbled across a burger king

More from here later

One of my favorite TV series, which the Hite boys watch together

We then walked to the Brandenburg gate. This is another impressive monument, done in the Roman style. However, perhaps even more interesting, is the statement made directly around the Brandenburg gate.

 The white building is the US embassy, the gold doors below are the Russian embassy, and the French embassy is across the street. Here in the center of German pride, with a traditional Roman victory column and triumphal arch, the Allied powers stand watch, or guard, or as victors over the German people and legacy. Take that political and historical message as you will.

So we left the Brandeburg gate and walked back to Alexanderplatz and checked out the Berlin nightlife. We passed by this building sporting the German world cup victory, but other than that I found very little world cup champions merchandise, which I thought was strange. Berlin is known for having a crazy nightlife and Kevin and Austin wanted me to get a taste of it, so we tried to go to two clubs and paint the town. At the first one, the bouncers told us to come back later (my guess was there were already two many guys inside and not enough girls) and the second asked us who was playing, and when we didn't know she turned Austin and myself away, but let Kevin, who speaks fluent German, inside. This turned out to be fine by me, as I knew that Saturday was going to be a full day. We went back to the apartment, got four hours of sleep and were up bright and early the next day. In order to avoid getting four hours of sleep, the first half of Saturday's post will wait till tomorrow. Goodnight!