Breaking Down The Wall

So here we are, hanging out in Berlin. Most times I've written on the blog have detailed several spots Shannon and I have reached, but I think (other than from back in Korea) this is the first time we've stayed put for some time while on the road. In fact, we've been in Berlin for nearly 2 weeks, and I can't think of many other places I'd have liked to stay at for this long. Maybe some small town surf location in Indonesia, but I think Shannon would lose her mind in boredom there, so Berlin is probably still the best bet.

Our good friend Kris put us up for the first three nights here, which helped get a better feel for the city, though I think if you shadowed a local for weeks on end you'd still miss out on so much here. From "pay what you like" wine bars to abondoned shopping malls turned art slum turned night club, we've done our best to see it all.

Un-Yon! Un-Yon! Un-Yon! Un-Yon!

One of the strangest yet coolest things we saw was a local soccer game. It's a tier III team, which Kris described to me as the equivalent of a small town WHL hockey team, so not very prestigious. The fans however refuse to see it that way, and their stadium holds something like 10 or 15 thousand people. They cheer like madmen, not a single person doesn't wear the right colours for each game, and they have their own hooligans - the guys who enlist themselves into the position of beating the tar out of hooligan fans from the opposing teams. Oh, and when their stadium needed renovations, the fans took it upon themselves to donate time and fix it up on their own.

We caught the game where they were poised to move up to league II, which is much closer to being the equivalent of the NHL at home. They won, and so Shannon and I rushed the field at the end of the game, chanting "Union!" (pronounced un-yon in German).

The Art House (not sure if that's the actual name of it) was another pretty snazzy spot we saw. The srory I'm told is that it used to be a shopping centre, then was abandoned sometime in the communist era. Artist and other squatters settled in, turning it into a 4 level concrete graffiti-filled flop house. As the neighbourhood became more trendy, it got harder and harder for the vagabonds to stay put there, but they managed to get their stuff together well enough to turn it into a mixture of night clubs, bars and music lounges, along with a few art studios set up to keep the art guys in business. It's a little freaky moving floor to floor in what could be a rapist's favourite hangout in any other town, but once you get over the concrete graffiti interiors and toilets that have only occasional smatterings of useable light, it's quite the kitschy place.

We also made sure to hit pleny of the more traditional tourists sites, from museums and historical sites (like Nazi bookburning locations and plenty of Soviet east-west sights), plus we watched a Brahms concert performance at the Konzerthaus by the Konzerthaus symphony members. We stuck out a little bit in our backpacker-formal attire, but no one seemed to mind too much.

So yeah, Berlin's a pretty cool place. Walking along the remaining parts of the old Berlin wall, seeing some of the eerie artifacts from the Nazi era, walking through the train station at night seeing the strange mix of anarchists and punks - it's hard not to get into this place. Our next stop is Amsterdam which I'm sure I'll have plenty of fun things to say about as well, though I have a feeling it will be a little less culture-oriented, and a little more night-life related. Hmmm, should be fun.