Berlin

Firstly, Berlin is amazing. I'm really glad we decided to stay 5 nights here because everything is so interesting and fun and cheap and wonderful. We're staying at the Heart of Gold Hostel. Based o'course on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I'm writing this from the comfort of my very own big red chesterfield sofa, looking at a big mural of the whale that materialised in outer space and had seconds to come to terms with its existence before it splatted on the ground.

Here's one I prepared earlier!

One thing I can't get over is how delicious and cheap the food is here. Usually in big cities I expect food to be good but pricey. Here, we can spend about €5 each and get a delicious meal any moment of the day. Same with the beer! We went on a walking tour yesterday and afterwards the guide, us and some others went to the pub. It was so beautifully Germanishly organised, every table has its own keg and taps and touchscreen, you choose a number and press it before you pour your own beers, and the computer keeps track of how much you've drunk and splits the bill exactly between everyone at the end. Magic!! Even better, you can compete with other tables, the number of pints drunk by each table in the pub  is shown on a big screen, and you can even compete with other pubs across Germany! And at €2.30 a litre, there's no excuse not to go overboard.

I was pretty excited to eat my first currywurst, but it turned out to be a big sausage drowned in 95% tomato sauce and 5% curryishness served with some bread. Sorry guys, but that's called a sausage sammich and we've kind of got it covered in Australia. I give it a solid 5.5/10.

At the pub! Unfortunately you can't see the magic of the computer screen at work tallying up everyone's drinks.

Currywurst. Good drinking food, I'll give it that.

We found our way home quite tipsily at the end of the night, stopping to buy apple pastries from the station. There had been a lot of knowledge and beer stuffed into my head over the course of the day! Our tour guide was great, so enthusiastic about everything to do with German history. As much as I enjoy looking at impressive buildings, getting the stories and finding out the little coincidences that made history happen is what makes it amazing. I felt really emotional hearing about how the Berlin Wall, which everyone considered to be a totally permanent feature, was basically brought down by the complete stuff up of a press conference by an incompetent politician. It's stupid little things like that that get things done in this world.

We visited the Pergamonmuseum today, it always blows my mind that the German's managed to carry  basically a whole town of artefacts back home with them. Tomorrow we're going to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Going to Anne Frank's House in Amsterdam last year made me so upset, I'm usually not that interested in being touristy at places where terrible things have happened. However, I think the attrocities committed here are one of those things you can't really get your head around until you've seen the place where it happened, where it isn't just a number or a statistic. But if there's dumb tourists taking a million photos of themselves like it's Disneyland I'm going to be pissed. We'll see.

Dad can't decide whether to be fierce or smiley.