Berlin!

Today was another day of our own version of traveling; walking as much as possible and seeing as much as possible in little time and for little money. Berlin was a great place for this style because almost all the sights were fairly close and everything (food and beer) is less expensive than our pervious cities. 

Let me start the list of places we visited by saying we did not go into pretty much any of these places because of either time or money, but we saw them and got the gist nonetheless. We saw the TV tower, Saint Hedwig's Cathedral (we did go inside here), then we walked down the Main Street where there were many museums like the Berliner Dom, the Palace of the Republic, and a couple university buildings. At the end of the street was Brandeburg Gate

which lead us to the Reichstag. We wanted to go in the Reichstag but the line was staggering! 

Then we walked along the River Spree as we heading across town to the Eastern Art Gallery. When we got there we found the gallery is actually a 1.3 km stretch of the Berlin Wall that had been painted by artists in remembrance. The paintings ranged from messages 

To all sorts of different styles and colors of patterns and distorted images

All the way to different people and forms of people, like the famous Dmitri Wrubel's depiction of east and west German leaders kissing!

We also took a tour (free of course) to the Holcaust memorial museum. It was so sad but incredibly well done and we learned a ton about WWII. Then came the night... The music festival is still in full swing but today has a new twist: GAY PRIDE! There have been countless men and women wearing rainbows, crazy costumes, glitter, or almost nothing at all, all of them going just crazy. The scene was unbelievable and nearly impossible to describe, but I'll do my best. It was similar to last nights music festival activities except the ratio of gays to straights was probably 6:1 in favor of the gays. There was a different stage every 200 yards on the street in front of the Brandeburg Gate and there were thousands of gay men and women going buck wild in celebration of the rights they have in this country. It was an... Interesting sight to say the least and Austin and I very much enjoyed it, no matter how many things we saw that we cannot un-see. 

Our day in Berlin was incredible and we saw as much as humanly possible. We are sad to be leaving tomorrow but excited to see a new country and city as  well; Prague, here we come!