Berlin!

So after Melnik we kept on heading northwest towards Berlin, only to be rewarded with one of the most hilarious moments of the trip...Prostitute Pagodas! or, Hooker Huts...depending which bit of alliteration you prefer. What are they you ask? little mountainside cabins with hookers...how could I tell? well...mostly because of the one who was standing on her porch in her underwear in the freakin' freezing cold (it was snowing).

Anyhow, Berlin. It was much more a Big City than anywhere I had been recently (Rome is big, but doesn't feel city-ish the way Berlin does, I guess Berlin is a little more american seeming is what I'm trying to say). Berlin does benefit from the fact that so much of it is new or reclaimed/renovated since WWII. The way into the city was an entertaining drive, and we found th hotel without any problems (except that they had my reservation under "Albee Tullberg" instead of Tullberg. wtf mate?
We then got to adventure about to return the car...which sucked, because even though we found the address I had in my reservation, there wasn't a National Car Rental office there any longer. Soooo, we placed a phone call and found the right place quickly enough. We decided from there to head over to the Checkpoint Charlie museum (very fun, informative, and pretty shocking). After this, we were downright starving and walked up to a vegetarian thai place. Fantastic food, decent prices and not too far from a Metro to get back to the hotel and crash in preparation for a huge day to follow.

We started off by taking the metro across town (after ditching our bags at the reception) and going to a one mile stretch of the Berlin wall that is still standing. It was painted a while ago and has since been graffiti-ed quite a bit (predominantly over the crappy paintings!) since then. Impressive. We decided that we would take in some more of the less traveled Berlin by walking back towards the city center, went up the TV tower to take in as much of Berlin as possible from a high vantage point and then proceeded to walk through the historic downtown past Basilicas, museums, a really shocking/touching holocaust monument, and all the way to the Brandenburg Gate. This put us by the new Rathaus (I think...the place with the gigantic glass dome that you can walk up) and left us with a decision, to walk up the glass dome (pretty cool) or walk through the Tiergarten back towards out hotel...thankfully, for scheduling's sake, we chose to walk through the Tiergarten and let Ariel do some shopping at Europe's biggest mall (a couple blocks from our hotel). We picked up some dinner, and good european chocolate to give as gifts, picked up our bags and hopped back on the S-Bahn to get to the airport...

We should have checked how long the train ride to the airport was going to take...because upon arrival we had to speedwalk to the terminal...but made it ok :) The flight to Sweden and bus ride into Stockholm were relatively uneventful, but I got really happy getting back to the city I had left three weeks before. have we covered how much I like Stockholm yet? I really miss it too...sigh. maybe I can move back in a couple years...