Sunday, August 8, 2010

berliner.

spent a weekend (a few weekends ago now) frolicking around berlin with my friend from google emily who moved to berlin recently. awesome city. definitely already looking forward to going back. especially on a weekend where it's not a million degrees, because for each of the three days i was there the lowest day time temperature was 93 degrees.

i took an early morning flight on friday to berlin and arrived at emily's place around 11:00am or so. it was already pretty warm out at that point. we walked around her neighborhood - really cute, like a noe valley in san francisco - and stopped to grab lunch at a cafe. delish. all the while we stopped to take pictures of awesome street art which is everywhere in berlin. emily likes to say the city is a museum which is totally true.

thought my dad would like this one:






after lunch we walked around a few of the near by neighborhoods just exploring and taking pictures. it was a great walking city - really flat and all the neighborhoods flow into one another pretty easily. everything seems like a combination of old and new. makes sense considering the city's history is still evolving with the wall having just come down 20 years ago.


we stopped for gelato which was delish before heading inside for a nap to avoid the hottest part of the day tucked safely indoors. we enjoyed some dinner at a near by corner cafe before watching the sunset and enjoying some wine and AMAZING honey goat cheese on emily's balcony.

saturday we continued our explorations stopping at random cafes when we were too hot to continue (it was the hottest on saturday) and heading to local galleries to check out the 'real' art. i bought a cool print that i need to get framed. but mostly we just tried to stay out of the heat which kept us away from lots of touristy things. we ate dinner at this really good vietnamese place while watching germany compete for the third place spot in the world cup. it was cool to be there during the game - all the bars/restaurants had moved their tv's out onto the street because it was too hot to be inside anywhere so on nearly every street corner there were people watching tv outside. when they would score you could hear the whole neighborhood erupt in cheers. we met up with some of emily's friends that night and danced the night away at a one of the coolest bars/nightspots i have ever been to which was literally right on the river - like you could jump in from the deck if you wanted to.

on the last day i definitely wanted to see the wall before i left so we braved the heat one last time to a nearby neighborhood where a big piece of the wall still exists. on our walk we stumbled across a local fire department who were doing their part to keep berliners cool in the heat wave:

i wouldn't go in, but emily took the leap on the walk back.

we ended up at the wall in the scorching heat but it was still so interesting to see. it's only a portion that is left at this point as it was all knocked down 20 years ago. crazy to think that one day you lived in a country and the next day there was a wall dividing you which is pretty much how quickly the whole thing went up - overnight.


there is so much history here and so much still to be made considering most of the people still living in berlin were alive to remember when the wall went up and came down.

i really want to go back soon and see more of the touristy stuff that i missed due to the insane heat wave. all in all, it was a good trip to see a good friend, and despite the heat a good time was had.

1 comment:

  1. I really enjoyed reading this. Really nice work. So glad you visited. Come back if I stay!

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