finally some description versus me projectile vomiting my sociopolitical ideas on everyone!

After revisiting a few of my previous articles, I realize I am horribly preachy. Anyone that's known me long enough to remember my xanga is probably experiencing every kind of deja vu. But no fear! I have no proselyting to do today. I got back from my spring break trip this past Sunday and man it was good to be home! Living out of a tiny carry on sized luggage bag with all of three outfits in it for ten days is not really my idea of tons of fun and convenience.

Our first stop was Berlin, a city I didn't have too much interest in before I came to Italy, but going there was the second best decision of the entire trip. Perhaps it was the fact that we had the best tour guide ever, with whom I kind of fell in love, Tom. Tom was, and will forever be, amazing. He knew absolutely everything about the city of the Berlin, starting from its Prussian roots, unification, through two world wars, the cold war, and the falling of the Berlin Wall. The whole thing took about four hours and we were hanging on his every word the whole time. For lack of a better phrase, I just didn't realized how crazy and kind of messed up yet fascinating the history of Berlin is. The city itself started as a small fishing village, and basically through the entire 20th century was the epicenter of the world's political tension. It was really insane to see some of the damage that WWII did to Berlin, too, Tom would often pepper his accounts of historical events with "you can see how the bombings during WWII destroyed part of this building and that structure and all these artworks, et cetera. Especially coming from my whole life in the heart of America, our safe defended little bubble to which no harm could ever fall, it was quite a visceral experience to be in a city so obviously ravaged by things I'd only read about in dry, calculated historical texts. It was just so raw being there, Tom really put it into perspective how Berlin has only been stable for the last twenty years and there are still many open wounds that are still very real. (I saw this overwhelmingly gothic boy who couldn't have been more than seventeen with a swastika pin on his imitation leather jacket. Really dude?? The German youth are kind of unhinged in general, but really? )

I was also impressed with the quality of German food and drink. The food is all super hearty and the beer is delicious. They have a tradition there of mixing beer with orange soda or sprite and it sounds really odd but it's really tasty and refreshing! Weiner schnitzel is really, really good. Berlin has one of the most efficient public transportation systems I've ever seen and it's really really convenient! Our hostel was just a 5 minute subway ride away from the historic city center. This paragraph is a relatively uninteresting amalgamation of things I liked because in terms of writing I really don't know what to do when I'm not doing some sort of critical analysis.

Anyway, so at the end of the tour we were sitting on the steps of the Berlin Dome as Tom told us the story of the night the Wall fell. Despite having taken a European history course in high school that thoroughly covered the Cold War, I had never known the full story. As Tom told it, Stalin and the controllers of Communist Germany had decided that the tension between the east and the west could be somewhat alleviated if they pretended to loosen the traveling restrictions between East and West Berlin. Basically they drew up a bunch of fake legislation about chilling out, saying that all the restrictions were going to be removed eventually, and set up a press conference to announce it all (even though effectively they planned to change nothing, "eventually" would turn into never.)

This is where my history gets really accurate... so apparently their press guy was like super cocky and felt like he didn't really need to read the memo, which would have told him that he was to say the Wall would come down, but not put a date on it. He skimmed it and must not have gotten that part. He said the Wall was coming down, and the reporters were like, well, when? And under all that pressure and through the virtue of being kind of a dumbass he was like, "now". And everyone was like, seriously? And this was all live television, so all the East German people basically storm the streets going to all the checkpoints demanding to get through, and the 4 1/2 guards that were there were like so confused because obviously they hadn't heard about this. Essentially the East Berliners stormed that shit down and all the Western Berliners were waiting with champagne and bananas (bananas were a western product that Stalin had embargoed or whatever so no East Berliners had bananas for like twenty years),

Anyway there is about a 98% chance I goofed the history somehow but right as Tom was finishing the story, a German man walked by with his wife and kid and said to us "It was the best weekend of my life!!". It was basically the coolest moment ever. Even Tom was kind of stunned and was like, "yeah that doesn't usually happen, we just got really lucky!"

Basically, the entire thing was kind of magical, Berlin is amazing, and stay tuned for an Ireland post!