From the country to the city

Güstrow was a pretty amazing little town. They all have so much history here. Everywhere has there own castle, a few impressive churches etc. and this is what we saw today, all without tourists. We did however run into a lady carrying a basket full of kittens she was trying to get rid of. They were so cute and its good we had someone with us who spoke the language. Earlier in the morning we finally had the priviledge of meeting Angelika, Thomas and Cordula's daughter and the owner of the room we spent 3 nights in. We all went out to lunch and David and I enjoyed some of the best fish we've ever had. Similiar to trout but specific to that area of Germany. The end of our tour of Güstrow took us to a small restaurant where Angelika and several students from her music school where having a recital type concert. They were all very good, especially Angelika's rendition of "Memories" on the harp. I felt bad interrupting with my cough, but it is getting much better finally. We spent one more lovely evening in Güstrow and in the morning caught a train to Berlin.

We found the hostel quite easily as you have to cross through the longest surviving section of the Berlin wall to get to the river Spree on which our hostel boat is parked. We are paying 12 Euro a night to pitch our tent on the deck! It's great. There's an awesome view and I get rocked to sleep. After setting up we made our way to the New Europe office, the starting point of our free bike tour! It was great, just like the one in Paris, but able to cover more ground. We saw museum island with the Berlin Dome, the TV Tower, Berlin wall, the site of the 1933 book burning, the Hitler Bunker (where Hitler spent all his time leading up to his suicide in 1945), the Reichstag (parliament), The Holocaust memorial, Brandenburg Gate and much else along the way. The gate is topped with a statue once stolen by Naplolean, but they stole it back. In fact we saw its replica in Paris.

Today we slept in then made our way to Potsdam, just outside Berlin. We spent the day wandering around its gardens and palaces built in the time of Prussian Kaisers. We even toured through Freidrich I art museum. On the way back we made a couple cafe stops to eat, drink and watch the world go by. Berlin has been an interesting place. Outwardly it looks quite run down, especially in the east, but that seems to be where you see the trendiest people and the most action. As our guide kept saying the city is quite poor, but it is in such a state of renewel and rebirth. There was a building overtop of the square with the book burning memorial where a big fashion show will be in 2009 and its historical building are covered in Mercedes ads...

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