Now that we were appropriately lubricated, we left Kruezberg before it got too late and before our stoned Berliner tour guides talked our ears off. Our next stop was the more touristy center of town where we would check out the Reichstadt and the Brandenburg Gate.
Among the many fascinating things about the city is their public transportation. First of all, it is entirely on the honor system...you buy a ticket from a machine, and then get onto a train without ever going through a gate or a check in. You then ride the train. No one ever takes your ticket. Ever. Secondly, not content with the choice between elevated train, subway and ground level trains, the Berliners do all three. And finally, like everything else, it is shockingly clean.
The advantage to going on this trip in February (other than the cheapness) was that we were relatively free of other tourists. The layer of snow also helped, basically ensuring that we could walk around Berlin city center without much interuption or distraction. We did have our one moment of scummy American tourist behavior when we used the space between an empty tourist info booth and a construction wall as a make shift bathroom...but mostly we just took very reverent pictures of the Brandenburg gate, a lovely monument made even more so by the snow.
After walking around the Reichstadt and "Museum Island" for a bit we found a glass wall that had all of the articles of German Constitution written on it, and perhaps most impressively...if you looked straight through the glass wall, you could see a techno party happening in one of the office buildings on the other side. It was sort of like Berlin in one encapsulated image.
Everytime this song, by this Williamsburg-by-way-of-Detroit band has come up on this playlist I've sworn that it was a Jayhawks song. And I suppose they should take that as a compliment.
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