Doppel fun

Yesterday we arrived in Berlin after a six and a half hour train ride. Whew. We had a bit of a struggle figuring out how to get to the city from the train station so we got a late start. 

Side note: "Doppel" is our favorite German word. It means "double" and just sounds so funny when you say it, like doppel cheeseburger or doppel decker bus. We have lots of fun with doppel. 

Anyway...

Once we checked into the hostel we went straight to the Berlin Wall. On the way we walked through a cemetery which was kind of like a park too. It was really cool. All of the tombstones were covered in flowers and bushes and trees. It was very beautiful and took away the morbidness that's usually present in cemeteries. 

Right after that we went to the Berlin Wall memorial which was really cool. There was a free museum and a lookout on top of the building so you could see it all. It's crazy how you can see the tool marks on the east side of the wall from when people were literally tearing it down: 

The west side is full of graffiti:

From the lookout you could see a security tower: 

There was a second thinner wall behind the real one to make it more difficult for people in the East to escape. In the museum they had some of the obstacles that were in between the two walls that would block an escape. It was really weird to think that all of this was happening less than thirty years ago.

In the museum, they showed a video from 1989 when people were tearing it down and it was chaos. People were standing on the top and smashing the wall with whatever they had. I can't imagine how happy they must have been to be reunited with loved ones and free from the dictatorship. 

This was in the memorial area and once again I think it's cool that they let plants grow all over. It gives a cool feeling of new life. 

After the wall it was getting pretty cold so we headed back to the hostel. We went to the hostel bar which was on the roof. We had met two of the guys from our room earlier and we ran into them at the bar so we chatted with them for awhile. They were from New York and go to Syracuse. After a while, some other Americans trickled in to join us. Then a German kid from Bavaria, then a kid from New Zealand who said he knew Lorde (liar), and a girl and a guy from Australia. We had so much fun with everyone and ended up staying all night. We got our non-USA friends to do their best American accent and they nailed it. One kid just said "like" every other word which was pretty accurate. Youth hostels are tons of fun, everyone is so nice and you meet the most interesting people. 

Us with our new friends: