Day 61 - Berlin

Unfortunately the better part of today was spent on a train to Berlin. It was only 5 hours from Prague so couldn´t overnight it and takes up valuable daylight hours. When I got back to the hostel in Prague, a German girl had checked into the hostel. I was having a chat with her and she turned out to be an architect so we were having a nerd conversation about styles and noodling over details.

She made the comment that Berlin was probably the largest construction site in the world (since the Berlin Wall came down) with an interesting blend of the old and the new, and hard to tell what was east and west. When I went for a walk this afternoon around the place, that was pretty accurate description. Even the new buildings are really cool and I like the designs on them. They compliment the environment and don´t really compete with the existing.

Both old and new have a particular flavour to it that I can´t quite but my finger on. It doesn´t have the self absorbed nature of the Renaissance, dynamics of the Baroque, stillness of classical or industrial nature of eastern europe. Will be interesting to see more.

The only other ´odd´ thing was seeing a war memorial to German WWII soldiers. I guess the west, being the ´victors´ get to have their spin on history. Still, a little hard to take a monument to those who were the ´enemy´, ´caused´ the suffering to fellow Australian countrymen/soldiers, gave rise and allowed for places like Auschwitz to exist etc. Still need to get my head around it and all sides to the story.