Wow that's rough...

So as predicted, I got out into Berlin, met some people, and had a great time! Hurray less lingual isolation! I did a walking tour today which was great since its free and all you have to do is show up, and afterwards, you tip your tour guide what you deem worthy. In any case, I did the usual stand in a huge crowd of people and try to analyze who I thought spoke english. I spoke to a few people who were hit and miss, but the tour was quite lovely anyways so it didn't matter much. It was 3 and half hours of walking through Berlin and I heard so much about the history. I knew the basic history of the east-west Germany divide, but I had no idea just how bad east Germany had it. After getting beaten in two wars, suffering inflation and famine, and being stuck in a communist division basically against their will til about 1989, wow. It was crazy walking around bullet torn buildings. We went around to so many different locations where you would hardly know what the buildings meant, you would just think "oh that's interesting architecture" and have no idea about how there was a historic protest against socialism where 200 people died outside. We also walked to an area in front of apartment buildings, and then realized we were standing above Hitler's ex-bunker. Ironically, it's covered by a piece of lawn where people bring their dogs from the apartment building to take a crap. That's fitting.

In any case, it was quite lovely and then I ended up hanging out with a guy from Vanderbilt and had a good time walking around to different museums and parliment. It was so cold today, it even started snowing! I guess I'm getting my winter jollies here. Tomorrow I move out of my hostel, a big chain-hostel, into a small eco-friendly hostel outside of town that is completely self-sustaining. I thought it was the least I could do to reduce my enormous carbon footprint.