Today we left Prague and are making our way into Berlin via Dresden as we have a planned 2 hour stop in the once desecrated city. Dresden turned out to be quite a nice lunch stop! It was raining the first hour during our walking tour but many of us huddled together and grabbed lunch (oddly enough) in an Australian restaurant where it was nice and dry, warm and served delicious food! I found the eerie and gothic like buildings in Dresden simply fascinating. It is a small town that in the last 26 years has had to be completely reconstructed.
Once we arrived into Berlin, we met yet another rainy afternoon. It was about 3pm when we breached the city limits and Alan decided that given the weather he would take us around the city via driving tour instead of a walking tour. Berlin is stunning and it is also huge! I thought to myself, "how can I see this all in one day?" we would have had a day and a half but our afternoon was pretty much shot due to the terencial downpour going on outside. In any event, we decided to head to bed early and pray for nice weather on our free day.
Friday 8/5 -
Much to our distaste, we awoke to a rainy Friday but Amanda, Kieta, and I set out anyway to try and make the most of our day. Our first stop was the East side Gallery, which is more commonly known as the Berlin Wall. It is what seems like miles of the old east/west Berlin separator covered in graffiti art...beautiful art! We took nearly an hour to try and see as many murals as we can. I seriously have never seen anything like it! As a city, Berlin is covered in graffiti. Alan told us that the local government spends 50 million Euros every year out of their anti-graffiti budget to try and paint over all the walls and buildings with graffiti on them... Too bad they are really just providing people with blank canvases to start over. Take a look at some of the pictures of the wall!
After a long, wet day out shopping and sightseeing we headed back to our hotel to get ready for our white T shirt party. We were all meant to wear white T shirts and travel as a group from place to place and throughout the evening sign each other's T shirts with little inside jokes and sayings from the trip. I thought this party was pretty cool because it touched on the well known graffiti aspect of the city we were in but also was something fun and creative we could all do in our final days together. Most people ended up wearing black and white so the pictures all seemed to turn out nicely... Have a look!
The evening turned out to be a huge success and fun for all! Now we are off to Amsterdam. I am actually writing this from the coach (on Saturday) and we have been sitting in traffic at a dead stop for over an hour now so we are unsure as to when we will actually reach our destination! We left at 7am this morning and are aiming to be there by 7:30pm and have a full evening planned so as you can tell, we have one busy day ahead of us!
Talk to you again soon!
Love,
Lindsay
Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Dresden and Berlin, Germany
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