Berlin, Germany

Arrived in Berlin on Thursday after a long train ride. The train station is huge! Apparently there are over 1100 trains that pass through here daily with over 300,000 passengers. We grabbed a map to look for our hostel and found out how big the city actually is. It's massive! We bought a 48 hour ticket for all of their public transportation for about 15 Euro. Their transportation is the most efficient system I have ever used. The longest time you have to wait for one of their subways is a maximum of 3 or 4 minutes. The trams go all over the city and are extremely easy to use. Another thing that I noticed about this city is graffiti. The city is completely covered with graffiti. It seems like it dominates Los Angeles and New York with the amount of graffiti. It seems there isn't one building that doesn't have any graffiti in all of Berlin. Anway, we made it to our hostel, which is probably the nicest one I've stayed at over the past few months. We grabbed some pizza and mapped out our travels for the next day. On Friday, we woke up and met in West Berlin for a walking tour of and about the Reichstag Parliament building, Bradenburg Gate, SS & Gestapo Headquarters, the ground above Hitler's Bunker, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the final battle of Berlin and the Third Reich, and the Jewish Memorial of Berlin. Backed a lot in about a four and a half hour walking tour. I took a lottt of photos, so can't wait to get those up. Afterward we went to the Berliner Fernsehturm, which is a towering pinnacle in the center of Berlin that gives you a view of all Berlin at 207 meters (680 feet). Pretty cool to see the entire city at such a high height. Went back to the hostel to plan our trip to Prague. Our hostel also had a free dinner with our help cooking. It was nice to hang out with other people at the hostel. The hostel offered really cheap German beers, so a lot of people would hang out and drink in the kitchen. Many Germans and Americans were staying in the hostel. Saturday, we grabbed a train and headed off to Prague.