........................................................................It's famous on the backpacking circuit, the Berlin pub crawl. After a long and rainy free city walking tour, I was ready for some German beer. There was about 200 people stumbling down the streets on this "tour", totally out of control. Met a couple cool fellas from Perth and talked to a dude from Bombay for a while. Also talked to a guy who had grown up in East Berlin. His memory of the wall coming down was how he didn't have to go to school for the entire next year because of all the chaos. Best place was a club under the railroad tracks. Don't remember much else, but from then on, when ever I met someone who had been to Berlin, they were sure to have also participated in the crawl. Berlin is a great city. I spent 5 nights there checking out the museums, monuments, and just kicking it in the many parks and beer gardens. I really liked the sand sculpture garden then had set up by the train station, amazing. I was rooming with three guys from Baltimore who were funny as hell, and a couple girls from Napoli who never went to bed. I tried speaking Italian to them but they would just laugh. I made fun of them for how many pairs of shoes they traveled with (at least 7 pairs each). Had one crazy night with the Americans doing our own pub crawl. Ended up hanging out late night at this empty bar with a bar tender who was the spitting image of the Jane's Addiction singer. He liked us and played us some Jimi Hendrix because we were Americans. Berlin never sleeps, and has possibly the most interesting mix of old and new Architecture in Europe, even though most of it was leveled in the war. What was amazing to me was the blurring of the boundary of east and west, and how long ago the reunification seems. Now you can take your picture with guy in a bear costume in from of the Brandenburg Gate while you envision Kennedy or Reagan denouncing communism. I was exposed to so much history there.
