Monday; I took the free tour of Berlin offered by Sandeman's New Europe. The tour guide was extremely entertaining, giving us a brief history of the city before taking us around the city. He told us that the city is actually built on swamp land, so that explains the bad odours you get sometimes. We started at the Brandenburger Tor, then saw the Bundestag (parlement), the Holocaust memorial and the Führerbunker (which is actually only a patch of grass). And these are only the first places we visited,for more, check out my pictures on Facebook. I then came back to the hostel to get ready for my first pub crawl, which was great fun.
Tuesday: I went into the dome they have installed on the Bundestag when it was renovated to become the seat of parliament once again in 1999, since West Germany's parlement was in Bonn because the Bundestag was in No Man's Land during the division. The tour guide had warned that the line-up could be quite long and I ended up spending about 3 hours in all to get up to the dome. The view is quite impressive, and they have a free audio-guide which explains the more important buildings of Berlin, a good few of which I had seen during the tour.
I then took an hour and a half train to Hamburg, checked into my hostel and explored the neighborhood by foot. Turns out the hostel is in Altona, but within walking distance of Reeperbahn, which is Hamburg's red light district. Lot's of casinos, strip clubs and brothels.
Wedensday: I had from someone in Munich that lived in Hamburg for a few years that Altona had a big Turkish community, so I got up and decided to look for a Turkish barber shop. After about 15 minutes, I found one, went in and asked if he spoke English. No. Well, that's ok, all I wanted was a really short hair cut and a straight blade shave. I then did the free tour, which started at the Rathaus (city hall) a huge building and testament to the wealth that the shipping companies have brought to the city of Hamburg. After that we visited a few churches, and then a few Kontorhause (accounting houses, used as offices for the army of accountants the shipping companies needed to keep track of all of the goods passing through the city). The guide also talked about the great fire of 1842, which destroyed about 25% of the city. Thus, very few historic buildings are left, since in 1943 the city was bombed for 8 consecutive days by the Americans and the British. At the time, it was the largest bombing, and it created a fire storm, basically like a tornado of fire. Temperatures reached up to 900°C and wind speeds up to 240km/h. The guide finished the tour by telling the story of a famous Hamburg pirate Klaus Störtebecke. We finished the tour in the old habour, so I decided to come back by ferry, touring around the new harbour, which of course is huge. Afterwards, I got ready for the pub crawl. We were a smallish group, but we had an amazing time in bars and clubs in the Reeperbahn. We started off at the 99¢ bar, where, yup, everything is 99¢. We also checked out the bar where The Beatles started their international career (there's actually a Beatlesplatz in Reeperbahn) though it was closed because it was Wedensday. We then did a few different bars and a club to end the night.
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