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13/07/06
It's finally Love Parade time!!! Something we have been waiting for! We arrived late, by the time we worked out the underground system and found our hostel it was after midnight and were so exhausted we were ready for bed!
14/07/06
Today we joined a walking tour to see a couple of the major sights of Berlin. We started at the Brandenburg Gate where we met our tour leader Mike, a New Zealander that had been living in Berlin and leading tours for 3 years, he was really good and knew so much history about Berlin. We first jumped across the cobblestone line where the Berlin Wall used to seperate East and West Berlin and headed to a Jewish Memorial. This was truly an amazing site! It comprised of 2711 square stones, each to respresent each jewish person that died in the war, they we all different heights to show different ages, it was like a maze of stone! Then we moved on to the area where the underground bunker was that Adolf Hitler and his men worked and also the exact spot where Hitler committed suicide. Down the road a little were the remains of the Berlin Wall, it is all fenced in now to prevent graffiti and all that is left is about 50 metres of a dilapilated old wall. The next thing we visited was a site where there were 120 'buddy bears' so they call them, massive bears all painted different colours, each representing a different united nation, was very strange as they were in the middle of this big square. We were a little intrigued by the bear thing and after looking around we realised that our whole tour had moved on - Oops.. We had no idea where they had gone so we flagged down one of the other tour leaders that spoke English and he pointed us in the right direction. We finished up the tour about 6pm and went for a couple of drinks before heading back to the hostel to get changed for the pub crawl that started in the city of Berlin at 8.
Pub crawl started with free beer and vodka shots, as you can probably tell it was going to be a large night!!! We went to five bars, and they kept handing out the vodka shots... Was a massive night and ended up getting home at about 6am!!
15/07/06
After only a short sleep we were up for the Love Parade, very surprisingly weren't feeling too bad with after effects of the night before! We headed down to the gates where it started and met up with some people we had met the night before, the parade started at 2pm. There were 60 floats with 60 djs playing house music, I was in heaven! A couple of beers sorted us out and we stood on the side of the street and watched all the floats go by. Was a brilliant day and we saw heaps of people dressed in some very strange and very revealing costumes! They say there was about 1.2 million people there! The night ended up at 11pm with fireworks and the last of the dj's playing at Victory Column. We were home by midnight after a very long couple of days and some much needed sleep!
16/07/06
Our last full day in Berlin, we got up late and now feeling the effects of the last couple of days we decided to have a very relaxing day and wandered around the city centre. Found a little bit of energy towards the end of the day and decided to climb up the top of Victory Column to see what the views were like from the top. We climbed the 200 odd stairs and realised how very unfit we all were, the views were amazing though. Berlin is a beautiful city and is quite modern, there is a forest right around the column with quite a few nice parks, including a nudist haven!!!!
We retired back to the hostel in the evening to get ready for our flight the next morning, watched American Pie 2 in german, very frustrating when you can't understand it!!!
17/07/06
After getting up super early to get to the airport we flew back into London...
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