Duncan and Joe

Day four in Berlin we got down to tourist business. We booked a free walking tour, but got sucked into a good looking Indian restaurant and decided that way more important than making our tour time. Preparing for India, ya know?

We missed our walking tour, but there was some sort of gymastics / kids festival going on near the Brandenburg gate. They had some basketball hoops setup there so Joe and I played a few games of HORSE and some 1:1 ball. I wasn’t able to take a game off Joe, but I kept it competetive. I’ll blame the stress fracture in my foot for now. 

From the street fair we went to the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, and then onto the Topographies of Terror Museum, which focuses on the role the SS and Gestapo played in cultivating an atmosphere of terror in occupied Nazi territory.

The rain continued again and we went to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant for dinner. 

We actually made the walking tour this time around. Joe and I met up with Caroline, a high school friend who was visiting a friend of hers in Berlin. The tour was great, and added some more historical context to the smattering of things we’d seen over the past few days.

Our tour guide, a nice Irish guy, also explained part of why Berlin remains so affordable today, or as one mayor described it, “Poor, but sexy.” The lack of a military requirement in West Berlin in the post-war period drew a lot of bohemian types to the city, and as the political capital of the country, but not the banking or industrial center, wages remained relatively low. Technology has a presence in Berlin today, but hasn’t driven up prices in the same way it has in other large cities. I mentioned the population descrease in a previous post–Berlin is one of the few large cities to have a population decrease since WWII. All of these factors means it remains relatively affordable, especially when combined with tight rent-control restrictions. 

After the tour we met up with Caroline’s friend for a sushi dinner, and then enjoyed a few beers in Kreuzberg.

Berlin was a great city to cap off the European leg of our trip. Joe and I were both excited for Israel and what lay after, though. Europe was fun, but also relatively comfortable. A major reason for the trip was also to stretch our comfort zones and put ourselves in personally uncharted waters. 

Israel seemed like a good transition into India. It has some more grit than the polished cities of Europe, but also is also a modern country rich in history. 

Enjoying the becah on our first night in Tel Aviv.

And some local food.

Israel was more expensive than either of us were expecting. We were used to the countries in Europe we’d visited where a dollar goes pretty far. 

For the first two nights in Israel we stayed in a hostel bunk dorm. We’d mostly done Airbnb’s and a couple hostel private rooms in Europe, but wanted to try something new. Not having personal space was definitely something new, but we grew used to it over the two nights we were there. When we moved into an Airbnb for our remaining time in Tel Aviv, we definitely approached it with a new appreciation.