Berlin is the COOLEST place in the world

It´s funny that I never really connected with Ireland - I thought... it´s not you, Ireland, it´s me... But the second I got to Germany, I fell dorktastically in love with it. Berlin is such a beautiful capitol city. Everyone should come here! We went on a fantastic walking tour of the city yesterday, and the guide was brilliant. The city has so much interesting and disturbing history, and I learned a lot from the walking tour. Some highlights were the Jewish WWII memorial, the memorial for the books burned by the nazis (a clear panel in the middle of the Bebelsplatz square reveals a large underground empty book storage area representing the negative book space for all the books burned), museum island - an island made up of museums(!), and the Reichstag (German Parliament), which was restored in 1990, with a glass dome on top, which you can go into and look out at the city, or down upon the parliament at work (very clever). Another place that I really enjoyed was the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche, a monument to the damage from WWII, it was nearly destroyed except for the front entrance, it´s spire is broken off, and it was eventually partially repaired, and converted into a museum. We also saw the location of the underground bunker where Hitler was hiding out, and committed suicide. That was really creepy - luckily, it was destroyed long ago, and nothing is there except for grass, which apparently gets covered in dog shit in the summer. Today we are doing some more in-depth museum exploration - The museums are incredible, and (plus bonus), are leaders in the field of Near Eastern Archaeology, and I have studied a lot of the famous items in the Pergamonmuseum. yay!